Eric Savitz (Barron's) reports "BEA (BEAS) shares jumped sharply yesterday, in a move that Citigroup’s John Reilly Walsh attributes to “renewed takeover speculation.” Walsh says he knows of no impending deals, but nonetheless asserts that a takeover of BEA by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) “makes sense” given BEA’s strong position in the system-oriented architecture [SOA] market."

HP Shifts Marketing Chief to Printers
HP's chief marketing officer Cathy Lyons is being "repotted," as Peter Drucker would say, returning to the company's printer unit "to take on responsibility for strategic change management," whatever that means, reporting to printer boss Vyomesh Joshi. HP chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robison is taking over corporate marketing responsibilities while they sort out Cathy's replacement. She was named CMO in June 2005. Before that she was general manager of that little goldmine, printer supplies.

Qantas Abandons Linux for AIX
Qantas is abandoning the Linux it's been using under its finance systems for AIX to "address some stability issues," according to a story in ZDNet Australia quoting a speech given by the airline's general manager for finance improvement and segmentation Suzanne Young. The AIX/Oracle 11i/Hyperion/Teradata migration is part of what Qantas calls its eQ transformation project.

Novell Recruits New Identity Boss
Novell has named Jim Ebzery, an ex-IBMer and former president of the Viisage Division of L-1 Identity Solutions, to run its identity and security management unit. Kent Erickson, who's been running both identity and security and workgroup solutions, now gets to focus. Everybody Novell hires these days seems to be ex-IBM.

Google Brands iGoogle
Google has dubbed gadget-bedecked personalized versions of its home page "iGoogle" and provided a new coding-free Gadget Maker customization tool with seven templates for adding stuff like personal photos, YouTube favorites and users' own creative content. Google claims "tens of millions" of personalized pages already and it's important to the company because it sharpens its search algorithms and helps deliver more relevant results, ultimately leading to revenue-producing ad clicks. iGoogle, reportedly the fastest-growing on Google products, will be available in 26 languages and 40 countries.

The Massachusetts Halo Effect
Texas, California, Minnesota and Oregon are considering bills that could push them down the Massachusetts path and into the arms of the anti-Microsoft Open Document Format (ODF).

Solaris Boots on Rock
Sun is preening about Solaris booting on its next-generation high-end, heavily multithreaded, high-throughput, 16-core 65nm Sparc chip Rock ahead of schedule and within six weeks of Sun getting its first Rock prototypes back from TI. First system shipments are penciled in for the second half of '08. Before that epiphany, however, Sun's eight-threads-per-core, highly integrated system-on-a-chip Niagara 2 chip is due out next half, delivering twice the throughput of the existing Niagara, Sun says. Niagara systems are bringing in $100 million a quarter now, Sun says, or at least did last quarter.