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IBM Tweaks Red Hat Linux on Power Prices Up and Down

If you want to buy Red Hat Linux for your iSeries, pSeries, or OpenPower server, you can buy it from Red Hat, or you can buy it at a discount from IBM, which started directly distributing both Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux last summer. However, IBM's prices just changed, and for the most part, they have gone up, although in some cases, prices have dropped.

Red Hat doesn't charge per system (regardless of the number of partitions), but per Linux instance on a server within partitions, even if there is only one partition (meaning it is in effect an SMP server). Through IBM, you can get Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 Update 3 or Linux AS 4. IBM has also launched its own electronic technical support service in conjunction with Red Hat (and also with Novell), which lets customers can get the same one-contact with Global Services for support for Linux as they get for OS/400 and AIX. Here are the price changes for 5369-RDH, which is the product number for Red Hat products:

• 1 Year Subscription and Standard Support, 1-2 CPUs (feature 2419); was $995, now $799; down 19.7%
• 3 Year Subscription and Standard Support, 1-2 CPUs (feature 2420); was $2685, now $2157; down 19.7%
• 1 Year Subscription and No Support, 1-2 CPUs (feature 2423); was $295, now $395; up 33.9%
• 3 Year Subscription and No Support, 1-2 CPUs (feature 2424); was $795, now $1067; up 34.2%
• 1 Year Subscription and Standard Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2427); was $1295, now $1499; up 15.8%
• 3 Year Subscription and Standard Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2428); was $3495, now $4047; up 15.8%
• 1 Year Subscription and Premium Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2429); was $1995, now $2495; up 25%
• 3 Year Subscription and Premium Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2430); was $5385, now $6737; up 25%
• 1 Year Subscription and No Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2431); was $595, now $995; up 67%
• 3 Year Subscription and No Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2432); was $1605, now $2687; up 67%
• 1 Year Premium Subscription and No Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2433); was $795, now $1295; up 63%
• 3 Year Premium Subscription and No Support, 1-8 CPUs (feature 2434); was $2145, now $3497; up 63%

BEA Attempts to Quantify and Qualify IT's Acceptance of Service-Oriented Architectures

So, what do you think about service-oriented architectures? Not sure? Think it sounds like a good idea for building more flexible applications, but are a little unsure about exactly what people mean when they say SOA? Join the club, because according to a new survey of 1,000 C-level managers, IT managers, and programmers by middleware software maker BEA Systems, you are in good company.

BEA said that about the same number of C-level executives spent time on the survey as IT managers, which the company believes is indicative of the fact that C-level execs understand that SOA is an important evolution in application development that can make their companies more resilient by making their IT systems and applications more flexible. About 44 percent of those surveyed (across all titles) said that they were familiar with SOA, and on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 meant you have the basic concepts of SOA and 4 meant you were already an advanced adherent to this approach of developing software as a mesh of services, not as monolithic application, the average response was 1.76. Some 90 percent of those taking the survey understood that SOA was about improving the level of service that IT delivers to end users, customers, and partners and that done properly it could result in lower costs, the re-use of application components, and better integration of applications.

Interestingly, about 29 percent of those who did the survey identified themselves as SOA architects, which is a hybrid of a business analyst, an application developer, and a system analyst.

MindTree Acquires iSeries Outsourcer LINC Software

MindTree Consulting, an IT consulting company with dual headquarters in both Somerset, New Jersey, and Bangalore, India, announced last week that it has acquired rival Indian IT consultancy Linc Software, which is also located in Bangalore and has the distinction of being an expert on the iSeries platform.

According to reports, MindTree acquired Linc to expand its portfolio of covered server and ERP platforms and to gain another 220 employees to help it attain its goal of cresting above $231 million by 2007. (That odd number must be a round number in rupees.) Linc was founded in 1988, and is one of the few outsourcing companies in India that has expertise in the iSeries. The company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Australia, and MindTree says that this will help it expand its presence in these markets as well as get a foothold in the vast iSeries market, which has about 215,000 or so unique customers worldwide.

NetManage Improves in the First Quarter of 2005

Host connectivity software vendor NetManage has swung to a profit from a loss a year ago after a modest increase in sales of its products in the most recent quarter. For the quarter ended March 31, NetManage had sales of $12.1 million, up a smidgen from the $11.9 million it booked in the prior year's first quarter, with license fees up a bit to $5.3 million and services revenues off a bit to $6.8 million. A year ago, NetManage had a loss of $431,000, but this time it was in the black to the tune of $808,000.

Hoping to capitalize on the uncertainty in the market after competitors WRQ and Attachmate have been merged and taken private by a bunch of venture capitalists, NetManage has announced a competitive replacement program called MigrateNOW, which includes tools to migrate scripts, macros, and other features of Attachmate and WRQ end user connectivity software to NetManage Rumba and OnWeb tools. NetManage has 30 million users at 10,000 companies, and the combined Attachmate and WRQ, with about $200 million in annual sales, is about five times the size of NetManage.

DataMirror Partners to Push Sales

High availability and data transformation software maker DataMirror has signed three new partnerships to help it boost sales.

First, the company inked a deal with The Normandy Group, a Cincinnati, Ohio, consultancy that will act as a system integrator for installing DataMirror's iCluster high availability and Transformation Server data transformation software. Normandy Group will also peddle the company's compliance software, which is called LiveAudit.

DataMirror also extended an existing partnership with fellow Canadian Syntax.net, which is located in Toronto and is a systems integrator specializing in the midrange. Under their extended agreement, DataMirror is Syntax.net's preferred supplier of HA software, and the two will work together to push the products into the Canadian midrange sites.

Finally, DataMirror announced a new partnership with business intelligence software provider Business Objects, which will peddle Transformation Server alongside its own BusinessObjects XI data warehousing software.

Wyse Picks New CEO After VCs Buy $35 Million Stake

Thin client maker Wyse Technology has picked a new CEO at the same time as a venture capitalist has acquired a controlling stake in the company for $35 million.

The new CEO is John Kish, who used to run Oracle's desktop client business; Oracle, you remember, coined the term thin client about a decade ago when it wanted to poke Microsoft in the eye by suggesting that maybe we didn't need whole PCs now that the Internet had arrived. Kish got the job as CEO when Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a venture capital fund that was created in March 2004 and has over $250 million in money plunked into mid-sized technology companies (many of them orphaned during the dot-com boom or when the bubble burst), plunked down $35 million a few weeks ago. That you can buy a controlling stake in a company that has $175 million in sales for $35 million seems strange. Wyse was founded in 1981 and has been selling terminals and thin client since that time.

World Community Grid Reaches 100,000 Devices

The World Community Grid (WCG) grid computing initiative started by IBM last November has added 100,000 PCs, workstations, and servers. IBM says thus far more than 64,000 people have donated over 8,250 years of aggregated runtime to the grid, which is being made available to the Human Proteome Folding Project, a kicker to the Human Genome Project that is trying to understand the mechanisms by which proteins fold and unfold themselves in our cells as they do the things that keep us alive or, if they don't work properly, kill us with diseases. Marist College, a liberal arts school located in IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., stomping grounds, has donated the processing capacity of its 7,000 PCs and laptops to the WCG project. Marist is also where Linux on the mainframe was created, incidentally, and despite its self-proclaimed liberal arts bent, Marist offers bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science. IBM Pokie is where Big Blue has designed and manufactured mainframes since there were mainframes.