In a judgement that is expected to upset Indian software industry, the Karnataka High Court has held that payments made by importers of shrink wrapped software are subject to deduction at source, in terms of Article 12 of the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements. This decision comes against the appeal filed by the Income Tax Department against the decisions rendered by the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal holding that, payments for import of shrink wrapped software cannot be treated as ‘royalty’. Since this decision has come from the Karnataka High Court, this is binding on the importers of shrink wrapped software from Karnataka, unless this decision is stayed by the Supreme Court. The judgement gives the Income Tax department a blanket cover to go after all importers of software in the state and recover dues on TDS amounts which they are supposed to deduct.“The judgement is clear, and allows the IT department to go after all importers of software in the state, recover not just the dues on TDS, but also interest and other penalties. At 10 percent of the value of all software imported in the state since 2000, this would amount to a huge moolah for IT department,” said S Sivakumar, Director S3 Solutions, Bangalore. Sivakumar estimates that various entities in Karnataka State alone has imported close to Rs 20,000 crore of software directly. “All this while the industry has maintained that there's no need to pay TDS on import of software, and software cannot be treated as royalty. In most instances, importers of packaged software have been taking the view that, no TDS under Section 195 of the Income tax Act needs to be effected,” he added. There is also a view that since the judgement has come from a High Court, the income tax department would use the judgement to recover money from importers across the state. “The department can even use strong measures such as attaching assets and freezing bank accounts.” However most partners feel that majority of channel community would be unaffected. “It would be distributors such as Redington, Ingram Micro and Sonata who will have to face the brunt. Very few tier-2 resellers have imported directly, and even if they have it's mainly electronic downloads, and may not be tracked easily,” observed Harinder Salwan, Secretary of ISODA. Partners who buy software directly from distributors are in no way likely to be affected since the specific section in the income tax act does not cover transactions between two resident entities. Sivakumar however, said that he expects the large distributors and software companies who have directly done business with foreign entities to appeal with Supreme Court. He said that if income tax department pursues the case across the country, the distributors and vendors would consider the extra 10 percent liability and increase rate of software. In short software prices may go up by 10 percent, not a good news with tupee devalued against US dollar.

Dell on Monday said that it has officially ended its reseller relationship with EMC storage products two years earlier than initially planned, and will instead focus on selling storage products based on its own intellectual property. The move brings to a close a long-term, mutually-profitable reseller relationship that in its last couple years gradually fractured as Dell and EMC both began expanding their storage product lines with products that competed against each other. Dell also announced it will continue to provide support for customers of its EMC products. However, the company in June had said at its Dell Storage Forum that its sales focus into its Dell-EMC customer base will be on Dell-branded products, and that it was committed to building its own solution provider channel. Dell had been selling EMC's Clariion midrange SAN, VNX SMB SAN, Celerra NAS, and Data Domain deduplication storage products. Dell and EMC signed their first five-year reseller contract 10 years ago this month, a move which worried EMC's other channel partners because of the preferred pricing Dell received by virtue of being EMC's largest reseller partner. At its height, Dell accounted for about 10 percent of EMC's total sales revenue, and about one-fourth of EMC's Clariion product line revenue. The two in 2008 signed a five-year extension of their relationship, which would have taken them through 2013. However, the relationship between them had already begun to unravel. Dell in early 2008 acquired storage vendor EqualLogic, and as a result became one of the top storage vendors in the industry. However, EqualLogic gave Dell its first product line which competed strongly with that of EMC. Dell in August of 2010 made a surprise $1.15 billion bid for 3PAR, a developer of storage arrays featuring such services as clustering, tiered storage, and thin provisioning, which allows applications to be configured with more storage capacity than is physically available. In September, Dell eventually lost that bid after a short but intense bidding war with Hewlett-Packard which saw the price for 3PAR eventually soar to $2.35 billion. However, by bidding on 3PAR, Dell signaled it was not afraid to compete against EMC. Dell further strained its EMC relationship with its late 2010 move to acquire Compellent, a storage vendor which had long identified EMC as its primary competitor. The final break between the two former partners seemed to have been put in place in January, when EMC introduced its VNX and VNXe SMB storage lines and made it clear that those products were not being sold through Dell. EMC Chairman, CEO, and President Joe Tucci at the time was blunt when asked by CRN about how EMC plans to work with Dell in terms of the new product family. "In this product line there is no Dell partnership," Tucci said. "In any conversations we have had with Dell, Dell will not take up this partnership. They will not resell this product." Actually, there was still some room for Dell, which did sell the VNX, but it did not become a major reseller of the EMC line. By this past Summer, the break-up was felt in a very significant way. When Dell in August reported its second quarter 2011 finances, it said its storage revenue fell 20 percent over last year to $502 million. That included a 62-percent drop in revenue from Dell's sales of EMC storage products. That drop exceeded a 15-percent increase in sales of storage products based on Dell's own intellectual property, including its EqualLogic and Compellent lines. "Most of the remaining EMC storage business has transitioned over to Dell technologies," said Dell CFO Brian Gladden at the time. Dell has also acquired such companies as Ocarina, which gives it a strong deduplication technology, and Exadata, a developer of scalable NAS technology. The company is in the process of integrating the two technologies across much of its storage line. Dell has done well with its acquisitions. Since it acquired EqualLogic in 2008, EqualLogic's customer base has grown 700 percent, the company said. Meanwhile, sales of the Compellent line in the first half of 2011 exceeded those of all of 2010, Dell said. While Dell declined to further discuss its decision to end its EMC relationship, Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell storage, said in a prepared statement that his company is committed to providing quality service and support to existing Dell/EMC customers, will focus its sales on storage products built with its own intellectual property. "Dell is making serious investments in both acquisition and internal development to assemble a competitive storage portfolio that provides customers with superior technology, such as automated tiering, virtualization and content aware deduplication and compression. Our customers are seeing the benefits of Dell’s storage portfolio and the context within a broader data center strategy as compared to storage products built around costly and old architectures," Thomas said in his statement. EMC, which on Tuesday reported strong third-quarter 2011 growth in storage revenue and earnings, declined to comment on the official end of its Dell reseller relationship.

Kingmax, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of DRAM and flash memory products, has unveiled its India strategy and is targeting 15 percent market share in the DRAM and flash memory market in India, in 2012. With the expansion of its product range, the company expects 70 percent revenue growth in India, in 2011. “We are targeting a revenue growth of 70 percent from $1 million in CY2010 to $1.7 million in CY2011. With our increased focus on the India market, expansion of our product range, and Redington, Supertron, Salora, and Kingstar as our national distributors, we are targeting a market share of 15 percent in the Indian market,” said Lawrence Chang, Senior VP – Sales, Kingmax Digital Inc. Elaborating on the company’s channel strategy, Chang said, “With our advanced product range and competitive pricing, we will leverage the large channel base of our national distributors to target the retail market. To ensure that our partners understand our products well, we are imparting training to our distributors, which in turn will train their channel base. In our partner incentive program we have plans to offer gifts and monetary incentives on achieving sales target in a stipulated period.” “We also have plans to create awareness among the consumers through print advertisements and events,” he added. The company expects to garner 70 percent of its revenue from retail sales and the rest from bundled sales. During the event, Kingmax also introduced 1TB SSD (solid state drive) along with other products including 128 GB USB 3.0 ED-01 flash drive, 64 GB SDXC memory card, 64 GB microSDXC card, and 2400 MHz Nano gaming RAM. The company offers a wide range of SSDs, USB flash drives, memory cards, microSD cards, card readers, DRAM modules, and external hard drives.

Fujitsu has launched VDI bundles for small and mid-size businesses to ease their move to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The Fujitsu VDI bundles come in two sizes: up to 42 workplaces, and up to 20 workplaces. Both include an optimized Fujitsu Primergy TX200 S6 host server as well as a display, keyboard, and mouse for managing the server. Customers can order the required number of Fujitsu Zero Client devices to match their VDI environment. “VDI is particularly well suited to the needs of small and mid-size businesses, but often seen as too complex. New Fujitsu VDI Bundles make the switch simple by including all the elements in a single package, from the central server to the keyboards and mice, and the power and network cables,” said Alok Sharma, Country Manager, Workplace Systems, Fujitsu India. The Fujitsu Portable Zero Client, a plug-and-play USB device that allows existing desktops and notebooks to be used as VDI host nodes, even provides a solution for companies that want to re-use old Windows-based PCs when moving to VDI. Fujitsu VDI Bundles are available through Fujitsu’s direct sales and select channel partners in the CEMEA&I region (Continental Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India).

Flat-screen maker LG Display posted a wider-than-expected quarterly loss, as tepid demand for TVs and PCs hit panel prices and one-off losses weighed. The South Korean company, which vies with home rival Samsung Electronics Co for the top position in LCD flat screens globally, said it expected panel price falls to ease in the current quarter from the previous quarter. Panel makers are struggling with a weaker-than-usual seasonal demand pickup in the second half as an uncertain global economy slows demand for TVs, desktop monitors and notebook PCs, depressing panel prices. Consumers are also increasingly turning to mobile devices such as Apple Inc's popular iPad and iphone, sapping demand for traditional desktop computers and laptops. The South Korean company, which vies with home rival Samsung Electronics Co for the top position in LCD flat screens globally, said its July-September operating loss was 492 billion won ($434.6 million), versus an average forecast of a 196.5 billion won loss in a poll by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. That marked its fourth consecutive quarterly loss and compared with an operating loss of 48 billion won in the previous quarter and an operating profit of 182 billion won a year ago. LG Display blamed foreign currency translation losses and additional provisions for the wider-than-expected shortfall. LG Display is a key panel supplier for Apple Inc's popular iPad and iPhone. Apple reported quarterly results that missed expectations for the first time in years, blaming rumors of the new iPhone for hurting demand in the September quarter. Shares in the panel maker ended down 0.22 per cent before the results, in a wider market that was down 2.74 per cent.

Microsoft today shipped eight security updates that patched 23 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), .Net Framework, Silverlight and other bits in its portfolio. Two of the updates were labeled "critical," Microsoft's most-serious threat ranking, while the other six were rated "important," the next-most-severe tag. All but eight of the vulnerabilities -- which were tagged to IE -- affected one or more editions of Microsoft's client or server versions of Windows. Of the 23 total bugs, nine were rated critical, 13 were pegged important and one was marked "moderate." The two critical updates -- MS11-081 for IE, and MS11-078 for .Net and Silverlight -- were the two called out by Microsoft and consistently by outside researchers as the pair to apply first. "It's no surprise that IE is at the top of the list," said Storms. Microsoft typically patches its browser every other month, and last updated IE in August. One of the eight critical vulnerabilities in the IE update affected just IE9, which shipped last March. Microsoft has patched IE9 before today, but this is the first it's needed to fix a flaw specific to only that edition. The IE9-only vulnerability is in that edition's version of a JavaScript DLL (dynamic link library) used by that browser. As usual, the IE vulnerabilities could be exploited by hackers with a classic "drive-by download" style of attack simply by convincing users to steer for a malicious website. Other researchers agreed that MS11-081 should be deployed immediately. "Every time you see one of these [IE] updates, you need to patch them immediately," said Jason Miller, of VMware's research and development team. The second consensus top-pick was the update for .Net -- a Windows-centric software framework -- and Silverlight, a Microsoft application framework for content-intensive websites and online applications. Like the IE update, MS11-078 can be exploited by attackers who dupe users into visiting a malicious website. Worse, the flaw could be exploited by hackers targeting not just IE users, but Mac owners running a browser with the Silverlight plug-in, or Windows users running the plug-in within Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox. "By my reading of the bulletin, it's cross-browser and cross-platform," said Miller. Microsoft updated its Mac Silverlight plug-in separately; users should immediately download and install the newest version from the Silverlight website. Storms highlighted MS11-078 if only because of its novelty. "We're used to the IE bugs, but [MS11-078] has three different attack vectors, and the Web hosting one has high potential for exploitation," Storms said. "If a Web hosting environment allows users to upload custom ASP.NET applications, an attacker could upload a malicious ASP.NET application that uses this vulnerability to break out of the sandbox used to prevent ASP.NET code from performing harmful actions on the server system," said Microsoft in its accompanying bulletin.

IBM is taking its business analytics capabilities down a new path by making them available to IT organizations to monitor and predict issues with systems and processes. The new tools come out of IBM's WebSphere and Tivoli lines and are designed to work in a heterogeneous environment and across a range of IT services, including storage, networks and services in the cloud. The first tool is the WebSphere Operational Decision Management, which monitors business processes against business rules, automating governance, said Scott Hebner, vice president of market strategy at IBM. As an example of how the tool could work, Hebner said that if inquiries about a certain product are rising, the system could alert IT to the need to devote more resources to the issue. "This is for the IT employees to be able to ensure that a process is running efficiently against whatever rules are defined," said Hebner. Judith Hurwitz, an analyst at the Hurwitz Group, said that IT systems today are really "a combination of lots of different services," such as software or infrastructure as a service, as well as internal data centers. Hurwitz said "it is very important to be able to analyze the quality of service," to make sure "you have a consistent level of service across that entire environment." Another tool from IBM is Tivoli Analytics for Service Performance, which provides a consolidated view across an IT environment. Among the things it does is bring predictive analytics to IT infrastructure, a capability that is now widely used by businesses to compete in the market. It uses historical trends to help identify when, for instance, there is a risk of service degradation because of the increased use of a particular system. Hebner said the system uses agents that are deployed throughout the environment to gather data. IBM has also updated the capabilities in its messaging brokering, IBM WebSphere Message Broker, so that these tools can share information.

Asus has unveiled its first ultrabook, called the Asus ZenBook, a sub-$1,000, thin, brushed-steel laptop computer aimed to compete with Apple's MacBook Air, as well as with the emerging tablet market. "ZenBooks are a perfect balance between strength and beauty," said Asus Chairman Jonney Shih, explaining the decision to name the new ultrabook after the Buddhist school of practice. He spoke at the launch event in New York. At first glance the ZenBook, which costs $999, resembles the MacBook Air. The 27.9-centimeter ZenBook has a brushed-steel exterior and weighs only 1.09 kilograms. The thinnest part of the ZenBook is only 3 millimeters, or about .13 of an inch, thick. In constant standby mode, ZenBook can boot within two seconds, and it can stay in standby mode for up to two weeks between charges, Shih said. It has a 128GB hybrid solid-state disk, which can ensure against data loss even when the data hasn't been saved to disk. The device comes with a set of high-performance components: The SSD can ingest or read data at a rate of 6.6GB per second. It features USB 3.0, which is, according to Shih, 10 times faster than USB 2.0. It also features graphics capabilities that are 34 percent better than a competitor, Shih said, but did not name the competition. The unit also has Intel's Core 1.6Ghz i7 processor, comes with 4GB of RAM and runs Windows 7. The Asus release comes the day after Acer launched its first ultrabook costing under $1,000, the Acer S3, priced at $899. Toshiba and Lenovo are also shipping ultrabooks, though models from both companies are priced at over $1,000. Intel coined the term ultrabook to describe a new category of ultrathin laptops aimed to compete both with the emerging tablet marketplace as well as Apple's MacBook Air. Intel specified that ultrabooks use Intel's Core processors, including Sandy Bridge and its next-generation Ivy Bridge processors.

Apple‘s iOS 5 and Google’s Ice Cream sandwich are once against each other. Where apple is going to launch iOS5 on October 12, Google is also planning to bring out its latest operating system Ice Cream sandwich just one day before iOS 5 launch. Presently, Android is leading the mobile operating system race ( by volume) as globally more smartphones run Android than any other mobile operating system in the world, with iOS coming in second. Both the platforms there are offering more than a million apps in circulation, With the new operating system, Google tends to offer a common operating system and development platform for all Android devices including smartphones and tablets and any other android device. This update will make the Android tablet devices USB hosts, which will further facilitate Android developers to create intuitive apps for the Google TV platform. For iOS5, it is reportedly said that Apple has added almost 200 new features to its predecessor OS platform. Also, in order to make its new OS more users friendly, Apple’s has integrated a new lock screen in iOS5, reports suggest. However, Apple is not clear on the level of interaction that will be possible with non-system apps directly from the lock screen. The new Apple iOS 5 would be available for most Apple devices such as iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, and iPod Touch (3rd and 4th generation). Choosing between Apple’s iOS 5 and Google’s Android Ice Cream Sandwich (for high-end users or anyone else) is not possible until both are out. As of now, the good news for users is that both would be available by second week of October.

Xerox India unveiled the new DocuColor 8080 Digital Press at a four-day event at IPEX 2011 in Mumbai. The machine handles jobs ranging from direct mail and calendars to booklets and collateral – opening up new ways for printers of all sizes and scope to increase business. Core to the DocuColor 8080 are three features that offer printers a competitive edge. The new technologies in Docucolor 8080 comprise:- • Productivity apps simplify the most common print jobs with ready-to-use templates. Apps range from job ticketing and personalization to prepress operations, allowing printers to significantly increase the number of jobs completed daily. Each app comes with software from the FreeFlow Digital Workflow Collection and on-site support to help users reach maximum productivity fast. • Low gloss dry ink, ideal for various marketing applications, offers a smooth, matte-like finish that accents color images, including shadows and highlights. The ink creates the look and feel of offset – highly sought after by marketers and graphic designers – with the speed and simplicity of digital technology. • Automated Color Quality Suite (ACQS), Color accuracy is accomplished with the ACQS, a set of tools driven by an Inline Spectrophotometer, which reads color data inside the printer. ACQS automates color management tasks with minimal operator involvement – allowing for more high-value, profitable applications to move quickly through the shop. The DocuColor 8080 features three different print servers – Users can select the one that best matches their production environment. The networked servers, offered by Xerox, EFI Fiery and CREO, allow operators to produce consistent color quality easily. Customers who purchase the DocuColor 8080 have access to Xerox's Profit Accelerator Business Development Portfolio to help promote and expand their digital printing businesses. The DocuColor 8080 Digital Press is available in India for immediate order taking.