• VoIP is no threat, says British telecom giant

The emergence of usable voice over IP services, which let individuals and companies make phone calls over the Internet--in many cases for free--is not a threat to BT but an opportunity, the British telecommunications giant said Monday.

Speaking at the Voice over IP Forum in London's Le Meridien Hotel, John Blake, head of hosted IP services at BT Global Services, said that although there is a "dichotomy" for BT, which will involve some cannibalization of existing services, the company has an aggressive VoIP plan.

BT, like other telecom firms, faces a loss of revenue if free VoIP services such as Skype take off. According to James Enck, European Telecom analyst/global telecom strategist at Daiwa Securities Investment Bank, Skype has an annual growth rate of 500 percent in terms of on-Net minutes, and 5 percent of broadband connections in the United Kingdom are using the service. "It's practically a household name," Enck said. [ more ]

• HP launches software automation manager

Hewlett-Packard Co. tomorrow will unveil a management automation software product and a new version of its help desk software at its annual European user conference, Software Universe, in Madrid.

The new HP OpenView Automation Manager product replaces the pricey Utility Data Center offering the company dropped last month, analysts said. It includes technologies HP got when it acquired Novadigm Inc. and Consera Software early this year, as well as business intelligence software from HP Labs.

Automation Manager, which will ship in January, gives CIOs an automated predictive system for managing the IT services of a corporation, said David Gee, HP's vice president of worldwide software marketing. When demands change, the software automatically optimizes the configuration of services and applications to match preset service levels, he said. [ more ]

• Swap offer for pirated Windows XP

Computer giant Microsoft has launched a pilot scheme to replace counterfeit versions of Windows XP with legal ones.

The first-time initiative is restricted to the UK and to users with pre-installed copies of the operating system in PCs bought before November.

Until December Microsoft said software can be sent to it for analysis if there are doubts about its legitimacy. [ more ]