But Wait, There's More

• British telecommunications firm Orange has taken the Linux plunge. Last week Dell and Oracle jointly announced that range has replaced a mobile multimedia application database running on a proprietary RISC platform with a Linux-on-Intel solution. The application stores the user preferences of Orange's 13 million customers and lets them access Orange content, such as sports and horoscopes, over the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) Short Message Service (SMS) communications protocol. Orange IT managers say the cluster of four Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers equipped with Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and Oracle 9i database is expected to deliver a 10-fold price-performance increased over Orange's previous Sun Microsystems' Solaris-based multimedia subscriptions dual-processor server.
  
  

• IBM this week introduced three new xSeries servers that support the Pentium 4 and Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors with the updated 533 MHz front side bus. This faster bus helps the processors get more work done without higher clock speeds. The updated xSeries 305 is a 1U rack-mounted server that supports the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor with the 533 MHz bus. It has 256 MB of main memory (expandable to 4 GB), comes with a 40 GB IDE drive or an 18 GB SCSI disk drive (expandable to two 73 GB drives), and has two half-length PCI-X slots and two integrated Ethernet ports. With the 40 GB IDE drive, a base xSeries 305 with the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4/533 MHz bus option costs $2,159; switching to the 18 GB SCSI drive raises the price to $2,489. The updated xSeries 235 tower server has a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processor (expandable to two processors), 256 MB of main memory (expandable to 12 GB), ten drive bays (which can hold 1.3 TB of disk), five PCI-X slots, and one PCI slot. The base xSeries 235 sells for $2,949. The updated two-way xSeries 345 is a rack-mounted machine fits into a 2U form fact. It supports the new 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon with the 533 MHz bus, and comes with 512 MB of main memory (expandable to 8 GB), up to 880 GB of internal disk capacity, and has four PCI-X slots and one PCI slot. In a base configuration, the new xSeries 345 costs $3,059.
  
  
• SSA Global Technologies is on the acquisition path again. Last week Elevon, a publicly traded company that develops e-business applications for IBM mainframe systems, announced that it has agreed to be acquired by SSA GT. The acquisition is the third in the last year for SSA GT. Elevon, based in San Francisco, announced last Friday that its board of directors has agreed to sell 100 percent of its common stock to SSA GT for $1.30 per share. Based on the number of publicly traded shares, the value of the deal would be $20.25 million. If approved by Elevon shareholders, the company would become a subsidiary of SSA GT, a privately held company based in Chicago. Elevon did business as Walker Interactive Systems before changing its name to Elevon in 2002, after it acquired a Unix-based application by the same name from a UK software (a product it has since sold). Walker Interactive Systems was delisted by the NASDAQ stock market in 2001. Elevon sells three core e-business suites that run on IBM mainframes and use the IBM middleware stack, including CICS, DB2, and WebSphere Application Server, and a business intelligence system that runs on Unix platforms. The company's e-finance application suite includes general ledger, fixed assets, and project cost management applications. Its e-procurement suite includes accounts payable, inventory management, and procurement applications, while its e-revenue suite includes billing, accounts receivable, and collections applications. The company also offers an OLAP-based business intelligence tool, called Elevon Active Financial Planning, which it develops in conjunction with its partnerships with Hyperion Solutions and Information Builders. This software runs on Microsoft Windows servers. Other Elevon offerings include a collection of query and reporting programs, a collection of portals, and a series of connectors for Java and XML connectivity.
  
  
• eIQnetworks last week launched the 3.5 release of MailAnalyzer, a browser-based mail server analysis and reporting utility that works with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, and Sendmail e-mail servers. MailAnalyzer's 70 prebuilt reports help users identify e-mail usage patterns and regain unused mail resources, and is often used as an analysis tool in mail migrations. With this release, eIQnetworks has made a number of enhancements, including a new executive summary report and other new reports, an improved user interface, the addition of installation and configuration checkers to speed implementations, a new App Status feature to check the status and behavior of the application, and what the company claims is a 100 percent performance improvement in log file, user data collection, and data updating. MailAnalyzer costs $495 for a single user license.
  
  
• E-mail security software company GROUP Technologies recently launched a new services organization to help companies using IBM Lotus Domino to get a handle on e-mail security and fight spam. As part of the new GROUP Professional Services organization, announced at the recent VIEW Administration Conference for Notes and Domino Professionals in Las Vegas, Nevada, GROUP technologists will monitor a company's e-mail traffic. GROUP will then generate a report that includes information about the size and number of non-business-related e-mail attachments; the types and amounts of offensive e-mails and attachments; the attachment number, size, and types; the number and size of e-mails transmitted; the size and number of hourly transmissions; and the threshold counts and sizes. After going over the results with the client, GROUP will typically recommend one or more of its suite of tools to address the problem areas. "This is no cookie-cutter approach to solving e-mail security and management issues," says Jürgen Wege, GROUP Technologies founder and chief executive. GROUP's software targets Domino and Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers, and has seen numerous deployments in iSeries-Domino environments.
  
  
• Logility last week announced Version 7.0 of its flagship ERP system, Logility Voyager Solutions, at its annual user conference in Atlanta. The Logility Voyager Solutions suite, which the software company ported from Windows to OS/400 in 2001, offers manufactures and distributors a collection of supply chain planning capabilities. Key new features to be delivered when Version 7.0 ships later this summer include new views of the real-time status of the supply chain using key performance indicators, and a new alerting system; enhancements to the forecasting engines for single-enterprise and multi-enterprise planning processes; new planning capabilities to simulate and execute on a variety of planning strategies; enhancements to its sourcing capabilities; new Web services that provide access to the suite's ordering and inventory management functions; a new transportation planning optimizer; new "best practices" templates for warehouse management; and support for Microsoft's .NET platform.
  
  

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