EMC buys Greenplum

In today's podcast: EMC buys Greenplum; Singapore bank suffers serious IT failure; and Cathay Pacific to offer in-flight broadband.

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EMC plans to acquire Greenplum for an undisclosed sum and form a new division around the privately held company's data warehousing technology. Greenplum sells software for analyzing large amounts of structured data, breaking up the information into multiple databases and working on each separately for quick results. The buyout is just the latest in a string of acquisitions being carried out as IT vendors gear up to address the coming trend of cloud computing.

One of Singapore's biggest banks suffered a major IT outage on Monday that took down its computer systems for seven hours. The outage knocked DBS Bank's back-end computer systems offline, leaving its customers unable to withdraw cash from ATM machines on Monday morning. The outage affected all of DBS' consumer and commercial banking systems, but no data was lost during the system failure, the bank said. While the root cause of the outage remains uncertain, DBS is investigating the system failure with help from IBM, which runs some of the bank's IT operations under an outsourcing contract.

Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific Airways plans to offer in-flight broadband, cell-phone service and live television on its aircraft from early 2012. The airline will use the eXConnect system supplied by Panasonic Avionics that can deliver a 50Mbps Internet stream via satellite to aircraft. That stream will be split between passenger Internet service and crew applications, such as the transmission of real-time flight data back to the airline's base of operations. The satellite link will also support data and voice cell-phone calls and carry a handful of live TV stations and some pay-per-view programming.

A former senior database administrator at a Houston electricity provider was sentenced Tuesday to one year in prison for hacking into his former employer's computer network, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Steven Jinwoo Kim, 40, of Houston, pleaded guilty on Nov. 16 to one count of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization and recklessly causing damage. Kim had worked at Gexa Energy until February 2008, when he was fired as senior database administrator. In addition to the prison term, Judge Vanessa Gilmore of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas ordered Kim to pay US$100,000 in restitution to Gexa Energy.

...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.