SEARCH
RSA to kick off next week with Microsoft’s ‘Stirling’
Posted in: Industry News, Security by thirdoctet on April 4, 2008 | No Comments
The world’s largest security conference will kick off next week in San Francisco with the public unveiling of Microsoft’s next-generation of security software, code-named Stirling.
Over the past few months, Microsoft has quietly shown the software to a select group of users, but sources familiar with the company’s plans said that it will release a beta version of the code to users during the RSA Conference next Tuesday. Microsoft will allow attendees to “see new technologies,” including Stirling and the company’s next-generation Windows Server 2008 software, according to the conference agenda.
Microsoft’s Forefront product line has been playing with more established security products over the past few years, but with Stirling the company will finally be able to offer administrators a single product that manages all of its security offerings.
“Stirling will touch many different areas of network protection, server protection and client protection,” said Ronald Beekelaar, an independent IT consultant based in Amsterdam, who is familiar with the Forefront products. “So Microsoft has to coordinate that between different products. But that also means that beta testers should really look at Stirling at all those levels, and not just test the client protection, or only the firewall protection,” he wrote in an e-mail interview.
Continue with the rest of the article at its source.
Microsoft, Sun open interoperability lab
Posted in: Industry News by thirdoctet on | No Comments
Microsoft and Sun, which became a Windows OEM last year, opened an interoperability center Monday that will provide a test bed for customers who want to run Microsoft applications on Sun x64 servers.
The two also unveiled a Sun program to get Exchange 2007, which is a 64-bit application, up and running on Sun’s x64 platforms.
The lab, which is located on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, is part of a wide-ranging OEM agreement Sun and Microsoft hammered out last year.
The Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center, open to joint customers of the two vendors, will focus x64 systems and storage, including virtualization, Java, management and identity. Sun has had a presence on the Microsoft campus for the past three years.
Analysts say customers have been asking the two for years to put aside their industry bickering and help them solve IT problems in their heterogeneous networks.
Continue with the rest of the article at its source.
Sun Microsystems and VMware Announce OEM Agreement to Add VMware Virtualization to Sun x64 Server and Storage Portfolio
Posted in: Green Technology, Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 28, 2008 | No Comments
CANNES, France VMworld Europe, February 27, 2008 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced an OEM agreement to expand their virtualization offerings. Starting today, Sun is offering the VMware Infrastructure product suite on Sun hardware systems with full support from Sun. This helps enable customers to capitalize on the high performance, scalability and energy efficiency of Sun’s x64 servers while leveraging VMware’s ground-breaking virtualization solutions to improve asset utilization, operational efficiency, and business agility. The agreement also benefits systems integrators and channel partners by providing a fully supported, seamlessly integrated solution from these two leading technology providers.
“When it comes to innovative design, performance and scalability, Sun is an x64 industry leader,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems. “With today’s announcement we’re expanding our virtualization portfolio and giving customers who want VMware virtualization software a great hardware platform for maximizing their utilization and their IT investment.”
“The benefits of lower capital and operating expenses, business continuity, security, and a greener datacenter are driving strong demand for VMware virtualization software on Sun x64 server and storage systems,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “This new milestone in our ongoing relationship with Sun gives customers what they want: a combination of advanced technologies that deliver strong business value.”
Sun and VMware will continue their robust qualification program of VMware products on Sun systems. The companies will also work to ensure that the Solaris Operating System (OS) will continue to be a first-class guest operating system on VMware virtualization software, and VMware Infrastructure will be a first-class datacenter virtualization run-time and management stack on Sun x64 systems. The two companies plan to also collaborate on system management configuration, deployment and monitoring for each other’s products.
Selected Sun x64 servers are available for a free 60-day trial as part of Sun’s Try-and-Buy program, which includes a free 60-day evaluation of VMware Infrastructure. More information on the Try-and-Buy program and eligible systems is available at: http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/products.jsp. Sun also offers its own complete virtualization portfolio that includes unified software management tools and virtualization of operating systems, servers, storage, desktops and chips – both inside and outside the box. More information on Sun’s desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio is available at http://www.sun.com/virtualization.
In conjunction with today’s announcement, Sun will showcase Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0 during the VMworld Europe conference. This solution leverages VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter to allow customers to securely access centralized desktop environments over a variety of network connections. Today’s agreement ensures frontline support and allows customers to purchase the complete solution directly from Sun, including Sun Ray virtual display thin clients, Sun VDI Software 2.0 and VMware virtualization software. More information on Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions is available at: http://www.sun.com/datacenter/consolidation/virtualization/desktop/index.jsp.
For more information on the VMware/Sun relationship, go to http://www.vmware.com/sun.
Novell to Acquire Data Center Management Leader PlateSpin
Posted in: Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 26, 2008 | No Comments
WALTHAM, Mass. , Monday, 25 February 2008 – Novell today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. This acquisition will extend Novell’s leadership position in the next-generation data center by providing the only solution to dynamically deliver business critical services across both physical and virtual infrastructures. PlateSpin offers extensive solutions for the management of heterogeneous workloads that encapsulate data, applications and operating systems residing on a physical or virtual host. These solutions improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, data center relocation and disaster recovery. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver unparalleled support for mixed infrastructure environments offering products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux*, UNIX*, and Windows* operating systems in the physical and virtual data center. The combined solutions will deliver superior value by helping customers reduce costs, improve service levels and respond to fluctuating business requirements.
“Flexible, automated management tools that fully leverage server resources and allow the movement of workloads are necessary for optimizing the data center,” said Stephen Elliot, research director, Enterprise Systems Management Software and ITMS at IDC. “Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT organizations; as such they must purchase data center management solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational costs as well as integrating and managing VMs across both server and storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between hardware and the virtual software tiers.”
Optimizing the Data Center
The acquisition of PlateSpin will allow Novell to offer customers a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will solve many of the data center challenges that customers face today, including:
- Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of data center initiatives, like server consolidation, data center relocation and hardware upgrades, to help customers reduce costs, power consumption and space in the data center.
- Protection: PlateSpin’s disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the data center, for improved security and business continuity.
- Provisioning: Using PlateSpin’s technologies, customers will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable customers to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
- Optimization and Management:Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, customers will be able to increase server utilization and optimize their data centers by better addressing common workload movement challenges.
The acquisition of PlateSpin will enable the heterogeneous data center with support for leading operating systems and virtual platforms. It will also further enhance Novell’s leadership in open source virtualization by providing tools that easily enable customers to move physical workloads to Xen*-based virtual machines running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise as well as other virtual platforms provided by VMware*, Citrix*, Microsoft* and others.
Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, said, “The PlateSpin acquisition will be a cornerstone of our two-pronged enterprise Linux and IT management software strategy. With the addition of the PlateSpin product portfolio, Novell will be uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation infrastructure software that is at the core of the data center. Together, we will have the most comprehensive workload management solution that allows customers to monitor and analyze what to virtualize, provide the tools to seamlessly virtualize and unvirtualize workloads, automate the management of workloads, and provide the leading open source platform from which to run virtualized work.”
Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin, said, “PlateSpin’s ability to manage workloads is unparalleled and is an essential part of making the data center truly respond to the needs of the business. Combined with ZENworks® Orchestrator and virtualization from Novell®, we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers.”
Read the entire press release at www.platespin.com.
NetApp automates VMware snapshots, storage provisioning
Posted in: Industry News, Storage, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 17, 2008 | No Comments
By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer, SearchStorage.com.
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) is adding a SnapManager software module for virtual servers and automated storage provisioning as part of a series of upgrades to its software portfolio.
The new SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI) software module is similar to NetApp’s SnapManager modules for applications, such as SAP and Oracle. The products create an interface for setting data protection schemes that is meant to run in the idiom of the application being protected and through an interface on the application server itself. SnapManager products also run on virtual, as well as physical servers.
NetApp has supported snapshots of virtual servers, but these updates make the snapshots more complete and granular, according to NetApp vice president of solutions marketing Patrick Rogers. “SnapManager support means snapshots will operate inside the hypervisor environment, and snapshot and recover the entire VM, similar to the way SnapManager does backup and recovery on SQL and Exchange servers,” Rogers said.
NetApp is also adding a Provisioning Manager. This application allows administrators to create storage policy groups with predetermined settings, such as RAID levels and snapshot schedule, and automates provisioning of new hosts according to their assigned policy groups. There are no predefined limits to the number of policy groups supported. “It’s similar to provisioning VMware and other virtual machines,” according to Rogers.
For now, Provisioning Manager won’t automate virtual server provisioning, something at least one NetApp customer said he’d like to see soon. Tom Becchetti, storage engineer for a large medical manufacturing company , said the ability to delegate certain provisioning tasks after automating the initial setup of volumes will come in handy. But where it would really work best, he added, is for rapidly provisioning virtual hosts.
Continue reading the complete article at its source.
Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop
Posted in: Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 13, 2008 | No Comments
SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.
With over four million downloads since January 2007, innotek’s open source VirtualBox product has been quickly established as one of the leading developer desktop virtualization platforms. Now, as part of the Sun xVM portfolio, VirtualBox will have the support of Sun’s global development community, field resources and partners to make VirtualBox even more compelling to developers and end users, driving greater adoption across a broad set of communities. VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris operating systems to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side, switching between them with just a click of the mouse. This allows software developers to more easily build multi-tier or cross-platform applications, or power-users to take advantage of applications that may not be available for their base operating system of choice.
“VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Software. “Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications.”
VirtualBox is open source, and can be freely downloaded without the hassle of payment or frustrating license keys at virtualbox.org or openxvm.org. The download is less than 20 megabytes and the software is easily installed on any modern, x86 architecture laptop or desktop system running Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris operating systems, in just minutes. Supported guest operating systems include all versions of Windows from 3.1 to Vista, Linux 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, Solaris x86, OS/2, Netware and DOS.
The Sun xVM family of products uniquely integrates virtualization and management to help customers better manage both physical and virtualized assets across heterogeneous environments. Previously announced products in the Sun xVM line include Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM OpsCenter. Sun xVM Server is a datacenter grade, bare-metal virtualization engine with advanced features such as live VM migration and dynamic self-healing, and can consolidate Windows, Linux and Solaris operating system instances. Sun xVM Ops Center is a unified management infrastructure for both physical and virtual assets in the datacenter. Sun has announced partnerships and endorsements for xVM with Microsoft, RedHat, Intel, AMD, Symantec and Quest Software. More information about Sun xVM solutions can be found at: http://www.sun.com/xvm.
The agreement to acquire innotek follows Sun’s announcement on January 16 of a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database. These acquisitions reaffirm Sun as the largest commercial open source contributor.
The stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the third quarter of Sun’s 2008 fiscal year. The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun’s earnings per share.
About innotek
innotek is an internally funded software company located in Stuttgart, Germany with offices in Dresden, Berlin and the Russian Federation. Its team of international specialists has focused entirely on the development of high-tech system software. innotek has been at the forefront of PC virtualization technology since 2001 and now staffs Europe’s largest and most experienced team of PC software virtualization experts with numerous Fortune 500 and government customers.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network is the Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo and Java are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the US and other countries.
Read the entire press release at sun.com.
Citrix Delivery Center Helps Customers Transform Datacenters into Delivery Centers
Posted in: Application Delivery, Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 11, 2008 | No Comments
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. » 2/11/2008 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced Citrix Delivery Center, a new overarching product family brand for its market-leading application delivery infrastructure solutions. The Citrix Delivery Center product family features four primary product lines: Citrix XenServer™, Citrix XenDesktop™, Citrix® NetScaler® and Citrix XenApp™ – the new name for Citrix Presentation Server™. Citrix also unveiled a new tool called Citrix Workflow Studio designed to help customers unlock the full power of Citrix Delivery Center by orchestrating communications across multiple Citrix products as well as third-party solutions.
The new Citrix Delivery Center brand reflects the growing need for IT organizations to transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” By definition, datacenters have historically been static warehouses of applications and data, oriented more toward long-term production projects than highly-responsive, on-demand service delivery. Unfortunately, this outdated model makes it extremely difficult to keep pace with today’s fast-paced business environment where companies must contend with a constant barrage of new applications, new devices, new competitive pressures and an increasingly mobile workforce. In an era where businesses run on applications, the ability to deliver applications and desktops to any user, anytime, anywhere from a secure central location is rapidly becoming a core focus for most IT organizations. By providing an end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery, Citrix Delivery Center is the first solution on the market to address this challenge across all applications, all networks, and all users.
“In today’s volatile business environment, the traditional deployment of applications leaves a lot to be desired by enterprise organizations,” said Michael Rose, Research Analyst with IDC. “With the increasing number of mobile workers, computing locations, applications and user scenarios, an application delivery infrastructure enables a dynamic and flexible way of providing applications to users. Citrix Delivery Center presents a unique way to help orchestrate the critical pieces of the infrastructure required for true application delivery.”
Introducing Citrix Delivery Center
The Citrix Delivery Center product family ties together the company’s four key application delivery infrastructure systems. Customers will continue to have full flexibility and choice to buy individual products or combined solutions within the family or take advantage of them as an end-to-end application delivery solution. The Citrix Delivery Center product family includes:
- Citrix XenServer – The XenServer product line is an enterprise-class solution for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. With the new Platinum Edition, XenServer also becomes the first and only solution on the market to address both virtual and physical servers, making the entire datacenter more dynamic (see today’s separate press release on the latest edition of this product).
- Citrix NetScaler – The NetScaler product line is a purpose-built web application delivery solution that accelerates application performance up to five times while improving security and reducing web infrastructure costs. In addition to delivering web applications for thousands of corporate customers, NetScaler is also the delivery infrastructure of choice for most of the world’s largest consumer websites, touching an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users each day.
- Citrix XenApp – The company’s flagship application virtualization product line, previously known as Presentation Server, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. With more than 70 million users and 99 percent of the Fortune Global 500 as customers, the XenApp product line uses state-of-the-art client and server side virtualization to deliver applications to office and mobile workers from a single centralized location. The new XenApp name was chosen to better reflect the product’s core focus on application virtualization, and to underscore the importance of providing customers with an end-to-end virtualization system that incorporates servers (XenServer), applications (XenApp) and desktops (XenDesktop).
- Citrix XenDesktop – XenDesktop is the industry’s first comprehensive Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) system – moving beyond the limitations of existing products to ensure the simple, secure and cost effective delivery of Windows desktops to any office worker with an unparalleled user experience.
The Citrix Delivery Center product family also includes all Citrix solutions that go to market as part of the above four product lines, including Citrix Access Gateway™, Citrix EdgeSight™, Citrix Password Manager™, Citrix Provisioning Server™ and Citrix WANScaler™. These products, which enhance the value of application delivery for all applications and desktops and serve as key differentiators to the four primary Citrix Delivery Center product lines, will continue to be available both as standalone solutions.
“This shift in thinking about the traditional datacenter as more of a dynamic delivery center makes perfect sense for organizations’ evolving IT environment, where technologies such as virtualization make infrastructure much more complex than in the past,” said Davood Ghods, Agency Information Officer for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “The promise of a product such as Citrix Delivery Center is that it provides a complete set of application delivery technologies that work seamlessly together, something that any IT organization would love to have.”
Workflow Studio Enables a Truly Dynamic Delivery Platform
Tying it all together, the new Citrix Workflow Studio provides an orchestration tool that wraps commands from virtually any product and presents them as graphical objects that can be easily linked together on a visual workflow canvas. Using Workflow Studio, administrators will be able to integrate previously disconnected processes far more easily across multiple Citrix Delivery Center products, allowing them to work together as a single cohesive system. This also makes it much easier for customers to integrate Citrix solutions with third-party products to automate end-to-end application delivery processes.
Highly extensible and open, Workflow Studio is built on Microsoft .NET, PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. This extensible design also makes it easier for customers to link Citrix products into broader systems management solutions from partners like HP, IBM and Microsoft to ensure that all of the Citrix Delivery Center products function seamlessly within large enterprise environments.
“In the early 1990s, Citrix inspired an entire industry to think differently about how a new generation of applications should be delivered. Over the years, we have continued to raise the bar on application delivery with innovative new products that help customers keep pace with new application types, user scenarios and business challenges,” said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Citrix Systems. “Today, Citrix offers the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of application delivery infrastructure solutions, featuring a broad range of world-class products that extend from the datacenter to the desktop. We are excited about Citrix Delivery Center and its potential for transforming datacenters into delivery centers for customers around the world.”
Pricing and Availability
The individual products in the Citrix Delivery Center family can be purchased today in any quantity and combination to fit the exact requirements of each unique customer. A tech preview of the new Workflow Studio solution will be available in Q2 2008.
Citrix XenApp will be the new product line name for all versions of Presentation Server going forward. The Citrix Presentation Server name will remain on all existing product, documentation, support and marketing tools specific to the 4.5 and earlier releases of the product.
About Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS) is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructure. More than 200,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Citrix customers include 100% of the Fortune 100 companies and 99% of the Fortune Global 500, as well as hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers. Citrix has approximately 6,200 channel and alliance partners in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2007 was $1.4 billion.
Care of citrix.com.
Sun renames, rejiggers Project Blackbox, a modular data center
Posted in: Industry News by thirdoctet on February 5, 2008 | No Comments
Project Blackbox, Sun Microsystems’ modular data center, has a new name and a new reference customer, signaling a new level of maturity and acceptance for the concept, an analyst said.
Today, Sun announced that the Blackbox, Initially introduced in late 2006, is now called the Sun Modular Datacenter S20. The S20 data center comes in a standard, 20-foot-long shipping container equipped with all the necessary data center amenities: cooling, power distribution, external hookups for water, air conditioning equipment and network connectivity. The product is generally available and lists at $559,000, not including professional services.
Meanwhile, a Stanford University research group that was the first American customer of the earlier Blackbox has purchased a second unit and plans to have it in production in the next few weeks.
Citrix XenServer Wins Gold in SearchServerVirtualization.com 2007 Product of the Year Awards, Virtualization Platforms Category
Posted in: Application Delivery, Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on | No Comments
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla » 1/30/2008 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced that Citrix XenServer™ Enterprise Edition 4.0 has been named the Product of the Year in the Virtualization Platforms category of the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2007 Products of the Year awards. The Virtualization Platforms category recognized three products that have altered the virtualization landscape this past year. The awards are presented by the editors of TechTarget’s Data Center Media Group, and products are judged based on innovation, performance, ease of integration into existing environments, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value.
“Being recognized as the Product of the Year in the Virtualization Platforms category by TechTarget’s respected virtualization industry site validates Citrix’s goal to simplify server virtualization,” said Phil Montgomery, senior director of product marketing, Citrix Systems. “This award highlights XenServer Enterprise Edition 4.0 as a solid, enterprise-class platform, ready to give the market leader a run for its money.”
Introduced in August 2007, new features in XenServer Enterprise Edition 4.0 include XenMotion™ for live migration of running virtual machines; XenCenter™, a scalable, resilient virtual infrastructure management solution with an easy to use Windows user interface; a powerful 64-bit hypervisor that supports both 32- and 64-bit enterprise workloads; and, an open, standards-based XenAPI which enables ISVs and OEMs to develop add-on solutions for XenServer. The release also includes version 3.1 of the Xen open source hypervisor “engine” and leverages the latest hardware virtualization support features from Intel and AMD to deliver near bare-metal performance.
XenServer was also named Product of the Year in the Virtualization for Linux servers category by TechTarget’s SearchEnterpriseLinux.techtarget.com. For more information about the awards and to view a list of all featured companies, visit: http://www.searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com and http://www.searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com.
Read the entire press release at its source.
Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo
Posted in: Industry News by thirdoctet on February 1, 2008 | No Comments
Care of The New York Times; Microsoft said Friday that it has made an offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, in a mix of cash and stock.
The offer represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price of $19.18 on Thursday.
If consummated, the deal would redraw the competitive landscape of the Internet consumer services business, where both Microsoft and Yahoo have struggled to compete with Google.
Microsoft said the combination of the two companies would create efficiencies that would save approximately $1 billion annually. The software giant also said that it has an integration plan to include employees of both companies and intends to offer incentives to retain Yahoo employees.