The U.S. government is taking Oracle to court for alleging overcharging several million of dollars, and perhaps as much as $10 million, according to documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

At issue are what are called "GSA schedules," which are essentially contracts designed to provide discounts that are as good or even better than those given to the vendor's preferred customers.

"The whole idea of GSA schedule discounts is that the government, in the aggregate, is likely to be one of the largest purchasers of a company's products, and is entitled to take advantage of the discounts that its large buying power should command," the complaint states.

Oracle is accused of working on the sly to find ways around the GSA restrictions so that commercial customers get even deeper discounts. According to the complaint, it's the taxpayers who ultimately pay the price for Oracle's alleged misdeeds.

Security firm Symantec this week introduced its new ExSP Licensing Program designed to allow partners the choice of consuming Symantec software via a monthly subscription-based model.

"Our partners are telling us that they’re finding success in offering Symantec software bundled with their services to solve their customers’ information protection challenges," said Randy Cochran, VP, North American Channel Sales, Symantec. "By enhancing our ExSP licensing program to make it accessible to our broader partner base, Symantec is enabling partners of all sizes to accelerate profitability and reduce their upfront investments to support growth. With this subscription-based program, Symantec partners can license our solutions in a way that aligns to how they do business with their customers."

Symantec claims the new pricing model will help companies reduce their upfront costs, while also enabling traditional Symantec partners of all sizes to more easily develop their own managed services offerings.

The ExSP Licensing Program is open to partners enrolled in Symantec's Partner Program who are qualified service providers, the firm said.

IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Coremetrics, a privately held company based in San Mateo, CA that specializes in Web analytics software, IBM announced on Tuesday.

"With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities to give clients greater insight about customer behavior and sentiment about products and services, and give true foresight into their future buying patterns," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere. "Marketing departments can benefit from these capabilities very quickly because we are delivering this in a Software-as-a-Service model. The combination of IBM and Coremetrics will maximize marketing expenditures and also make the buying experience more convenient, personal and interactive for consumers."

The acquisition comes on the heels of IBM's recently 2010 CEO study, in which Big Blue reported 88 percent of CEOs plan to focus on getting closer to their customers in the next five years, while 82 percent said they want to better understand their customer needs. Some 85 percent of CEOs said they need more visibility into their business, and these are all areas IBM hopes this acquisition will them address.

More here.

You've probably never heard of SeaMicro before, but if the company was looking to make waves in the media, job well done. That's the sort of thing that happens when you manage to cram 512 Intel Atom processors into a 10U rack mount space.

We're talking about the company's new SM10000 server, which comes equipped with said processors slapped onto miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, according to SeaMicro. As company CEO Andrew Feldman describes it, the multitude of Atom chips can be more power-efficient than x86 chips for certain cloud and Web transaction tasks.

"Today's servers are inefficient on small workloads," Feldmen explains. "Atom turns out to be good at ordinary problems and not great at hard problems. The Internet is all about ordinary problems."

Yet there's nothing ordinary about what SeaMicro has done. Each of the 512 Z530 processors run at 1.6GHz and the whole thing needs just one-quarter of the power and space that a traditional "best-in-class" server would need for the same kinds of workloads, Feldman added.

Due for release by the end of the July, the SM10000 will command $139,000.