But Wait, There's More

IBM Wins Patent Contest for 12th Year in a Row

IBM is once again the king of the patent holders. The Patent and Trademark Office said last week that, for the 12th year in a row, IBM was issued the largest number of new patents by the U.S. government. In 2004, IBM was issued 3,248 patents, and now has a portfolio of over 40,000 patents. Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, which makes products under the Panasonic brand name, rose to the number-two position in 2004, with 1,934 patents issued. Canon was number three on the list, and Hewlett-Packard was number four on the list, with 1,775 patents issued. Memory maker Micron Technology was issued 1,760 patents, followed by Samsung with 1,604 and Intel with 1,601. Industrial conglomerate Hitachi, which has a respectable IT business, particularly in disk arrays, and which bought IBM's disk drive business last year, dropped from the number-three position on the list in 2003 to the number-eight position in 2004, with 1,514 patents. Toshiba had 1,310 patents, with Sony coming in at number ten on the list, with 1,305 patents. As an aside, the Patent Office said that the U.S. government itself was issued 829 patents last year from its vast arsenal of research organizations in academia and the military.

"American innovation and discoveries are the foundation of our technological strength worldwide," said Jon Dudas, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, in a statement accompanying the numbers. "Increasingly, patents have become an essential ingredient of our economic vitality, paving the way for investment in commerce and in research and development, and creating jobs for millions of Americans." While this is true, there certainly are a lot of patents from Japanese and Korean companies on the list as well. It would be interesting to see a complete list of patents by the geographic region from whence the patents come. That might be a better indicator of innovation by geography than not. There could be a lot more--or less--innovation in American and Europe than shows up in this top-ten list.

As we reported elsewhere in this issue, IBM has granted the open source community the right to use 500 of its patents, free of charge, in their software projects--the first time any company has done this. This could be the first step in establishing a patent trust for open source projects.

TECSYS Acquires Application Solutions

TECSYS, a Montreal, Quebec, maker of supply chain management software, has acquired Application Solutions, a maker of warehouse management system software for the OS/400 platform. TECSYS has its own WMS solutions and is acquiring Application Solutions, based in Markham, Ontario, to bolster its product line in this area.

Application Solutions has about 50 employees and had sales of about $10.6 million (Canadian) in its fiscal 2004 year, ending March 2004; the company has 40 customers running its warehouse management software, called Maestro, in over 300 sites. Maestro integrates with all the popular midrange ERP suites, including SSA Global's BPCS, MAPICS's eponymous suite, the World and OneWorld suites now owned by Oracle, SAP's R/3 and mySAP suites, and others. TECSYS says the acquisition was its way to break into the OS/400 business, and says that it will continue to develop products for the platform.

BZ Research Says JBoss Is Most Popular Java Server, Eclipse Most Popular Java Tool

The team of people behind the open-source JBoss Web application server are ebullient after a report from BZ Research that indicates a big surge in the use of JBoss over other Java application servers.

For the past several years, BZ Research, a sister company of Software Development Times magazine, has polled SDT readers about the application servers they use. In the November 2004 poll, 33.9 percent of the 759 respondents to the survey said they were using JBoss, compared with 26.9 percent in a November 2003 poll and 13.9 percent in November 2002. The JBoss server has just squeaked by IBM's WebSphere, which accounted for 32.9 percent of respondents (down from 40 percent in the 2004 poll). JBoss is also taking a bite out of BEA Systems, which saw its WebLogic application server in use by 35 percent of those polled in late 2003, but only 27.9 percent in 2004. Oracle's application server accounted for the bulk of the remaining middleware in use by those polled.

On the software development front, the open-source Eclipse development platform is gaining market share by leaps and bounds, jumping from 35 percent in the November 2003 poll to a stunning 55.3 percent in the November 2004 poll. Borland's JBuilder toolset was knocked from the number-one position by Eclipse and accounted for only about 23.4 percent of development platforms in use in late 2004. Sun Microsystems' open-source NetBeans alternative to Eclipse also had market share gains, rising from 13 percent to nearly 18 percent in the past year. IBM's WebSphere Studio saw its share drop by a few points to 21 percent share in the BZ Research poll.

IBM Rolls Out Low-Rate Financing to Boost Sales, Again

IBM's Global Financing unit is rolling out its "Low-Rate Financing" deal once again in the Americas region, and the interest rates the company is charging for financing its computers, software, and services are 0.2 percent lower than what it was charging last summer. While that may not sound like a lot of money, it adds up to over millions of dollars in equipment and several years of interest payments.

As the Federal Reserve Bank was raising interest rates last July, IBM increased its financing rates by 1 percent on the Low-Rate Financing deal. The on-again, off-again deal allows companies buying from $25,000 to $1 million in gear to get financing for low rates (at least by IBM's standards); customers buying pSeries products can get the low rates on deals as large as $2 million. IBM's best rate last summer was 4 percent for iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, and xSeries servers and their associated storage, up from 3 percent in May 2004. That rate is now 3.85 percent. This time last year, IBM was charging 3.25 percent, and even pSeries deals had a $1 million cap. If you read the fine print, you'll find these rates are only offered for qualified customers (meaning those with decent credit and solid financials), and they are only available on capital leases with a 24-to-36-month term with a $1 end-of-lease payout.

The interest rates IBM charges for PCs is 4.3 percent, and the company is charging 4.1 percent for any software sold under a one-time-charge licensing option and for various services from its Business Consulting Services unit. Financing for IBM's Integrated Technology Services products (this is systems integration, as opposed to business process engineering work) has been given a financing rate of 4.5 percent.

Oracle Closes PeopleSoft Deal, Lays Off 5,000 Employees

Having completed its acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle has laid off 5,000 employees from the merged company, which has approximately 55,000 employees. The layoffs were announced internally last Friday and are expected to be made public this week as Oracle formally announces its integration plans for the former PeopleSoft. The scuttlebutt on the street was that Oracle could let go as many as 6,000 employees from the PeopleSoft ranks, which were at over 12,000 employees before the hostile takeover.

This is a stunning number of cuts, and while it is hard to believe that this number is correct, it is. Having paid $10.3 billion for PeopleSoft, Oracle needs to get that money back, and plans to do so by cutting costs and getting the maintenance and license revenue streams from the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards ERP suites. The deeper Oracle cuts, the more quickly it gets a return on its investment--provided it does not cut so deeply that it leaves customers disgruntled.

Even before it closed the acquisition last week, Oracle was moving executives in anticipation of the takeover. Just before the Christmas holidays, Dave Duffield, PeopleSoft's founder, resigned as chairman and CEO. Oracle fired four of PeopleSoft's executives, including co-presidents Phillip Wilmington and Kevin Parker, general counsel James Shaughnessy, and chief marketing officer Nanci Caldwell, on December 28, and put its own executives in charge of those posts, which they also hold at Oracle. Ronald Wohl, who heads development of the Oracle Applications unit, and Michael Rocha, who heads Oracle's support operations, have also been asked to step down.

COMMON's Executive Director to Leave After Spring Show in Chicago

COMMON's top paid employee, executive director Lynn Schwartz, will be leaving the organization at the end of March, the embattled iSeries user group announced recently. Schwartz, who has guided COMMON through a recession and the post Sept. 11 travel freeze, financial difficulties and budget overruns, and the in-sourcing and eventual outsourcing of organizational duties during her four-year stint, cited "family and personal pursuits" as her reason for leaving. "The past four years have been very rewarding," Schwartz said in a statement. "With COMMON now standing on a strong, stable foundation, it is time for me to refocus my attention back on family and personal pursuits." Pressed on the matter, Schwartz says she will take some time off after stepping down, then do something exciting, possibly studying abroad, before beginning her search for a new job, outside of the IBM user community. "I have loved what I have done all these years, but I just feel ready for a big lifestyle change," she says.

The state of affairs at COMMON has always been a subject of concern to some in the iSeries community. Last May, COMMON outsourced a portion of its operations to SmithBucklin, a Chicago-based company that specializes in the management of user groups, and which also has a hand in running SHARE, a user group similar to COMMON but for IBM mainframe and Unix and Linux professionals. Then, in October, a COMMON insider circulated an e-mail that brought to light the group's most recent financial difficulties, budget overruns, and its decision to dip into reserves to make ends meet. The lowest conference turnout in years at the fall 2004 conference in Toronto further contributed to the perception that COMMON is struggling and needed a new direction.

Beverly Russell, who was elected chairman of COMMON's board last year, thanked Schwartz for her decision to stay until after the spring 2005 conference, which will be held in COMMON's hometown of Chicago from March 13 through 17. "She made it clear that she would remain with the organization through our upcoming spring conference to ensure that there would be no disruption in the planning process for this landmark event that includes USERblue," Russell said in a statement. USERblue is a user group for Unix professionals that was created by SHARE. Schwartz, who was involved with the SHARE organization for 11 years, was probably instrumental in COMMON's collaboration with SHARE to get the USERblue and COMMON conferences held simultaneously in Chicago during the third week of March.

It appears that COMMON will seek a new executive director to replace Schwartz when she leaves on April 1. But since that's still months away, the organization will be taking a measured approach in any search and hiring actions. In an e-mail, Russell said that while the organization has "not yet had time to determine the process for replacing her," it will be doing a "full assessment of our requirements of a new executive director, review[ing] the organization and identify[ing] the skills that this individual must possess to take the organization forward into the future."

Keeping Lotusphere on the Ground for the Attendees

The annual migration of Lotus geeks is set to begin. Lotus trainers and trainees will convene in their winter home of Orlando, Florida. The conference dates are January 23 through 27. Attendance is expected to top 5,000, the level set in the 2004 event, and more than 160 vendors are expected to be telling their product and services stories in the expo area.

Based on feedback from Lotusphere 2004, which indicated too much emphasis was placed on roadmaps for the future, this event will bring more balance based on skills that can be put to use immediately, as opposed to talk about the promises of things to come. That means a stronger program involving Lotus Notes/Domino and an easing of the Workplace drum beating.

As an indication that Lotusphere is going with its traditional educational strengths, it has taken one of the most popular sessions, "Ask the Developer," and developed an "Innovators Panel," which will emphasize organizational productivity. If the panel doesn't wander off into the future too far with an inclination toward marketing its future brands, this could be a solid addition. This needs to be an insight into best practices as told by the people who led the projects, and if they give the attendees what they asked for, it will be based on current applications of Notes.

All told, there will be plenty of sessions that delve into the Notes and Domino family of products, as well as the Workplace products, Workplace Client Technology, WebSphere Portal, and Rational products. Lotusphere 2005 has been designed with three streams of content. One is set up for those looking for insights, tips, and techniques pertaining to Notes and Domino 6 and 6.5--the kind of information they can put to immediate use. A second educational track will cover WebSphere portal and portal products, and a third educational track will cover Workplace, the technology IBM has pegged the future of Lotus to.