> A hands-on review of Apple’s 802.11n Airport Extreme base station. Article
> Bloggers get all worked up over a supposed Wikipedia ban. Article
> Cisco just keeps on extending Apple’s deadline for a response to the pending iPhone lawsuit. …

> SOA, for all of its alleged benefits, can be a hard sell. Article
> CA aims to fight zero-day exploits. Article
> Oracle promises E-Business users an easy upgrade. …

> Ever wanted to see the Linux family tree? Timeline
> Ten companies that deployed a SOA in 2006. Blog
> Amazon counter-sues IBM in response to a patent lawsuit. Article
> IE7’s phishing shield gets a speed boost. …

Oracle kicked off this year’s OpenWorld conference with a heavy emphasis on service oriented architecture. The company announced a new version of their SOA Suite 10g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The suite’s new features focus on ease of deployment and installation: a one-click install, an enhanced ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and SOA governance support. “SOA is rapidly becoming the standard way for customers to derive added business value from their current IT investments and …

> Apple stock rises, profit jumps by 27 percent. The company attributed these figures to strong hardware sales, as well as the continuing popularity of their iPod line of portable media players. Article

> Microsoft is looking at…chip design? …

WebMethods is jumping into the service-architecture pool by acquiring data management software from little-known Cerebra for an undisclosed amount. Cerebra’s software is a “federate metadata repository” which in English means it’s a traffic cop that directs online software to relevant data based on context and dynamically defined rules. That, in turn, makes it easier for developers to reuse their code in new ways. Cerebra’s technology is based on standards from the World Wide Web …

Brilliant or foolish? Accenture said it will invest $450 million to gain service architecture expertise in the next three years, with R&D facilities located in Bangalore, Chicago, France’s Sophia Antipolis and in Silicon Valley. Article

What do potential customers think about service architectures? A new study from IDC found that customers definitely consider modular, online applications to be an important part of their future IT infrastructures. But it’s vital for SOA’s makers and sellers to carry on education efforts, provide guidelines and demonstrate business benefits, IDC found. Too many companies and consultants preach the buzzwords rather than the realities.

For more on SOAs:
– see this Destination CRM article

> ITAA taps Bush admin’s Bond as new president. Article

> VMware acquires Akimbi virtualization company. Article

> IBM claims speed record with frozen chip advance. …

Specialists in the service-architecture space will release a variety of new software tools this week. Most notable is SOA Software’s Network Director 4.0, meant to simplify the integration process of so-called enterprise service bus technology–the middleware for service architecture messaging. It will ship in July with a starting price of $50,000. Also new are Systinet’s Policy Manager 2.0 for administering IT governance and Mindreef’s SOAPscope Server 5.2 for QoS testing.

For …