But Wait, There's More

• A federal court ruled two weeks ago that the changes IBM made to its pension plan in 1995 and 1999 were illegal and discriminated against older workers. In 1999, IBM switched to a cash-balance plan, in which it paid into workers' pensions on an annual basis, based on a flat rate of 5 percent). Previously, IBM calculated its pension payout by multiplying the number of years an employee had worked by the employee's final year salary, which had the effect of boosting pensions in the employee's final years. Angered by the 20 to 40 percent drop in the value of their pensions, a group of ex-IBMers filed suit against Big Blue in 1999 in the Southern District of Illinois. IBM is confident it will win on appeal.
  
  

• At the moment, commercial Linux distributor SuSE, which used to be a partner of The SCO Group in the UnitedLinux consortium, has decided to stay on the sidelines and cheer on rival Red Hat in the new lawsuit it filed against SCO and the countersuit that IBM has filed against SCO (we'll tell you all about that next week). SuSE is arguably IBM's staunchest ally for Linux on its eServer platforms, and has pushed more Linux licenses onto iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries machines than Red Hat has thus far. (Red Hat still probably ships more Linux licenses on Intel-based servers than SuSE does, including on IBM's own xSeries boxes.) Thus far, SuSE is content to say that it believes SCO's inclusion in the UnitedLinux consortium has effectively open-sourced any questionable code, if any exists, and that its participation in UnitedLinux indemnifies SuSE's customers. SCO has not argued that point--at least not yet. But after Red Hat's suit, and SuSE's enthusiasm for it, that could change. SCO has David Boies, the man who beat Microsoft and one of the best lawyers in the world, on its side, and has enough market capitalization and potential awards for damages to pay him whatever is necessary to fund this lawsuit indefinitely.
  
  
• The one thing that is harder than trying to figure out how all the pieces of a multinational conglomerate with big partnerships fit together is trying to reckon what happens when some part of the behemoth is restructured. Fujitsu, which is half of the Fujitsu-Siemens IT partnership, has recently reconfigured some units into the Fujitsu IT Holdings Inc. subsidiary in North America. Fujitsu IT Holdings is a parent company to Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc., which sells the PrimePower Sparc/Solaris and Primergy Intel-based server lines, co-developed and sold by Fujitsu and Siemens in Europe, North America, and Asia. The holding company also controls Fujitsu Consulting, Fujitsu Software Corp, and Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. (Softek). Now Fujitsu PC Corp. is being merged into this holding company, which will allow Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc. (the server seller) to peddle PCs (laptops and handhelds only) into the same corporate accounts. Kazuto Kojima was named as CEO of the holding company, after having been named group chairman overseeing all Fujitsu units in North America in June. Toshio Morohoshi, who has been running the Fujitsu PC unit, was named as chief operating officer of the new holding company. Larry Fillmer, who was president and CEO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc., will continue to lead that unit as a director, but the Fujitsu PC company will be merged with Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc. on October 1 and Morohoshi will be named as president and CEO of that merged unit, not Fillmer. John Rose, who headed Compaq's Enterprise Computing Group in the wake of the Tandem and Digital acquisitions, before Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq, remains executive chairman of the holding company.
  
  
• Dell was ebullient last week as it announced that it had been chosen by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to build a 17.7 teraflops Linux cluster. This would put the cluster among the top-ranking machines in the world. NCSA, where the Mosaic Web browser was born and Netscape was spawned, is building its Linux cluster using 1,280 dual-processor PowerEdge 1750 servers, each using Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors running at 3.06 GHz. The servers are going to be linked using high-speed Myrinet 2000 switches, and the whole shebang will be based on Red Hat's commercial Linux distribution. Another 106 PowerEdge servers will be installed to provide I/O for the cluster and will link to 120 TB of disk storage. Another 64-node cluster will be linked with Myrinet switches for application development and testing. Specialized grid middleware from Platform Computing will manage and provision the cluster and will assign jobs to it among NCSA's researchers and affiliates. It will be operational within a few months, and will represent three-quarters of the combined supercomputing capacity that NCSA has installed. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But at list prices, the Dell servers and Red Hat licenses cost about $7 million, and the storage, interconnect, and related services could easily double that price.
  
  
• Taiwanese chip maker VIA Technologies this week was showing off dual-processor servers using its forthcoming VIA K8T800 chipset for use with Advanced Micro Devices 64-bit "Hammer" Opteron processors. At the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco last week, VIA demonstrated dual-processor servers configured with the Opteron processors and running the 64-bit implementation of MandrakeSoft 2.1 Linux Corporate Server, which is based on the Linux 2.4 kernel and includes the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, the PHP scripting language, the Postfix e-mail server, the ProFTP FTP server, Samba Windows-alike print-and-file server, and a bunch of other common servers all bundled into the same package. The K8T800 chipset can support one or two Opteron chips and has support for a clone version of Intel's AGP8X high-speed workstation graphics, something Advanced Micro Devices' own chipset for the Opterons does not do yet. The VIA chipset supports HyperTransport NUMA-style clustering, which is integrated on the Opteron processors. The K8T800 chipset is unique among modern chipsets, says VIA, in that it integrates a Serial ATA/RAID controller into its south bridge VT8237 companion chipset. The chipset was demonstrated on a MS-9130 motherboard made by Taiwanese motherboard maker Micro Star International. This motherboard has dual-channel DDR333 main memory slots. Micro Star International has about a 12 percent share of the worldwide motherboard market for PCs and servers, and also makes motherboards for Intel's Pentium III and Pentium 4 processors, employing chipsets from Intel and Silicon Integrated Systems, another Taiwanese chip maker.
  
  
• MAPICS last week reported a 51 percent increase in third-quarter total revenues, to $47 million, but its net income dropped by more than half, to $3 million, as the ERP software vendor completed its integration of Frontstep, a Windows ERP vendor that MAPICS acquired in December. Those numbers were big improvements over MAPICS's second quarter, in which its total revenues amounted to $38.1 million, and the company recorded a $1.8 million loss. "Completing the Frontstep integration and returning to profitability was our highest priority this quarter," said Dick Cook, MAPICS president and chief executive officer. The Atlanta software vendor's highlights of the quarter included 56 new customers and the roll-out of SyteLine 7, the latest release of MAPICS's Windows-based ERP package. Cook says the Frontstep acquisition will start being accretive to earnings in the first quarter of fiscal 2004, which beings October 1. Cook also indicated that MAPICS is well-positioned to participate in the ongoing consolidation of software vendors. As of June 30, the company had assets of $87.6 million, compared with $72.2 million a year ago.
  
  
• A recent study of insurance companies' computing infrastructures indicates a dire need for getting what they have into ship-shape as opposed to adding new functionality. Sapiens International Corp., the insurance software vendor that supports various midrange platforms, recently presented the study at IBM's insurance application architecture meeting and the insurance accounting and systems association conference. Sapiens says its study, which involved interviewing 180 insurance executives in the United States on key technology issues, such as the top technology initiatives and the biggest technology drivers for those initiatives, showed that insurance companies need to clean house before embarking on new projects. For example, the top technology initiative in the study was upgrading policy administration systems (22 percent), followed by application and server consolidation (16 percent), providing direct access to agents and brokers (14 percent), and system integration (13 percent). By far, the biggest technology driver pushing these initiatives is inefficiency with aging systems and processes (44 percent). Some 57 percent of respondents said that more than half of their IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing systems. The most popular new projects undertaken by insurance companies are developing Web front-ends (21 percent), integrated workflow (16 percent) document capture and storage (12 percent), ad hoc reporting (11 percent), real-time rating and quoting (9 percent), and document assembly and printing (9 percent).
  
  

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