3Com news from FierceCIO

Towney Kennard, VP of Business Partners, IBM Americas, is switching to the role of GM for the IBM-Lenovo Alliance. He'll be replaced by Ayman Antoun, currently VP of small- and medium-business for IBM Canada.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security named Greg Garcia assistant secretary for cybersecurity and …

Scott Murray resigned as CEO and president of 3Com after just seven months. He'll be replaced by Redline Communications COO Edgar Masri, who formerly worked for 3Com in other executive roles.

Cisco Systems is buying two companies to help resellers and customers with customizing their unified communications products. The companies are Metreos, for $28 million, and Audium, for $19.8 million. Their products include application development systems for IP services and voice XML interfaces, respectively. Both deals should close by the end of July, and don't be surprised to see me-too deals from competitors like Avaya, 3Com, and even within the Asterisk world.

For more on …

> Oracle warns against custom patch. Article

> Informatica buys Similarity for $55 million. Article

> Avocent acquisition targets Linux. Article

> DB2 embedded joins freebies trend. …

> EU clears Oracle to acquire Siebel. Article

> Ping: The merits of ICMP vs. ARP. Article

> Challenging QWERTY's illogic. Article

> 3Com reports networking growth. …

The SANS Institute is forming a master's program in information security. They received approval from the State of Maryland. Unlike many online schools, this one will have rigorous admissions requirements, officials said. There will be specialties for engineering and management. A timeline for admitting students isn't clear yet, nor is the length of the program. But it sounds like a good idea.

For more on the academic plans:
- read this eWeek …

> Connecticut man pleads guilty to selling Microsoft code. Article

> 3Com extends VoIP apps to road warriors. Article

> Fujitsu Siemens loads 64-bit Opterons in workstations. …

Verizon is jumping deep into the managed IT services ring. They plan to offer event management, firewalls, intrusion detection/mitigation, virtual private networking, compliance management, anti-spam/anti-virus, encryption, and professional services. Potential customers may want to wait, however, for Verizon to expand its dedicated staff, which currently is just a few dozen people headquartered in a Dallas data center. (Officials said there are backup facilities but didn't say how …

BMC Software's earnings fell sharply for the fourth quarter, with profit of $15.5 million on revenue of $395.1 million, versus $36.9 million on $400.2 million a year ago. However, for the whole year BMC earned $75.3 million with revenue of $1.46 billion, versus losing $26.8 million on $1.42 billion last year. Layoffs are coming, and no guidance is available yet for the next quarter, officials said. If you're a customer, expect to hear more buzz about BMC as a takeover target.

For …

Bruce Perens, the well-known open source advocate and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, joined SourceLabs as vice president of developer relations and policy. He previously was an independent consultant for Linux issues.

3Com announced that Marc Willebeek-LeMair is its new CTO. He was a co-founder of TippingPoint, …