Shake up at Nortel

Nortel Networks has announced major management changes as it confirmed it is closing down its DSL business worldwide. Nortel CEO John Roth plans to retire next April, and the company will immediately start searching for a new CEO, according to a statement. Meanwhile, COO Clarence Chandran is resigning, effective immediately. He had been on leave since March to recuperate from wounds suffered in a June 1997 attack in Singapore. Chandran also resigned his seat on Nortel's board.

Current DSL customers will still get support "under warranty," the company said, but they will not be able to buy any more DSL products from Nortel. Nortel was barely making a dent in the DSL market with its IMAS product line, having attained only a 6.3% share of the $3.2 billion market in DSL access concentrators in 2000, according to Dell'Oro Group.

Pilot surfaces only to sink

Managed security provider Pilot Network Services has officially filed for bankruptcy protection. The Alameda, Calif., ISP, which offered managed security services to several hundred businesses for six years, failed to offer any explanation -- even on its Web site -- during the last two weeks after abruptly firing all of its 200 employees and failing to notify customers, who were left scrambling to find new services. But last week, Pilot posted a notice at www.pilot.net that said, "We're done. Pilot is no more. This company is an EX-secure ISP. If it weren't for being nailed to the perch, it would fall over." In the "news" section of the Web site, Pilot stated: "Pilot Network Services has filed for bankruptcy," noting site support would be terminated at 5 p.m. May 9. The Web site listed several former Pilot employees said to be available "on a time and material basis" to assist customers. Pilot also listed an attorney to call for information.

The flogging of Exodus

It's been tough going at Exodus recently. Last month, the company reported a cash net loss of $118 million and said it would cut capital expenditures by $300 million for the year. A week later, the company's CFO stepped down, as did the COO and chief marketing officer. Then, on May 4, someone infiltrated the outer layer of a security-related Web site that serves as the entry point for Exodus customers checking their firewall process logs. Exodus officials say no customer information was viewed and they had a suspect in the hands of the FBI by last week. But, as if that weren't enough, last week Exodus' Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet data center failed to roll over to back-up power supplies when a Pacific Gas & Electric power source was disrupted. The Sunnyvale data center is a facility that Exodus received when it acquired GlobalCenter earlier this year. Yahoo, one of many businesses affected by the outage, said its instant messenger, chat and myYahoo sites were down for about three hours. To top off the week, Exodus announced a 15% reduction in staff, meaning about 675 employees will be getting pink slips.

Technology training bill hits House

A bill that would provide an incentive to companies that invest in training programs designed to increase the IT skills of their workers was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last week. The Technology Education and Training Act of 2001 provides companiees a tax credit to train workers in IT and would help reduce the number of IT jobs that go unfilled, its sponsors say. A Senate version of the bill was introduced in April. The tax credit could be applied against income tax toward the first $1,500 a business spends to train an individual worker. It would increase to $2,000 per individual for small business under certain circumstances.

Solaris gets wormy

Thousands of Sun Solaris servers connected to the Internet have been compromised by a recently discovered worm, Carnegie Mellon's CERT Coordination Center and security Web site Attrition.org said last week. Attrition.org, which monitors Web site defacements, said in a statement that it has received a list with 8,836 IP addresses of systems that were hit by the "sadmind/IIS worm." The worm penetrates servers running Sun's Solaris operating system, taking advantage of a 2-year-old security flaw. The Solaris system is set up to scan the Internet for vulnerable Internet Information Servers and Solaris servers. Software patches from Sun and Microsoft have long been available to fix the problems. However, the slew of defacements shows that not every Web site administrator is diligent in plugging security holes.

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