SAP's CEO resigns, effective immediately

In today's podcast: SAP's CEO resigns, effective immediately; Chinese man jailed for importing fake Cisco gear; and judge reverses dismissal of class-action suit against Dell.

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Leo Apotheker has resigned as CEO of German ERP giant SAP, the company disclosed on Sunday. The decision was by mutual agreement with SAP's supervisory board, and is effective immediately. The board appointed two co-CEOs: Bill McDermott, head of the field organization and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development. Meanwhile, CTO Vishal Sikka has been appointed to the SAP Executive Board, of which McDermott and Hagemann Snabe were already members.

A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a U.S. prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly US$800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday. Prosecutors said Li procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the U.S. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged

A class-action lawsuit in which Dell was accused of shipping defective laptops will go back to trial after a ruling was reversed by a federal appeals court on Friday. The suit alleges that Dell manufactured and sold defective laptops between July 2004 and January 2005. The judge in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed an earlier ruling of the case's dismissal by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs alleged that there were three "inherent defects" in the PCs Dell shipped, including premature power supply failure, motherboard failure and the inability of cooling systems to dissipate heat.

Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips. With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said Yu–Ming Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work. If commercialized, such graphene processors could be the basis of superior signal processing componentry, improving the fidelity of audio and video recording, radar processing and medical imaging.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.