IT Spending Not Negative Yet
Global IT spending will grow only 2.3%, not 5.8%, next year for a total of $3.5 trillion, according to Gartner’s latest reworked predictions – worse if the economy continues to disintegrate but not as bad as 2001 or 1991-92. Hardware will take it in the groin, down 4%, it said, with services flat and software up 8.6% versus 13.5% this year. It thinks spending will only be up half a point in North America, not 5.3%, and down 0.8% in Western Europe, Asia-Pac does best up 8.3%, not 11%.

IBM To Open Research Facility in Shanghai
It’s been 10 years between research facilities but IBM is going to open one in Shanghai to build new applications for small business and the Internet including text-to-speech and translation software. It will eventually employ 100 people.

Wanted: American IP Czar
The next administration is going to have an IP czar to fight piracy. President Bush signed the PRO-IP Act Congress sent down to him. It triples criminal copyright damages and gives the government the right to seize property used to commit IP theft.

Yahoo Layoffs Rumored
According to Valleywag, which got it from a “tipster,” Yahoo is going to lay off 3,500 people in December after the company’s “multimillion-dollar” Christmas party. Supposed the cuts will be coming from sales, finance, engineering and G&A. The company is also supposed to be slashing severance packages.

Larry Getting Shopping Itch Again
Larry Ellison told stockholders last Friday that with stock prices off Oracle may go bargain-hunting. “Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive,” he said. He’s targeting small growing concerns rather than big publicly traded firms. He said Oracle would remain profitable through any downturn.

Symantec Wants SaaS Resellers
Having thrown its hat in the SaaS ring, Symantec has added a software-as-a-service program to its normal partner program starting in North America.

Cloud Investors
Atlanta-based TechOperators, a new early stage VC targeting cloud computing and SaaS as well as Internet services, security, infrastructure and mobile, is launching its first venture fund and claims it didn’t have too many problems raising the $20 million-$30 million. The four managing partners, all ex-CEOs who sold their companies mostly to big boys, include Tom Noonan who sold Internet Security Systems to IBM, David Gould who sold Witness Systems to Verint Systems, Said Mohammadioun, who sold Samna to Lotus and Glenn McGonnigle, who sold VistaScape Security Systems to Siemens. They’re reportedly looking for firms already doing $1 million in revenue that need $2 million-$3 million to leverage their recurring-revenue business.

Zoho Offers Offline E-mail
Zoho Mail, the start-up latest feather in its peacock-like tail, has left private beta and is being offered around free for up to 10 users – $50 a head a year after that. Zoho will host the e-mail and handle the back-end storage. The widgetry, which can look like either Outlook (with serial messages) or Gmail (like a conversation) claims offline access complements of the Google Gears plug-in and provided you’re using Firefox or IE. And it’s compatible with iPhone. Gmail won’t even work off-line yet. Zoho Write, its word processing application, is also Gears-enabled.

Kickfire Cuts MySQL Deal with Sun
The Kickfire start-up is going to include a MySQL Enterprise subscription with its Linux-based MySQL appliances under a multi-year deal with Sun. It’ll make the things plug-and-play and offer users a single point of support. The appliance is a low-cost high-performance MySQL analytic storage engine based on what’s called an SQL chip that’s supposed to pack the punch of tens of CPUs into a small low-power form factor. It’s supposed to make data warehouses reasonable.