But Wait, There's More

• IT analyst firm Gartner is forecasting a moderate upswing in IT spending over the next two years, and then a big surge after 2006 as technologies converge. The prediction, which the Stamford, Connecticut, firm made at its annual user conference in South Florida last week, was hammered home with some strong words by Gartner's chairman and chief executive, Michael Fleisher. "2004 will be the year that companies make the turn from protecting profitability to driving growth," the news agency Reuters quoted Fleisher as saying. "A big turn is coming." Fleisher singled out four developing technologies that he says will drive growth: secure broadband wireless, mobile devices that consume little electricity, cheap and reliable computing power, and service-oriented IT architectures. For 2004, Gartner forecasts hardware spending to increase by 4.4 percent, to $355 billion, and software spending to increase by 7 percent, while overall spending should increase by an average of 5 percent a year through 2007, when Gartner forecasts total worldwide tech spending to hit $2.77 trillion, Reuters reports.
  
  

• Microsoft hosted its annual Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, and used the time in front of thousands of programmers to discuss future technologies for the Windows platform. An interesting new addition to the family is WinFX, a kicker to the .NET Framework, which Microsoft has been shipping for a few years, to build Web services applications in a Windows environment. WinFX is a new programming model that will take advantage of .NET features in the future "Whidbey" VisualStudio development tool, the future "Yukon" version of SQL Server, and the future "Longhorn" version of the Windows platform and its WinFS revamp of the Windows file system, which is currently a mix of Fat32 and NTFS out there in the installed base. Microsoft is also saying future innovations will bolster the security of the Windows platform. Central to this will be a new communications subsystem for Windows, called "Indigo," which will link Windows servers and desktops and their applications to one another in a secure manner, according to Microsoft. At the Storage Networking World Fall 2003 show in Orlando, Florida, the company also said that 75 vendors have integrated support for Virtual Disk Service, Volume Shadow Copy Services, Multi-path Input/Output, Storport, and other storage technologies inside Windows Server 2003 into their hardware and software products.
  
  
• According to the latest survey of more than 500 North American developers performed by Evans Data, 64 percent said that Linux was ready for prime time in the corporate environment, compared with only 34 percent of developers surveyed in the fall of 1999. Evans Data also says that its survey results indicate that 63 percent of developers are incorporating open source technologies into their applications, compared with only 38 percent in the spring of 2001. Linux is perceived by 23 percent of developers surveyed as being the most secure platform (up from 19 percent six months ago), while Windows XP is considered the most secure platform by only 8 percent of developers, down from 14 percent six months ago.
  
  
• Server maker SuperMicro is arguably the first vendor to get a two-way server based on the 64-bit Itanium 2 processor and fitting in a 1U form factor out the door. SuperMicro was showing off the device at the Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan last week. The Super Server 6113M-8, as the machine is called, is based on Intel's E8870 chipset. The server will be able to support 16 GB of main memory and four SCSI or ATA disk drives; it has 6.4 GB/sec of system bandwidth, has one PCI-X slot, and has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports on the system board. A 2U variant will have space for six drives.
  
  
• MySQL, the Swedish developer of the popular MySQL open-source relational database management system, announced last week that it has acquired Alzato, a unit of cell phone and telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson that specializes in database clustering technologies that are vital for keeping telephone services operational. While it was developed for telecom applications, Alzato's NDB Cluster middleware could be used outside of that industry, and that is what MySQL plans to do with it. MySQL needs some sort of clustering software to fight against Oracle's Real Application Clusters for Oracle9i and IBM's Integrated Cluster Environment for its DB2 8.1 database. NDB Cluster can support the clustering of up to 32 databases servers into a single fault-tolerant cluster. In 2004, MySQL will focus the NBD Cluster product at telecom applications and Web sites that need high availability. It seems reasonable that MySQL will eventually commercialize the Alzato product, so it can be used for more generic IT workloads, just as Oracle and IBM have done for their databases.
  
  
• If you're in the software business, one of the more successful areas to be in right now is business intelligence. That's the word coming from the Framingham, Massachusetts, IT analyst firm IDC, which last week reported that a good percentage of North American IT shops are planning to install business intelligence, if they don't already have it in place. The analyst firm reported that 39.9 percent of North American companies surveyed have already installed business intelligence software, and nearly 11 percent more plan to in the next year. Among bigger companies, almost two-thirds of those surveyed either have business intelligence software in place or have plans to install one.
  
  
• Open Text's pending acquisition of Windows, Unix, and OS/400 content management software provider Gauss has been given government clearance. In September, Open Text, based in Waterloo, Ontario, announced plans to purchase Gauss Interprise AG, a German corporation that retained North American headquarters in Irvine, California, following its merger with Magellan Software in 2000. German law requires that 75 percent of a company's shareholders approve an acquisition before the transaction is allowed to go through, which, Open Text says, it obtained last week. The $11 million acquisition is expected to be finalized early next month. Open Text also announced plans to acquire another German content management software company, IXOS Software, in a deal that's expected to be worth at least $206 million. The company plans to have North American headquarters in Waterloo and European headquarters in Munich, Germany. Open Text had revenues of $177 million last year and is facing a competitive landscape that includes EMC (which has offered to acquire Documentum for $1.7 billion) and IBM, which made a slew of content-management-related announcements last week.
  
  

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