Guild Companies

Windows & Linux Edition
Volume 2, Number 2 -- January 15, 2003

But Wait, There's More . . .

Microsoft, after renaming the "Whistler" kicker to the Windows 2000 family of operating systems three times, has finally killed off the .NET portion of the name and will go with the plain and predictable Windows Server 2003 moniker for the future operating system. Microsoft was attempting to make a statement by adding .NET to the product's name, showing a sharp contrast in technology between Windows 2000 and Windows 2003, but with the "Blackcomb" release of Windows (due many years from now) being the real .NET operating system, Microsoft has thought better of slapping the .NET brand on its server operating systems. Sometimes good sense prevails over marketing nonsense, and this is one instance. The name change does not, however, signify that Microsoft is not embedding what .NET technologies it does have ready for market in the Windows Server 2003 product; no features have been changed. (Expect more .NET name changes on other Microsoft products.) Since the new year has kicked off, Microsoft has put out Whistler Release Candidate 2 (RC2), the final pre-production version of Whistler before its announcement on April 24. You can download Whistler RC2 from the Windows Server 2003 RC2 page. Microsoft says that its Web site, which has 40 million users and 800 million page views a month, has been running on Whistler RC1 since last November, and presumably it has moved to RC2 or will soon move to the gold release.

Chip maker and Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices last week announced that it was partnering with IBM so that the two companies could jointly develop advanced 65-nanometer and 45-nanometer chip-making processes on 300 millimeter wafers. The current crop of microprocessors created by IBM and AMD use either 180 nanometer (0.18 micron) or 130 nanometer (0.13 micron) processes on 200 millimeter wafers. The two companies want to push the envelope with chip-making technologies and have another party help shoulder the substantial costs of doing so, hence this deal. Financial terms were not disclosed, but this smells like one of those deals where companies agree to help each other in exchange for the promise of benefiting against other competitors--in this case, Intel, its point on Itanium, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, which is still in the game with its UltraSparc family of RISC chips. Odds are that IBM will collect royalties from AMD on basic SOI, copper, and low-k technologies that are the basis of the work they will do--but only after AMD puts improved processes, based on the IBM technologies, into production at its own foundries or those of its partners. AMD and IBM plan to leverage a mix of copper, silicon-on-insulator, and low-k dielectric processes to make these much smaller circuits work in production. The first products that are the fruits of their joint venture, based on 65 nanometer processes, are expected to hit the streets in 2005. The research the two companies do will be conducted at IBM's advanced foundry in East Fishkill, New York. Both companies have reserved the right to distribute the knowledge they gain to third parties they might hire as contract chip makers, should it come to that.
If Dell smells that you are making money in a market that has anything even remotely to do with PCs or servers, watch out. Dell this week launched itself into the market for specialized point-of-sale PCs and handheld computers, and has partnered with hardware and software suppliers in the retail sector that sell gadgets and applications for linking stores to back office and supply chain systems. Dell is positioning itself more or less as a systems integrator and reseller of POS components, and obviously wants to get its OptiPlex business PCs and specialized retail monitors, keyboards, and printers into retail accounts. Dell has also signed alliances with retail application specialists Retek, AutoGas, GERS Retail, and MSS Global to get these companies to push Dell hardware and integration services into their accounts. The software vendors are the ones that are really influential in recommending solutions to retailers, and Dell has figured this out.
Hewlett-Packard probably has the most at stake when it comes to the success or failure of the 64-bit Itanium chip from Intel, and database maker Sybase, which is caught in the crossfire of an intense firefight between much bigger rivals Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, can't afford to miss out on the Itanium gravy train, should it start coming into the station. That's why HP and Sybase have agreed to work together to port the Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server relational database to the Itanium platform running either Red Hat Linux or HP's own HP-UX Unix variant. (Red Hat has its own database, based on the open source PostgreSQL database, and has no interest in helping Sybase or HP invade its turf.) Sybase also said that it would support, with HP's help, the upcoming Alpha EV7 processors, due to be announced any day now, for the AlphaServer Tru64 Unix server line.
Manhattan Associates has completed its $20 million acquisition of Logistics.com, a developer of transportation management software for Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris platforms. Manhattan Associates, which still counts most of its revenue from OS/400-related business, says the addition of Logistics.com's software helps to "bridge the gap" between transportation planning and transportation execution software. Logistics.com's offerings are used by shippers and carriers to find and execute the most efficient means of transporting goods, whether by air, land, or sea. The company says its Web-based architecture, Logistics Event Management Architecture (LEMA), will easily integrate with other business processes and solutions because it uses a version of XML for the transportation industry, called Transportation XML (tXML), that is readily extendable and is a superset of existing electronic data interchange (EDI) formats. Along with the technology and operations of Logistics.com come its customer base, which, Manhattan says, includes many Fortune 500 companies in the retail, consumer goods, food and grocery, and high-tech industries. Logistics.com was a part of Internet Capital Group.