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TERRIA has lost a third consortium member in its bid to win the national broadband network tender worth up to $4.7 billion.

Design software company Autodesk has acquired 3D animation developer Softimage from rival Avid technology for $35m to expand its games strategy. Avid had acquired Softimage from Microsoft for $258m in 1998.

Swedish carrier Tele2 has reported a net profit of SEK 848m ($135m) for the third quarter 2008, compared to a loss of SEK 1.23bn ($197m) in the year-ago quarter, on revenue down 2.3% at SEK 9.83bn ($1.56bn).

Federal contractor Science Applications International Corp has won a $27m three-year contract from the US Navy to provide IT support services for the europe and Middle East regions.

CSC has won a five-year $172m contract extension from the US Navy to continue providing operation, maintenance, and logistical support services for the Southern California Offshore Range, the Navy's premier live-fire, multi-warfare training complex.

The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide, and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed  Linux , Windows, and cloud environments.Traditional standards are being tapped in order to bridge the platform divide and new ones are being created to handle technologies such as virtualization that create physical platforms running one technology but hosting virtual machines running something completely different.[ Stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization report blog and newsletter. ]The goal is better visibility into what is going right or wrong -- and why -- as complexity rises on the computing landscape.Some help is on the way. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) last month began hammering out virtualization management standards it hopes will show up in products next year. Those standards will address interoperability, portability

CIO Jury: Industry knowledge is not essential

AUSTRALIA Post has kicked off an ambitious technology transformation program that's poised to slash 700 applications by half.

MICROSOFT will rip about $70 million out of the aged care sector's IT budget over the next 18 months forcing users to pay full rates.

GOOGLE has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia.