But Wait, There's More

• According to market research by IDC, the worldwide market for paid operating systems (as opposed to those that are distributed for free, such as FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris) shrunk a bit in 2002, and Windows and Linux increased their share of the server market. IDC says that 5.7 million new (and paid for) server operating systems were shipped in 2002, a decline of 5.1 percent over 2001. Those 5.7 million licenses raked in $7.8 billion for their suppliers. Microsoft, with 55.1 percent of the 5.7 million shipments, had the largest share, up from 50.5 percent in 2001. All the pundits agree that Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 plan, which included big price hikes and therefore encouraged many customers to buy software under the Licensing 5.0 plan in mid-2002, helped Microsoft gain share in a shrinking market. Linux accounted for 23.1 percent of server OS shipments in 2002, says IDC, up from 22.4 percent in 2001. Windows gets a lot of shipments, but only accounted for 16.7 percent of the $7.8 billion revenue pie; Linux got only six-tenths of a percent of the revenue. Unix sales declined by nearly 9 percent to 31.1 percent of server operating system sales, and NetWare got a mere 4.3 percent of revenue following another year of double-digit declines. Shipments of new operating systems for mainframes and proprietary midrange kit (such as the AS/400) were about 50,000 units worldwide, according to IDC, a decline of 58 percent compared with 2001. This is in part due to server consolidations (made possible through logical partitioning) and the adoption of Linux on these platforms.
  
  

• At its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans last week, Microsoft announced a new initiative to help its partners better connect with their potential and existing customers--and to do so more frequently. The initiative, dubbed Channel Builder, is really aimed at the hard-core independent software vendors for the Windows platform, which generally have decent code and applications but sometimes lack the sophisticated marketing machinery that Microsoft has. With Channel Builder, vendors with the Microsoft "certified" or "gold" partner status can start enrolling in December, so they can start networking, through the assistance of Microsoft with Web tools and partner events, with other channel partners and customers in order to peddle their own products. The Channel Builder offering will feature a partner portal, and will roll out worldwide during 2004.
  
  
• IBM last week announced that it is involved in two Linux projects with government agencies in the United Kingdom and Russia that are indicative of the increasing interest in the use of Linux among governments at all levels, all over the world. IBM is involved in nine proof-of-concept trials for Linux deployments at the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce, which is testing out the idea of moving Windows and other applications to Linux after the British Parliament announced its open source software policy in late July. The Office of Government Commerce was established in April 2000 to help government offices, agencies, and departments make the best procurement choices and to save money. Big Blue is also pushing Linux over in Russia, with the help of that country's Ministry of Communications and Computerization, which has just set up a Linux competency center to help businesses examine the potential of Linux in their companies and to actually get help in implementing solutions. IBM is dropping in a bunch of xSeries servers running Linux, as well as its WebSphere, DB2, Domino, and Tivoli software products. IBM's business partners can use the Linux center to test and demonstrate their applications to Russian companies, too.
  
  
• Hewlett-Packard last week announced that it has set up a Web storefront on the World Wide Retailer Exchange, a B2B exchange set up explicitly to link retailers with suppliers they need to run their business. The OneStop IT Shop on the WWRE, as the store is called, is expected to generate more than $50 million in sales of HP gear, which includes desktop and laptop computers, as well as ProLiant Intel -based servers. The WWRE currently has 64 members of its exchange, including Gap, K-Mart, Target, and Toys R Us; their combined sales are currently about $900 billion. The exchange is offering the HP kit with discounts of between 15 and 25 percent. WWRE says that its exchange has saved its members over $1 billion since it was formed in 2000.
  
  
• When you are an upstart vendor selling AMD-based Linux clusters, every deal counts. That's why Linux Networx is trumpeting a deal it has closed with farm machinery maker John Deere to help it design its equipment with Linux-based computer-aided design and engineering software. Deere bought an Evolicity cluster from Linux Networx with 24 AMD Athlon processors, plus the Clusterworx and ICE Box cluster management tools. The reason why Deere went with the Linux Networx solution instead of building its own cluster is that it was a turnkey solution. That makes sense. The killer deal that Linux Networx got in mid-August was to work with AMD to build two clusters comprised of a total of 3,300 64-bit Opteron processors for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is expected to deliver about 13 teraflops of aggregate computing power and will cost on the order of $10 million. This monster cluster will be used to run the ASCI nuclear stockpile management programs that the U.S. Department of Energy has been using as a means to pay for large computing projects for the past decade.
  
  
• Stampede Technologies plans to incorporate the new instant messaging capabilities that IBM recently introduced with Lotus Notes and Domino Release 6.5 into its TurboGold data compression software. Stampede makes its living selling compression software that speeds the Notes/Domino replication process and reduces the consumption of processor power and network bandwidth, an important factor for road warriors connecting to their company's Domino servers over a dial-up connection. In the near future, the company plans to ship a new release of TurboGold that integrates the instant messaging capabilities in Notes/Domino 6.5 directly into TurboGold. Company officials say this will give Notes/Domino administrators the capability to immediately communicate systems and policy changes to users, thus reducing the cycle time on implementation of new releases, policy definitions, and TurboGold features. Although Notes/Domino 6.5 became available September 30, a timeline for the instant messaging release of TurboGold was not provided.
  
  

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