But Wait, There's More

• According to the industry skuttlebutt being generated by Microsoft's top brass controlling the development of the Windows server family, the company might be doing an about-face and could, perhaps in 2005 or a little later, deliver a server version of the future "Longhorn" release of the Windows server family. Originally, Microsoft had hoped to have long-since shipped the "Whistler" release of Windows, which will come out as Windows Server 2003 at the end of April, and would be releasing the full .NET-enabled kicker to Whistler, code-named "Blackcomb," about two years after that. About a year ago, Whistler was delayed, Blackcomb got pushed out indefinitely, and Microsoft dropped in an intermediate release called "Longhorn," which was supposed to feature a new file format that unified structured and unstructured data. Then Microsoft said late last year that Longhorn would only be a client release, thus confusing everyone, since both clients and servers would have to be enabled to use this new file format. Now the company seems to be in flux. It wants to do a new release for technology's sake, but every new release is another disruption to what customers are doing, as much as it is an opportunity for Microsoft to sell new software to customers. I guess we'll expect Windows 2005 when we see it.
  
  

• If you are trying to figure out if you are ready for Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system, which hits the streets in about a month, you might want to take the company's skills assessment. You can do this online at www.microsoft.com/traincert/assessment. While the Microsoft skills assessment is obviously geared toward helping the company to push its education products, it is also useful for you to gauge how much of a disruption moving to the new platform--or indeed to any other Microsoft product--might be, based on your current skills.
  
  
• The deck chairs among the top brass of Microsoft have changed. A few weeks ago, Orlando Ayala was named as group vice president of the company's Worldwide Small and Mid Market Solutions and Partners group, a new organization that seeks to push Windows server and related middleware into the small and midsized business (SMB) market, as well as the Great Plains and Navision suites that Microsoft acquired last year. The Microsoft application software unit, which is comprised of these two units, is losing money, and Linux is giving Microsoft all kinds of headaches in the SMB space, which is why Ayala has been called on to lead the charge in this area. Kevin Johnson, an 11-year veteran of the company, who formerly was senior vice president of Microsoft's Americas region, was also this week named as group vice president of the company's Worldwide Sales, Marketing, and Services Group, reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. He is taking over Ayala's position as head of sales.
  
  
• Unisys announced enhancements to its Server Sentinel systems management program for its ES7000 Wintel servers this week. The company also announced add-ons to the program for managing Microsoft's SQL Server database, server consolidations onto the ES7000s, and a workload manager for applications. Server Sentinel 2.0 includes a full version of NetIQ's AppManager Operator console, having had a light version of the program with Server Sentinel 1.0, which was announced one year ago. The full AppManager console embedded in Server Sentinel allows it to take advantage of all the plug-ins for that program for managing applications. Server Sentinel 2.0 also includes security enhancements and predictive self-healing features, and it plugs into BMC Software's Patrol systems management tools. Server Sentinel 1.0 already plugged into Unicenter from Computer Associates, OpenView from Hewlett-Packard, and Tivoli from IBM. The Application Sentinel for Consolidation module is an add-on to Server Sentinel 2.0 that pings all the servers on your network, profiles your applications, and recommends how to consolidate them on an ES7000 server. Application Sentinel for Resource Management is a priority-based workload management program that dynamically allocates resources to applications and keeps them from running each other off the rails. And Application Sentinel for SQL Server is an add-on to Server Sentinel that provides database tuning and optimization advice to database administrators--work that they normally have to do by hand. These three Application Sentinel add-ons cost $1,000 per processor each; Server Sentinel ships standard with all ES7000 servers.
  
  
• Market researcher IDC has just completed a survey of IT shops, and found out that 65 percent of the companies surveyed said they are interested in utility computing. While utility computing is based in part of the outsourcing and managed services offerings that many IT vendors have been offering for years, the game is still wide open, according to David Tapper, program manager for IT outsourcing and utility services at IDC. He says that companies wanting to build true data processing utilities still have time to get into the much-vaunted first-mover position in this nascent utility market. The IDC report that came out of this study was based on only 34 participants, so take it with a grain of salt.
  
  

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