Rant: Offshoring in the Offing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you've been in the IT industry for a while, you've been subjected to companies--particularly in the manufacturing and distribution sectors--picking up and moving from the former industrial capitals to new industrial areas where labor is cheaper. You've watched as two waves of mergers and acquisitions slammed companies together in the 1970s and 1980s because people thought that bigger is better. You've been downsized, rightsized, and in some cases outsourced as companies tried to figure out how to rein in the people slice of the IT budget pie, which still utterly dwarfs the cost of hardware and software at most companies and probably always will. You've kept your job through the dot-com era--by keeping your head out of the clouds and your feet firmly planted on terra firma--or, if you were one of those dot-commers, you've landed a new job in a real company and have a regular pay check. And now, after surviving all that, you have to cope with offshoring. READ MORE >

HP Retakes Top Spot on OLTP Test with Windows on Superdome
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard has become king of the hill again on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test with its forthcoming 64-way Itanium-based Superdome server. The Superdome, which was running the new Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition from Microsoft, has bested IBM's 32-way "Regatta-H" pSeries 690, which is using the new Power4+ processors. How long HP will hold the top spot is unclear, with IBM said to be working on its own revised benchmark that will put it atop HP's latest result. READ MORE >

Gartner Says New iSeries Database Sales Dropped by 24% in 2002
by Alex Woodie

Despite a precipitous drop in DB2/400 sales last year, IBM managed to hold onto its lead in the market for database management systems, primarily because of a strong mainframe business and a 20 percent drop in database revenue from its closest competitor, Oracle, market researcher Gartner said last week in its annual database report. While IBM's database revenue declined by almost a percent, it gained almost 3 percentage points of worldwide market share as the market contracted by nearly 7 percent. READ MORE >

IBM Ready for the Next Database Race
by Dan Burger

IBM is poised to unleash a couple of integration, management, and analyzing software products targeted at businesses trying to more efficiently gather and interpret data as they interact with both customers and partners. Two key products that have the mandate of making Big Blue's Software Group more of a force in the database market have just been announced. The first is DB2 Information Integrator, which IBM touts as a key building block in On Demand computing, and DB2 UDB Express, which boasts autonomic computing capabilities and is aimed at the value-conscious small and midsized business (SMB) market. READ MORE >

IBM Puts BladeCenters in Preconfigured Clusters
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has announced that it will be supporting its BladeCenter blade servers as an optional building block component in the eServer Cluster 1350 server clusters that it sells. The Cluster 1350s are preconfigured server clusters based on IBM's xSeries line of machines, which use various processors from Intel as their main brains. IBM also sells a package called the eServer Cluster 1600, which is comprised of its own Power-based pSeries Unix servers. READ MORE >

Bytware Expands SNMP Support in Messenger Product Line
by Alex Woodie

Bytware has delivered expanded support for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that makes it easier to monitor iSeries events from an enterprise system console. The new SNMP capabilities available for MessengerConsole and MessengerPlus will allow companies to send a greater level of detail on the current status of OS/400 servers, as well as Microsoft Windows NT servers through the MessengerNT product, to an enterprise system management console, such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView. READ MORE >

Reader Feedback and Insights

We value your feedback and insights on the Windows and Linux server markets. Feel free to send a letter to the editor. We will consider your letter a candidate for the reader feedback column for this newsletter, but we will contact you before we publish your e-mail. READ MORE >