Sales Lift Red Hat

Red Hat, doubled fiscal third-quarter earnings Thursday on a 44% jump in sales, exceeding analyst expectations.

According to thestreet.com, the open-source software maker earned $23.2 million, or 12 cents a share, in the third quarter ended November 30, up from $10.8 million, or 6 cents a share, a year earlier.

Total revenue for the third quarter rose 44% to $73.1 million. Subscription revenue climbed 54% from a year ago to $60.2 million.

Analysts were expecting Red Hat to earn 9 cents a share on $71.1 million in sales in the third quarter, according to Thomson First Call.

Shares of Red Hat were recently trading up 87 cents, or 3.4%, at $26.60.

A late release of a major new product and a dearth of $1 million-plus deals soured the third quarter for Canadian business-software vendor Cognos.

Net income dropped by18% in the third quarter, and sales of new software license dropped by 17.6% over the same period last year.

Thestreet.com reports that the company`s total revenue in the quarter was $212.3 million, compared with $210.4 million. Cognos earned a profit of $28.3 million, or 31 cents a share, down from $34.5 million, or 37 cents a share, a year ago.

"We were disappointed with our performance in the quarter," says CEO Rob Ashe in a subsequent conference call.

The news was expected, since Cognos preannounced results at the beginning of December. The numbers were actually somewhat better than the adjusted First Call consensus, which called for a 29-cent-a-share profit on sales of $211 million.

Microsoft on Tuesday released an automated tool that fixes the glitch in the Software Update Services (SUS) server which rolled back previously approved updates to unapproved status.

Informationweek.com reports that after the latest round of Microsoft patches were released December 13, some enterprise administrators found that their SUS servers reverted all approved updates to unapproved status.

Although Microsoft quickly posted a support document listing manual methods of turning back the clock, a script-based tool was only promised, not delivered.

The delay was due in part to a bug in a first edition of the script, which Microsoft rolled out December 14. The flawed script, called "Approval Analyser Tool" by Microsoft, turned updates which had been set as "unapproved" by the administrator into "approved" updates, which if not corrected, would have deployed them to workstations and servers.

The new version of Approval Analyser Tool is available for downloading from Microsoft`s site.

The SUS snafu was just the latest in a string of patching problems that have plagued Microsoft customers over the last few months. In October, for instance, two fixes had to be revised and reissued.

Antivirus products made by Symantec and McAfee and used by millions have flaws that could potentially be exploited by hackers to control vulnerable computers, security experts warned Wednesday.

According to redherring.com, the researchers have rated the flaws as high or critical, sending the software makers scrambling for patches to fix the problem. However, no users have been affected by the bugs so far.

iDefense, a division of VeriSign, issued a security advisory late Tuesday detailing a bug in the McAfee Security Center that allows attackers to create or overwrite files. The same day, Alex Wheeler, an independent researcher, outlined a bug in Symantec`s product.

In its note, iDefense says that successfully exploiting the vulnerability in McAfee could let attackers force a vulnerable computer to execute a malicious program during a reboot or logon. But just because people are using the security product doesn`t mean their computers are infected.

"A typical exploitation scenario would require an attacker to convince a targeted user to visit a malicious website," the company says in its advisory.

The legal uncertainty surrounding the BlackBerry e-mail service appeared to have no financial impact on its Canadian maker, Research In Motion, in the third quarter.

The company reported on Wednesday that profit rose 33 percent, to $120.1 million, while revenue grew 53 percent, to $560.6 million, compared with a year ago.

But growing customer uncertainty stemming from a patent infringement lawsuit that might lead to a shutdown of most BlackBerry service in the United States caused R.I.M to lower its expectations for growth. It now expects to attract 700,000 to 750,000 new BlackBerry users in the current quarter, down from an earlier estimate of up to 825,000.