The Buzz: March 10, 2003

Executive Shift at Microsoft

Orlando Ayala, group Vice President in charge of Microsofts worldwide sales, marketing and services, is resigning his post to take on a newly created job as head of small- and midsize- business sales for the company, according to sources.

Kevin Johnson, who serves as senior vice president of Microsoft Americas, is the likely successor to Ayala, said sources close to the company.

Ayala, a 12-year Microsoft veteran, has been in charge of overseeing Microsofts relationships with SMBs and enterprise customers, as well as developers, channel partners and OEMs. But SMBs are becoming an increasingly key market for the company, warranting the creation of a separate, dedicated division, said one insider. Ayala will head up that effort. —Microsoft Watch

IBM Recalls Monitors

IBM is recalling 117,000 computer monitors to fix a circuit board that can overheat and smoke, causing a fire hazard, officials said last week.

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the company is voluntarily recalling the G51 CRT and G51t Touch Screen CRT models. On the back of the monitors in question are the model numbers 6541-02N, 6541-02E, 6541-02S, 6541-Q0N, 6541-Q0E and 6541Q0S. The units were manufactured between June and September 1997 in China and Malaysia.

The monitors were sold by IBM; MicroTouch Systems; and major retail stores, including Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax and RadioShack, between June 1997 and December 1998. They were priced at about $370 each.

EMC, Hitachi Settle Dispute

After four years of talks and an 11-month patent lawsuit, Hitachi last week agreed to make payments to EMC, and the storage vendors agreed to share programming interfaces with each other.

The five-year patent licensing deal and API swap means both companies can build software to more thoroughly manage each others hardware.

EMCs ControlCenter and WideSky and Hitachis HiCommand could only manage basic parts of the others technology.