October 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Whatever happened to peer-to-peer?
I remember several years back when peer-to-peer technologies were all the rage.
Many start-ups eagerly claimed the P2P label, whether or not the architecture truly was peer-to-peer. I wrote tons of articles about P2P ventures-- each hoping to be the Napster for enterprise IT-- that have since come and gone. And I recall the shift, after the dot-com bomb, when P2P based companies wanted to distance themselves from that label and all other start-up buzzwords.
But, today, a few of those early P2P kids are still kicking. Earlier this week Editor in Chief Steve Fox and I met with a few folks from Kontiki, one of those early P2P companies.
Kontiki makes software that can speed the delivery of video, large files, software, and other content over existing networks. Rather than relying on central servers or expensive hardware additions, Kontiki's Delivery Management System uses a company's idle PCs and other existing hardware to deliver huge files and video, which can choke a network. Essentially, it is a peer-to-peer architecture, and I remember when Kontiki was a little friendlier to the P2P tag. But now the company calls it "grid delivery," but it still is same idea of using otherwise idle network resources, such as PCs or servers, to create a network of peers. Typically slow files such as a large video file, can be delivered faster with Kontiki's DMS because the requested content is pushed out to the user not only from the original server, but also from networked PCs that have copies of the content.
Kontiki is continuing where others have stumbled. And most of what I've heard and seen says that rich media and video are going to keep growing in the enterprise. I'm not sure of their total number of customers, but some of the referenceable names include Ernst & Young, CNet, Adobe, and Palm.
Groove Networks is another one that is still thriving. NextPage, which at one time applied P2P to content and document management, is still around. The company's publishing applications business unit was acquired last month by Fast Search & Transfer. Who else has survived?
Posted by Cathleen Moore on October 29, 2004 03:51 PM
October 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Though he never said it, at times Mike Peterson must have felt a bit like Siegfried and Roy. Perhaps Roy in particular. Peterson is program director for the Storage Network Industry Association and charged with developing standards for Information Lifecycle Management. That sounds harmless enough if one were developing a standard in a vacuum. Peterson and the SNIA are not. ILM has become a primary point of contention and competition among storage heavyweights like EMC, IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard, as well as a slew of smaller companies that want in on the action. Peterson got to work with all those companies and more in hammering out a definition and a white paper on ILM concepts. It must have felt like lion taming at some point.
Though the concept of ILM has been around for a while, without any standard definitions, ILM had basically been a marketing concept more than a technology or, to use Peterson's words, management practice.
To their credit, the major heavyweights in the storage industry are supporting the SNIA's work. Though Microsoft is not yet on board, Peterson said he expects a statement of support from Redmond in the near future.
Turning ILM into a management practice will be a key to its success and perhaps the success of the storage industry over the next few years. Making ILM a management practice means the concept is more than just a marketing ploy. It also gives IT managers a way to measure vendor claims about ILM and to sell the concept to upper management. That may not be easy either, but at least the SNIA has done some of the hard work - taming the lions - already.
Posted by Bob Francis on October 29, 2004 10:54 AM
October 28, 2004 | Comments: (0)
MySQL this week boosted its open source database to give it what the company calls enterprise-level functionality, but the product still falls short of what some analysts believe it needs to play in the big leagues of databases.
IBM, meanwhile, is pledging to keep its DB2 database out of the realm of open source and maintain its availability only through a commercial license.
''We don’t see any benefit from a corporate point of view,'' to an open source route for DB2, said Paul Rivot, director of Database Servers at IBM.
''Our current business model fits with what customers are asking for,'' Rivot said. Customers are willing to pay for the bells and whistles of a database such as DB2, with its OLTP capabilities and high availability, he said.
For the time being, companies such as Oracle and IBM can maintain their cash-cow databases in the face of open source offerings. But as companies like MySQL add functionality such as triggers and stored procedures, it will be interesting to see if MySQL starts rising in price or if Oracle and DB2 have to start cutting their prices to keep users aboard, with open source alternatives growing as a serious competitive threat.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 28, 2004 04:31 PM
October 28, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Speaking as an ex-WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 user who now uses Microsoft Word and Excel, I'm wondering if the same thing is about to happen in the mobile world.
However, this time the migration will happen at the middleware layer, not at the end-user level.
The question is will Microsoft supplant all or most of the middleware messaging vendors, i.e., Extended Systems, Good, Intellisync, JP Mobile, Openwave, RIM, Visto, to name a few.
I ask for this reason: this month is the one year anniversary of Exchange Server 2003. Built into Exchange Server is Mobile Information Server [MIS], formerly known as Exchange ActiveSync.
While many companies haven't upgraded to Exchange 2003 yet, my guess is they soon will. Microsoft announced it is dropping support for Exchange 5.5 this year and support for Exchange 2000 next year. [Extended support for Exchange 2000 will continue but not mainstream support.]
Therefore, I expect companies will migrate to Exchange 2003. If they do, they get Mobile Information Server for nothing.
Two weeks ago PalmOne, you remember them, arch rival to the Microsoft and Pocket PC devices, announced it will be putting the Microsoft client component to MIS into the Treo 650 and into future wireless models as well.
What do the gurus of the industry say about the future of middleware messaging vendor rivals to Microsoft? It depends on who you ask.
David Hayden, president and CEO of MobileWeek says this changes the face of the mobile email space especially from an ROI perspective. Exchange 2003 with mobile device support is going to have a much lower ROI than RIM or Good Technology solutions.
Initially, those solutions will have a competitive advantage from a standpoint of feature set and security, but as Microsoft has proven time and time again, iteration after iteration, they finally get it right.
Hayden says this is not going to be an overnight change especially for those companies that have already deployed a solution like the RIM Blackberry Information Server.
However, for companies looking to equip thousands of workers with mobile email you can't deny the significant cost differential between a free solution coming from the engineers who created Exchange versus a third party solution.
Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile technology at Gartner sees it differently.
Dulaney says Microsoft basically offers manual push email. It is either a timed synchronization solution or you ping the server with SMS, an unreliable
mechanism, at least as far as working in real time goes.
Secondly, Microsoft must deal with each device vendor separately while
companies like most of the ones named above have cross platform solutions out of the box.
In addition, Microsoft doesn’t have a NOC, network operations center, which most of the other vendors have to provide linkages to many of the carriers.
What do I think? Well, for the immediate future everything that Dulaney says may be true, but looking further down the road, perhaps as long as five years or more, I think Hayden has it right.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on October 28, 2004 02:30 PM
October 28, 2004 | Comments: (0)
The virtualization software wars got a little more physical this week.
At its own VMworld 2004 conference, VMware announced its intent to ship its 4-Way VMware Virtual SMP product in the second half of this year, around the time it expects the first multi-core processors (bets are down that AMD beats Intel to the punch) to hit the market.
The company has clearly established a lead over Microsoft with its recently shipped Virtual Server 2005, a product that only has support for uni-processor machines at this point.
This sort of technology lead could mean significant bucks for VMware, owned by storage giant EMC, if various market forecasts prove accurate for over the next year or two. I guess you could say VMware wants to see virtualization, well, virtually everywhere.
"We think that over the next 5 years a very high percentage of workloads are going to go into virtual machines. Even by the end of (2005) of all new OSes deployed on x86-based servers, between three and five per cent of them will go into VMware virtual machines. And that figure will only increase over time because the efficiency, flexibility, and security benefits of running virtual - along with the technologies we are bringing in to scale to faster I/O - will make virtualization ubiquitous," said Michael Mullany, VMware's vice president of marketing.
Following up last month's delivery of Virtual Server 2005, (which Microsoft is using to lure most corporate users off older Windows servers and over to Windows Server 2003) Microsoft tried to steal a little of VMware's thunder.
It announced this week a free version of its Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit that can help simplify the process of migrating operating systems and its apps from a physical server to a virtual one. Microsoft appears to be applying some pricing pressure early in the virtual wars (shocking!) by not charging for the tool. VMware does charge for the competing P2V tool.
- By Ed Scannell
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 28, 2004 10:29 AM
October 27, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Blogging in fashion on Madison Avenue
It's no secret that blogs are catching on among technologists, but this morning The New York Times ran a piece on how blogs are being used on Madison Avenue.
The story quotes an agency COO saying that blogs are in fashion on Madison Avenue.
That is not to say that New York's marketing and advertising elite are all buying into blog nation. In fact, the story points out that several firms are finding that the risks may not be worth taking at this point.
The biggest fear is of "an uncontrolled message slipping out" the Times reported.
Of course, tech companies such as Microsoft and Sun face the same challenge with blogs and they have figured out a way to make it work, so I have to think Madison Avenue will, too.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 27, 2004 06:31 AM
October 26, 2004 | Comments: (0)
With this nailbiter of a presidential election just days away, its clear that technology will play a key role in tabulating and authenticating the results.
E-voting promised efficiency on scale that paper-based systems, with their hanging chads, could never match.
Yet controversy surrounds the new systems. IDG News Service, in a series of articles from across the country, shows the extent of the problems facing e-voting.
Security advocates raised dozens of concerns about direct electronic recording machines (DREs) in use in 27 states.
Technology industry representatives, however, say humans are more likely cause problems than machines.
Skeptical development teams plan to use Web and open source toolkits to monitor the elections.
But before a winner is ultimately declared, old fashioned methods will be deployed: lawyers. A lawsuit challenging e-voting has already been filed in New Jersey, and more are expected.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 26, 2004 11:40 AM
October 25, 2004 | Comments: (0)
A new study from the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and America Online (AOL) paints a dire picture of the state of security in the land of the home PC. AOL and NCSA surveyed 329 dial-up and broadband users recently to get a good look at the true state of security on the internet.
The results were not pretty. While 77 percent of the users surveyed felt fairly confident they could withstand a security intrusion from the internet, over half did not know what a firewall was.
This survey is even more interesting because researchers also inspected the users' computers. When their computers were checked, the results were even more staggering. Nearly 80 percent of the PCs were infected with some form of spyware or adware. The average user had 93 spyware/adware installations, while one computer was running (barely) with more than 1,000. On the virus front, 67 percent of the users had outdated anti-virus software and 15 percent had no anti-virus software at all. Commenting on the survey, Ken Watson, chairman of the SCSA, said, "Extrapolating the percentages in our survey, this indicates that millions of Americans are at risk - and are already infected - by viruses, spyware and adware."
It is not a pretty picture, but if you're feeling a bit smug behind your company's firewall and virtual private network, think again. IBM plans to release monthly network computer threat reports. According to IBM, the company routinely detects 100 million suspected or actual attacks against IBM customers each month.
Both reports add fuel to the debate about who has responsibility for maintaining security on the Internet - technology companies involved in the internet or consumers. This study makes one thing clear - what we are doing today is not working.
Posted by Bob Francis on October 25, 2004 02:09 PM
October 20, 2004 | Comments: (0)
It appears software vendors and their customers are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to newfangled licensing techniques.
While vendors are quick to move to subscription-based pricing, enterprises still want perpetual, pay-once-and-it's-all-yours licensing, according to a study released this week by Macrovision, SoftSummit, the Software & Information Industry Association and the Centralized Electronic Licensing User Group.
At first glance, it's easy to see why this divide exists: Software publishers can enjoy a steady, assured revenue stream by selling subscriptions while users would just like to own.
Software vendors face a peculiar durability problem compared to most other product companies. It's not like software is a set of tires that wears out and you have to buy new ones - you can use a piece of software forever. DOS will still run on some systems if you want to use it.
The reality is, though, that users do upgrade both hardware and software to get the latest features and pay ongoing maintenance fees, anyway. The challenge, as I see it, continues to be for software companies to find genuine, useful new features to put in their applications and not just add a few new background colors to the screen and call that an upgrade.
Macrovision's Daniel Greenberg, vice president of worldwide marketing, argues that subscription-based pricing spreads out payments more evenly. Somehow, I get the feeling that resistance or not, enterprises will find themselves having to make the change to subscription-based pricing eventually.
Unless they want to keep using DOS or Windows 3.1.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 20, 2004 05:19 PM
October 19, 2004 | Comments: (0)
After a long and distinguished career of listening to and advising IT shops on products and strategies, Dan Kusnetzky, IDC vice president of system research, has come to realize a few unalterable truths. Below he shares a bit of wit and wisdom about the unofficial (although some are likely posted on the walls of IT shops) Golden Rules of IT.
Rule Number One: If it is not broken, do not fix it.
Rule Number Two: Don't touch it; you'll probably break it.
Rule Number Three: If you do touch it and break it, it will likely take longer to fix and cost more to fix and you may have to take people out of retirement to fix it, so see Rule Number Two.
Rule Number Four: Good enough is good enough. If you strive for excellence then by the time you get there it is probably not needed anymore.
Rule Number Five: Do not touch anything until people are screaming. If they are NOT screaming, see Rule Number two. If they are screaming see both Rule Number Two and Rule Number Three.
- By Ed Scannell
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 19, 2004 10:54 AM
October 19, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Another group's IT spending study
The Chief Executive group issued some numbers this morning which suggest that more than 70 percent of CEOs plan to increase tech spending in the next year.
The study found that 25 percent of CEOs plan to increase spending by over 10 percent of their current budget and 26 percent expect to increase spending by 5 to 9 percent.
On the other hand, a mere 8 percent of CEO's responded that they plan to decrease spending.
CEO's top three targeted spending areas are: hardware, security and software integration, in that order.
Earlier this month I posted a blog entry about the results of a tech-spending study conducted by Forrester Research.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 19, 2004 06:24 AM
October 18, 2004 | Comments: (0)
I have a tip for all presidential candidates out there: Security is what people are concerned about. I'm not talking about security from terrorists and other ills that plague our world. I'm talking about computer security.
To judge from my recent experience, the average Joe and Jane are more concerned about computer security than terrorism. I was at a recent journalism event in Dallas, which honored reporters covering all sorts of important world events on the front lines around the world. I was the only computer journalist at the table, but most of the questions were not about terrorism or Iraq, but about computer security. The big question was: "Why is my computer nearly unusable because of all these files that download on my computer?" In return, I asked if these users had anti-virus software, firewalls, etc. Inevitably they said yes. One woman put it best. Because she is laid up with an injury, she rarely ventures out. She uses the computer to communicate with the outside world. "I used to enjoy e-mailing friends and family. Now, I don't do it because my computer is constantly under attack."
I don't believe the presidential candidates are listening, but it looks like the computer industry is. Cisco and Microsoft, for example, announced plans today to cooperate in an attempt to make networks safer for users. Of course, Microsoft has recently released its Security Control Center update to Windows XP, which attempts to offer more security for its users. Some security companies from outside the US are also seizing on the opportunity. Bitdefender, a computer security company based in Romania, is jumping into the U.S. market today with an array of products.
To judge from my recent experience, all these actions are positive moves and not a moment too soon.
Posted by Bob Francis on October 18, 2004 11:53 AM
October 18, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Don't give up on PeopleSoft just yet
The abrupt departure last week of executive vice president of products and technology Ram Gupta from PeopleSoft doesn’t mean that the company is throwing in the towel and is ready to cave in to Oracle.
Gupta was a close associate of former CEO Craig Conway, and so not considered part of the new management team, said Lee Geishecker, Gartner's research vice president for enterprise applications and lead PeopleSoft analyst.
And even though PeopleSoft board members said during the Oracle-PeopleSoft trial in Wilimington, Del. last week that they would discuss the right offer, there are still many hurdles to overcome before a takeover, Geishecker said.
"You don't see people leaving in droves out of Pleasanton (PeopleSoft's corporate headquarters)," Geishecker said.
The board of directors may not be as eager to sell the company as some of their remarks during the trial might indicate. They must entertain offfers that might be in the best interests of the shareholders, said Joshua Greenbaum, of Enterprise Applications Consulting.
In the long run, however, PeopleSoft customers need to decide whether they want to stay with the company's applications suite.
If a takeover is successful, Oracle said it will support PeopleSoft's Enterprise, EnterpriseOne and J.D. Edwards-based products. However, at some point, emphasis will go to Oracle's eBusiness suite, Greenbaum said.
With a takeover, customers who are comfortable with simply maintaining their present PeopleSoft applications may able to get along for five or six years with a shift to Oracle.
"But if you are an aggressive company who wants to get Service Oriented Architecture and next generation products, you may be disappointed," Geishecker said.
-- By Jack McCarthy
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 18, 2004 06:27 AM
October 15, 2004 | Comments: (0)
The horror of landmines is staggering. A small country like Croatia with 4.5
million people had by the year 2000 1.2 million mines buried somewhere within its borders.
Since the outright hostilities between armies stopped the primary victims of these mines have been, and are children.
In the matter of fact way of a technologist, Bill Rus, the president of Venture Analytics and founder of an organization called Roots of Peace, explained that children suffer more because they are lower to the ground than adults so their vital organs are closer to the explosive force of a landmine. They also have less blood and they wear sneakers rather than combat boots.
I would never have thought that high tech software could in some degree help reduce the number of deaths caused by such pernicious devices but that is the case.
Rus, a former Autodesk employee, worked with Carol Bartz, Autodesk CEO to contribute its MapGuide software and services to the effort to rid Croatia of landmines. It has been so successful that with additional contributions from Autodesk the effort is now also going to Angola and Afghanistan.
In Croatia from 1990 to 1999 there were 130 land mine casualties annually, mostly children. The MapGuide software was installed in 2000. From 2000 to 2002 casualties were reduced to 30 per year. From 2002 until now there have been none.
Rus tells me the Croatian ambassador to the U.S. credits MapGuide as one of the major reasons why.
How is that possible? Rus explains that while defusing 1.2 million landmines is a huge economic problem-- it costs about $3 to manufacture a landmine and $1,000 to find it and destroy it-- it is also a huge informational challenge.
How does one gather bits and pieces of information about landmine locations, aggregate it into a central repository, analyze it and map the results?
The information comes from a variety of sources including military, paramilitary and amateurs who remember seeing the armies planting a mine or even someone who says they planted mines around their own land to protect themselves from the military.
Rus tells me professional armies use standard patterns to lay out a mine field, which helps to find the mines, but paramilitary are not so careful.
Some of this information was collected by local units of the government and stored away in filing cabinets but not available to those who need it to defuse these mines.
All these layers of information are input into MapGuide which consolidates the information and provides it over different channels, including wireless handhelds, to the U.N. U.S. State Department, and to the Croatian government and the de-miners.
De-miners can instantly access the information on the specific area they are working on. It allows them to look at the integrated information on an area and determine quickly if it is a high priority area or a low.
Even identifying where casualties occurred is a tremendous aid to MapGuide's pattern recognition technology which can be overlaid with data on past troop movements, for example, and using GPS coordinates map out exact locations of mines.
Of course Croatia still has landmines. Through the work of many it has defused 500,000 landmines. That leaves another 700,000 to go.
There are anywhere between 60 million and 70 million landmines in
approximately 70 countries around the world.
I'm thinking if Autodesk can actually save lives there must be other applications and or solutions out of the high tech community that might be helpful. If you have some ideas email Bill Rus at bill.rus@ventureanalytics.com or the Roots of Peace offices in San Rafael, Calif.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on October 15, 2004 04:07 PM
October 14, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Maybe I'm foolish but I am still amazed at how much money is available for
projects that have by my estimate a 50-50 chance of success.
I spoke with Jory Bell, CEO of a startup called OQO. After graduating MIT Bell and a few friends went on to Apple and worked on the PowerBook product design team. From there they ended up at IBMs Almaden Research Center.
Their idea was to create the world's smallest computer. In other words make something the size of a handheld that runs full Windows XP and any application that will run on a desktop.
They started in 2000 with a mere $5.5 million in angel funding. Now, another $14 million dollars later in institution funding they have a product.
The device is dubbed Model 01, and it is 4.9 inches long, 3.4 inches wide, .9 inches thick with a VGA 800 x 480 screen that is also about 4.9 inches wide.
Model 01 uses a 1-GHz Transmetta processor that puts out in the most heated situations about 7 watts but it does use Transmetta's power throttling technology for thermal management.
The tiny system actually has a "significant" fan as Bell put it.
Connectors include USB, Firewire, WiFi, Bluetooth, audio and a docking station cable connection for video out to hi res monitors, projectors and Ethernet.
The device also has 256MB of RAM, 8MB dedicated to video, and the same Toshiba 20GB hard drive used in the iPod.
The screen slides up to reveal a thumb-sized keyboard which uses a track point-like device for mousing around plus digital pen and thumbwheel.
The package weighs a not unsubstantial 14 ounces. It will be made off shore by Flextronics, a very reputable OEM and priced at $1,999 for the XP Professional version and $1,899 for XP Home. For an additional $300 OQO will install Office Small Business Edition.
Okay, Bell says major corporations are already considering it. But I know that game too. That could mean Bell has an appointment to talk to somebody in IT at a large company. Not the same has winning a volume order.
Specific corporate applications include using it in health care for MDs making their rounds, insurance claims adjustors, and pharmaceutical sales reps to present info about products.
The advantage for IT is obvious, it is portable, unobtrusive and yet it runs Win-dows XP and XP applications. Therefore it has a single image and a single infrastructure to support.
I wish them nothing but success. And granted I don't know all the details. They received a total of $19.5 million, so far, I wonder if some of that goes to pay the manufacturing bill? Or do they only produce in volume when they have a solid order in hand.
To be honest, I sure hope among those institutional investors such as banks, retirement fund and mutual fund managers that put most of the $14 million in there are none that are using my money.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on October 14, 2004 10:37 AM
October 13, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Web services standards - Is enough enough already?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week is holding a workshop on "Web services Constraints and Capabilities." The organization is striving toward a common vocabulary on the constraints of what a Web service can do and may develop a standard to address the issue.
Once again, I have to ask, does the world need anymore Web services standards? Aren't there too many already?
Well, officials at the two leading Web services standards organziations, the aforementiond W3C and OASIS, have different perspectives on this.
"I understand from my discussions with people that the sheer nature and overlapping of some [proposed standards] can lead to confusion. We would like to reduce that," said Ian Jacobs, W3C spokesman.
"There's so much of an industry rush about Web services, it doesn't surprise me that perhaps there's an overabundance of specifications right now," Jacobs said.
"We are focusing on the proper design of a strong base for Web services and naturally, we want as few as possible specifications as the core layer, and built on top of that it's clear there's going to be a greater proliferation [of Web services specifications] and the OASIS model promotes that," Jacobs said. He added that the OASIS and W3C models are both useful.
OASIS, while the forum for lots of Web services standards ideas, does promote convergence and is seeking to eliminate redundancy, according to James Bryce Clark, manager of technical standards development at OASIS.
Upon receiving submissions these days,"the question is asked, 'Why do you need another [proposal]? Isn't this being done somewhere else?' " Clark said.
"Standards are like potato chips; no one eats just one," said Clark. Even a simple email evokes five or six standards, he said.
Too many potato chips, though, gives me indigestion. At some point, Web services standards bodies and the vendors who participate in them ought to settle on an easy-to-digest set of standards if Web services is to keep its promise of easing integration.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 13, 2004 03:16 PM
October 12, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft continues to be its own toughest foe in the Office wars as acceptance of Office 2003 still only accounts for a tiny fraction of the desktop suite's overall customer base.
According to Gartner, Office XP, introduced in May, 2001, still accounts for 50 per cent of market share with Office 2000 not far behind with 45 per cent. Even Office 97, now relatively ancient (Microsoft stopped supporting the product early this year) has a four percent market share. Gartner is still projecting that Office 2003, which is coming up on its first year anniversary, will remain at one per cent share.
What appears to be consistently holding down sales of Office 2003, despite a raft of technical, although incremental, improvements, is the lack of one or two outstanding new capabilities that would push corporate buyers to open up their purse strings. Conservative spending at the largest IT shops along with the late arrival of the first Service Pack for the 2003 version hasn't helped either.
The general consensus among leading research companies like IDC, Gartner and others is that Office still has its thumbs pressed firmly against the throat of the desktop applications market with over 90 per cent share of the market. IDC has even stopped producing regular reports specifically on the desktop applica-tions market because of Microsoft's dominance there.
"If you look at the way Microsoft typically delivers software, it's through new PCs as well as through maintenance contracts. So even if companies have not deployed new software they have essentially paid for it. There might be a lag in actual deployments, but Microsoft already has it monies up front through those contracts," said Mark Levitt IDC's Research Vice president of Collaborative Computing.
Gartner, however, has boldly predicted that by 2007 Star Office could wrest up to 10 per cent share away from Office. The company's prediction seems to be based on Sun's plans to charge for StarOffice 6.0 on both Linux and Windows.
- Ed Scannell
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 12, 2004 03:03 PM
October 11, 2004 | Comments: (0)
StorageTek users get a dose of history
StorageTek this week holds it annual customer conference, FORUM, in San Antonio, Texas. As is usual with such events, the company is making plenty of announcements, including a new FlexLine name for many of its online storage systems. Along with a new name, the company will also introduce a new FlexLine FLA300 disk array and the FlexLine FLX210 storage system. The company will also unveil its successor to the BladeStore line, the FlexLine 600 series. The new line will use a new blade design and lower-cost SATA drives.
While StorageTek gets away from its Boulder, Colo. home for the conference, many attendees may think the only historical significance of San Antonio may be the storied Alamo. True, Disney recently re-enacted the historic battle on the big screen, but San Antonio also holds some significance for anyone in the computer industry.
San Antonio was home to Datapoint Corp. While the Datapoint name is pretty much limited to a few computer timelines now, the company was in many ways the forerunner of current computer technology. First and foremost, the company invented ARCnet, which was an early local area network that was established way back in 1977, when leisure suits and muscle cars still roamed the earth. The company has also been credited with pushing the development of the microprocessor, as one of its goals was to design a CPU-powered terminal for its networks. One of the companies it approached to build this CPU was none other than current computer powerhouse Intel Corp.
Datapoint was unable to capitalize on its intellectual foresight however. Greed intervened in the form of a corporate raider who purchased the company in 1985. This was a time when research and development funds were being cut to the bone. As with many companies purchased during the "junk" bond craze of the 1980s, Datapoint eventually filed for bankruptcy and sold off its assets during a slow and painful death spiral. But if it had lasted, we might be talking less about Silicon Valley and more about Alamo Alley as the cradle of the high tech world.
Posted by Bob Francis on October 11, 2004 01:02 PM
October 08, 2004 | Comments: (0)
When IBM started talking about its next generation version of WebSphere Appli-cation Server (code named Vela) late last year, company officials were all hopped up about how the upcoming product was to be the first componentized version of the server. Through componentization WebSphere could more flexibly mix and match various pieces with Tivoli, Lotus Notes and DB2.
"By doing this you can not only get the core functionality but you can extend it as necessary. It means we will be able to create software offerings that more closely match the immediate needs of our customers," said Bob Sutor, who was IBM's director of WebSphere foundation software at the time.
But with the formal announcement of Vela this week, the componentization of WebSphere 6.0 was the last thing to be discussed. While Sutor said IBM has started work in this area on the product, it is largely "under the covers," adding that as the company "moves down the componentization road we'll be identifying com-ponents within WebSphere and other products in the [IBM software] portfolio making them usable across products," he said. Most of the componentization work done for Version 6.0 is internal and not exposed yet.
"So in [WebSphere] 6.0 we lay the foundation that we expect to be fully externalized for ISVs and users in Version 7.0," Sutor said.
With Version 7.0 two to three years away, componentization again seems to be a dream deferred.
-- written by Ed Scannell
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2004 08:57 AM
October 08, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Hurricanes hinder spam in September, kinda sorta
September's hurricanes Jeanne, Frances, and Ivan pummeld the Florida coast, but they also took a toll on spam during the month, at least according to vendor FrontBridge.
On each of the days immediately following the three hurricanes, spam volumes dipped -- but spam also reached a record peak of 91 percent on September 12, the company said.
The monthly average was 85 percent, FrontBridge said, up three points from the month of August.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2004 08:36 AM
October 08, 2004 | Comments: (0)
The latest report on IT spending for 2005
The results of a survey sent out on Thursday by Forrester Research indicate that 15 percent of companies will reduce spending on IT during 2005.
What's more, 37 percent of companies plan to spend more on IT next year than they did throughout 2004.
Those numbers are based on a survey of IT execs in the States and over in Europe. Here in North America, 46 percent of companies plan to dedicate more dollars to IT next year.
An interesting tidbit from the report is that 67 percent of enterprises have an "executive steering committee to oversee the IT portfolio." It's the organizations in which the CIO is singly responsible for IT purchasing where the most spending will come from, with a difference of 11 percent. Indeed, 44 percent of those companies where CIO decide will increase spending, while 35 percent of enterprises with the steering committees will allot more money to IT in 2005.
Meanwhile, Forrester also stated that cost-savings achieved through offshoring will not result in less IT spending. To wit, 48 percent of North American companies that tap into offshore outsourcers will spend more on IT next year, but among companies that do not outsource to offshore locations, 38 percent will spend more.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2004 07:23 AM
October 07, 2004 | Comments: (0)
PalmOne in partnership with Microsoft
Is this a joke or is it a misleading headline? The answer is neither. It's for real.
PalmOne, the handheld manufacturers as opposed to PalmSource, the operating system company, signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to integrate Exchange Server 2003 Active Sync synchronization protocol into future handhelds.
The deal is at the moment limited to future Treo smart phones due out this fall but it is obvious this is the first of many such agreements.
The licensing agreement extends to data, wireless email and calendar and
PalmOne will add wireless server synchronization.
PalmOne officials tell me they are the first non-Microsoft OS licensee of this protocol.
The deal makes perfect sense and will make it easier to integrate Palm handhelds into most enterprise email platforms.
IT will just have to worry about the server side, "flip a switch" is how one official put it, since it will already be enabled on the client side.
There were many other email solutions PalmOne could have chosen rather than working with a company long considered its arch rival and yet they chose to work with Microsoft.
Once again it proves that so-called religious wars have no place in high tech. When companies remain agnostic and let practicality rule, the enterprise is the beneficiary.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on October 7, 2004 02:11 PM
October 07, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Who spends the IT industry's R&D dollars anyway?
During his opening keynote at TechXNY on Tuesday, Computer Associates' interim CEO Ken Cron threw out a number that struck me kind of funny: $20 billion.
"The IT industry as a whole invests more than $20 billion dollars every year in R&D," Cron said. "As a result, new technology stacks, platforms, and operating systems are regularly introduced."
I tracked down via CA's public relations folks that the $20 billion Cron referred to was "an internal estimate based on industry data." Fair enough.
That big chunk of change starts to look rather miniscule when broken down by the R&D budget of each top-tier vendor. Microsoft pumped $7.78 billion in 2004. IBM applied more than $5 billion in its last fiscal year to "research, development and engineering."
That means just two companies comprise more than half of the yearly R&D spend.
Lest I forget, HP's R&D budget surpasses $4 billion each year, and Intel allocated 4.4 billion last year.
The sum of what Microsoft, IBM, HP and Intel used for R&D is about $22 billion.
It's probably clear by now where I am going with this: Sun spent nearly $2 billion on R&D in fiscal 2004, Oracle spent a wee dram under $1.3 billion; and so forth.
CA CEO Cron also said in his keynote that "aspects of the industry are still wide open. New players emerge every day. Innovation isn’t confined to the big IT players."
Now, my objective is not to pick apart Cron's words or sentences. The point he made about technology innovation holding the promise to drive fundamental social, political and economic change is a strong one, and it's one that I personally believe in.
So let's consider that the $20 billion is an estimate, as it was portrayed, and as an estimate there is wiggle room there, so it could really be several billion or maybe even $10 billion more.
But even if the IT industry spends a total of $30 billion a year, there are still two companies that contribute nearly half of that, and a mere handful of others that account for almost all of the remainder. Indeed, the sum of all the aforementioned companies is approximately $25 billion.
So the rest of the industry is spending a total of $5 billion -- and that's if the collective spending is as high as $30 billion.
That said, how can we expect the future of IT innovation not to be confined to the big players?
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 7, 2004 10:45 AM
October 06, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Java as we have known it could be in for a chill thanks to a ruling by a federal jury in upstate New York that says the programming language infringes on several patents Kodak acquired from Wang Laboratories.
Now, questions remain:
* Will users of Java, accustomed to free access, now have to license the language under all circumstances, since Kodak is now seeking royalties for past usage and could want them going forward, too?
* Will this stifle innovation not only on Java but in all areas of application development, with developers, be they independent or at large software companies, afraid of infringing somebody's patent?
* Should patents be applied to software at all? Many wonder how patents were applied to technology that may have predated the issuance of the patents in the first place.
Sun initially dismissed the claims as being without merit. But now it appears that the ruling of a single jury has opened a very large Pandora's Box for developers.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 6, 2004 01:12 PM
October 06, 2004 | Comments: (0)
NetSuite claims first business app with RSS
I met with NetSuite execs yesterday at the TechXNY show in NYC and they claimed that their dashboard is the first business application that supports RSS.
CEO Zach Nelson said that at NetSuite they use RSS internally to track news from a cadre of sites. But he also said that he envisions that RSS being used within a dashboard either internally or by customers to exchange ideas between executives, for distributing a 'CEO's Corner' style of update column to the entire company, or for the head of product development to post important updates that alert the product team, just to name a few examples.
Is NetSuite's claim true, or are there other business apps that already support RSS?
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 6, 2004 07:13 AM
October 05, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Gates is still testy about Linux migration
Microsoft officials recently made it clear that one of their objectives for the next 12 months is to do better at picking off more Unix migrators than archrival Linux. They feel they have left some low hanging fruit on the tree by not being aggressive enough in better educating the Unix fence sitters on the technical and financial merits of tossing their venerable operating system in favor of Windows.
The company tried to do exactly that during the last year via its "Get the Facts" campaign, which attempts to take out the religious aspects of choosing between Windows and Linux and consider only the hard, cold technical and financial facts.
"What I found in talking to Unix users the past year is they thought the gains in going to Linux were so great they weren't even considering Windows. So now, and going through the next year, we will spend even more time trying to make them understand there is even greater value in moving from Unix to Windows," said Martin Taylor, Microsoft's chief Linux strategist in Redmond, Wash. "It is having some effect because users are telling us now they are starting to do their own analysis of the situation," Taylor said.
Late last week however, Chairman Bill Gates, addressing an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., got a bit testy when someone piped up that almost 50 percent of servers being purchased now are running Linux. Chairman Bill responded bluntly. "First, it's just not a right number," he said. "Well over 50 percent of servers that are sold run Windows Server.'' He added that it is Unix and not Windows being displaced by Linux and that the shift of Unix share to Linux has been dramatic. Hmmm. Seems even the good chairman is admitting Mr. Taylor's work is cut out for him over the next 12 months.
- Ed Scannell
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 5, 2004 12:06 PM
October 05, 2004 | Comments: (0)
HP pens letter asking Sun's Schwartz to stop blogging about them
Hewlett-Packard sent a letter to rival Sun Microsystems requesting that president and COO Jonathan Schwartz stop entering comments in his blog about HP's strategic direction.
InfoWorld sister publication Computerworld Today writer Rodney Gedda got the full story.
Schwartz has not yet posted a response to HP's letter on his blog.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 5, 2004 10:23 AM
October 04, 2004 | Comments: (0)
What to do when the lights go out
This morning the lights went out. I live on the plains of Texas so it is not a big surprise. Hurricanes, tornadoes and general Midwestern storm craziness come free of charge along with the flat, featureless landscape. As a child, reading by candlelight - or more likely lantern light - in an electricity-deprived home was not unknown. My sister and I could identify with the standard Abraham Lincoln biography bromide of studying by candlelight with ease, even if we usually used giant lanterns instead.
But this time when the lights went out, it barely caused a ripple in my routine. My IBM ThinkPad still had battery power and I could still connect to the Internet through the phone line, although at a much slower speed. It was almost disappointing that the only real impact was that my coffee was becoming progressively cooler.
I then realized I could even make phone calls using my cell phone. I headed off to search for it through the house to no avail. Even if I did know where I had left it, I couldn't see it. By the time I found it, the lights were back on. It proved another childhood lesson from the Boy Scouts still applied: Be prepared.
- Bob Francis
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 4, 2004 03:39 PM
October 01, 2004 | Comments: (0)
The ousting of PeopleSoft President and CEO Craig Conway Friday by his board of directors caught almost everybody by surprise.
Wasn't the company coming off of a successful conference in San Francisco, as well as an upbeat quarterly earnings report?
The board's motivation may stem not just from the continuing shadow of Oracle, but from worries about future growth prospects in the overall business applications market.
"One problem is they are facing a fairly saturated market, where their human resources and financial applications, as well as their CRM applications and supply chain management applications are fairly mature," said Donovan Gow, analyst with American Technology Research.
The board may have felt Conway was not focusing on the challenge of keeping PeopleSoft technology competitive in such a tough market.
"If PeopleSoft is to remain independent from Oracle, they have to be able to make a credible case that the value of the company is higher than what Oracle is offering," said Gartner analyst Jeff Comport. In other words, they need to be more successful at selling their products.
Comport added that there is great potential in PeopleSoft Enterprise, the company's suite of business applications, which is among the best of its kind in the market. Its technology, acquired from J.D. Edwards further enhances its breadth.
"There is a need to make products more flexible and extensible," he said. "Increasingly, applications don't stand alone but have to be able to integrate and interoperate with a much broader spectrum of applications."
Will Dave Duffield, the new CEO and company founder, get chance to usher in a new era of success, or will Oracle win the day?
Who knows. Says Comport: "I'm not betting on one scenario or another."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 1, 2004 04:20 PM
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