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But Wait, There's More
The eServer i5 Model 550: Maybe So, Maybe Not, Probably
While it is clear that IBM is working on an eServer p5 Model 550 that makes a hard stop at four active Power5 processors cores, some people in the inner circles of the iSeries industry (but not IBMers) have suggested that, contrary to reports of an eServer i5 Model 550, no such machine is expected anytime soon. However, IBMers have been hinting that such a machine should be expected. And no one at IBM Rochester who has read our coverage of the i5 announcements has called to tell us we are wrong, which is the best reason to believe that the initial reports of the impending announcement for the i5 Model 550 four-way machine were correct. We still expect it sometime between the end of July and the end of the year, when we also expect to see the i5 Model 590, a 64-way behemoth. One of these two machines will be announced near the end of July. No one is clear on which one, as far as we know. We are not entirely sure that IBM knows, to be honest, with its Power5 chip production still ramping up.
IBM, SSA Global Ally to Attack the Midrange
Just a week after IBM and PeopleSoft teamed up to make a joint run at the midrange market with the RPG-based World software suite on the new eServer i5, Big Blue and SSA Global have renewed their allegiances and made a commitment to attack the midrange together. The two alliances pits two old rivals (JD Edwards, now part of PeopleSoft, and Systems Software Associates, part of a conglomerate that includes the SSA BPCS suite as well as the Baan ERP suite) against each other, with IBM selling bullets (or, more precisely, iSeries and eServer i5 servers) to both sides.
As has happened in other IBM alliances, SSA has agreed to standardize on IBM's middleware stack, including the WebSphere Application Server, the WebSphere Portal, and the DB2 database, in exchange for assistance from IBM as it tries to sell its software on iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries machines. IBM Global Services and SSA Global plan to offer joint implementation and consulting services. By standardizing on IBM middleware, SSA Global can help to meld together many of the disparate applications the company has acquired over the past two years.
IDC Expects Software Subscriptions to Grow Steadily
Software analysts at IDC have just released a forecast for the market for subscription-based software licensing, which many vendors believe is going to be their salvation from the horrors of constantly trying to upgrade their installed bases. According to the IDC report, the company expects software subscriptions to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.6 percent from 2003 to 2008, reaching $43 billion worldwide by 2008. Perpetual software licenses will shrink modestly at a rate of 0.3 percent annually over the same timeframe, according to the report.
But IDC may be underestimating how big the seismic shift will be away from perpetual licensing and toward subscription licensing. People are sick of managing their licenses and upgrading their software, and vendors are sick of selling their products this way. If vendors come up with the right mechanisms and pricing to properly do subscription-based software licensing, the shifts could be a lot larger than IDC expects. There are plenty of software upstarts that are going to try to make this happen, and they may fail, just as most companies that tried to sell software under the application service provider model in the late 1990s and early 2000s did. This time around, they may just get it right.
Big Hack Attacks Doubled At Financial Services Firms in 2004
If you think your IT job is tough, try working in the IT departments of the world's financial services companies. According to a survey performed by accountancy Deloitte & Touche, hack attacks against financial services companies more than doubled this year, compared with a study done this time last year. The company's "2004 Global Security Survey" indicates that 83 percent of the financial institutions that responded have had their IT systems compromised in the past 12 months, compared with 39 percent this time last year. Some 40 percent of those who were hit said that they sustained financial losses due to the attacks.
Ironically (unless you read Dilbert), of the 100 big financial firms polled, more than a quarter said they were not spending any more on IT security in 2004 than they did in 2003, and 10 percent of the companies actually cut their security budgets. Even more shocking was the finding that only 87 percent of respondents claim to have fully capable antivirus countermeasures, down from 96 percent in 2003. Not a winning strategy, clearly. But, hey, it's your money they are playing with, right?
VMware, IBM Extend Alliance
IBM and the VMware unit of EMC announced last week that Big Blue has extended its strategic alliance to resell and support the VMware server virtualization products for the next three years. IBM and VMware entered a partnership in 2002 as IBM figured out that it needed a way of providing partitioning on its xSeries and BladeCenter server lines. IBM offers its own implementation of logical partitioning on its Power-based iSeries and pSeries lines and has long since offered partitions for VM, MVS, Linux, and other operating systems on its mainframes.
The VMware unit, acquired by EMC earlier this year after quashing the idea of going public, says that the IBM deal demonstrates that VMware has managed to remain a neutral IT supplier even after being purchased by one of the fiercest rivals that the server makers, on which VMware depends, have in the market.
VMware products are generally only important to high-end iSeries customers who have sophisticated Windows servers running alongside their iSeries machines and who want to get something akin to the logical partitioning in the iSeries on their X86 servers. VMware is supported on Integrated xSeries Server co-processors as well as on outboard X86 machines that may or may not link back into the iSeries through Integrated xSeries Adapter cards.
Gartner Says Database Market Rebounded in 2003
The fiercely competitive database market has not gotten any easier to be in, but the market did, according to Gartner, manage to grow a smidgen in 2003. Gartner says that the overall relational database market grew by 5.1 percent in 2003, to $7.1 billion, which is a big improvement over the 6 percent decline database makers suffered through in 2002, when they only sold $6.7 billion in new licenses. (These figures do not include services and support revenues or sales of flat file database management systems that are still sold by IBM, Computer Associates, and a few other companies.)
Gartner pegged IBM as the number-one relational database supplier of new license sales, which includes a lot of mainframe shops that pay for software on a monthly basis; they effectively book a new sale every month, to Gartner's thinking. IBM had $2.5 billion in database sales, up 4.9 percent. Rival Oracle, which dominates the Unix database market and has a healthy share of the Windows and Linux markets, had new license sales of $2.3 billion, according to Gartner, up 2.4 percent. Microsoft booked $1.3 billion in relational database sales in 2003, up 11.1 percent, and giving it 47 percent of the Windows database market, which was up 3.8 percent, to $2.8 billion. Sales of databases on Unix platforms declined by 5.9 percent, to $2.34 billion; Oracle had 57.4 percent of this market. Linux database sales were up 158 percent, to $299 million, and Oracle nearly quadrupled its sales (thanks to Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters, no doubt) and got 69.1 percent of the Linux database market.
OS/400 PTF Guide Moves to Four Hundred Guru Newsletter
For many years now, our partner DLB Associates has been creating the OS/400 PTF Guide to help you suss out the patches to OS/400. The OS/400 PTF Guide has appeared in this last section of this newsletter, and we hope it has been useful to you. The guide will now appear in Shannon O'Donnell's "OS/400 Alert" column in Four Hundred Guru on Wednesdays.
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