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Sirius Bolsters eServer Presence with DSG Acquisition

Sirius Computer Systems last week significantly expanded its position in the IBM server market last week as the San Antonio, Texas company announced that it has acquired Denver Solutions Group. DSG, which is based in Denver, Colorado, is IBM's second-largest zSeries mainframe solution provider and also does a sizable business peddling IBM's storage and printing products. DSG is a privately held company that was founded in 1991; it booked $190 million in sales in 2003 and has 150 employees. Sirius, which is also a privately held firm, did not say how much it paid for DSG, but did say that it was IBM's largest iSeries solution provider in the world, the biggest pSeries provider in the Americas and is a leading peddler of xSeries products. Sirius has 350 employees and had over $300 million in sales in 2003. The combination of Sirius and DSG makes Sirius comparable in power, at least as far as IBM's eServer product lines are concerned, to its master resellers: Avnet, Arrow, and Agylisys. Sirius says that the combined companies will have more than $550 million in sales in 2004.

Evant Expands into Britain, Bags $15 Million in Venture Funding

Supply chain software maker and iSeries enthusiast Evant announced last week that it has opened an office in London to expand into the European market and has received $15 million on Series C venture capital funding.

Evant, which was founded in 1999 and acquired by Nonstop Solutions in 2002 (the combined companies took the Evant name), provides a line of Java demand planning and merchandise planning software that runs on any J2EE-compliant platform. But the company specifically targets the iSeries as well as other midrange and high-end platforms. Staples, O'Reilly Automotive, Lillian Vernon, and a slew of other big retailers have opted for Evant's solutions, and the company reckons that the success it has had in its indigenous U.S. market can be repeated in Europe, where the opportunity in retailing is perhaps even larger. This would be true because the European market is inherently larger and more fractured by cultural and language barriers. Each country presents a new and unique opportunity. The San Francisco company plans to use the $15 million in venture funding, which came from GRP Partners and 3i, to fuel its growth in Europe. GRP Partners was an initial investor in a lot of retailers that have become name brands, such as Costco, Starbucks, Petsmart, and Office Depot. Nonstop itself was backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Integral Capital, Lehman Brothers, Banc of America Securities, Crosslink Capital, Altos Ventures, and REI. Evant itself had $12 million in second round financing in September 2000.

IDC Says Oracle, Not IBM, Rules the Relational Database World

The great thing about having two large researchers in the IT market is that you can very rarely get them to agree on anything. Last week, we reported on the market share figures from Gartner, which showed that IBM squeaked by rival Oracle to capture the biggest piece of the relational database market in 2003. This week, we can tell you that IDC has declared Oracle the winner in 2003, and by more than a nose.

IDC says that Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft control three-quarters of the relational and object relational database markets, which accounted for $13.6 billion in 2003, a slight upturn. IDC reckons that Oracle had 39.8 percent of the market, followed by IBM with 31.3 percent, and Microsoft with 12.1 percent. The company's analysts reckon that the relational database market will grow to reach a $20 billion level by 2008. It is hard to figure how that growth will come about with the proliferation of open source and commercial derivatives of databases for all kinds of platforms.

Open Source Community Weaves Together Geronimo Java App Server Under Apache Project

IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' WebLogic J2EE-compliant Java application servers were just served notice from the open source development community last week as the Apache Software Foundation announced the Geronimo Java application server. Apache Geronimo, which was started in August 2003, is now an official Apache project and the foundation of open source developers hopes to have Geronimo certified as an official J2EE application server by the end of the third quarter of this year.

Geronimo is a lot of different programs woven together to make a single server, including Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ from Codehaus, JOTM and ASM from ObjectWeb, CGLIB and MX4J from SourceForge and Jetty from Mortbay. IBM has supported the Tomcat server on the iSeries, but has been mum about Geronimo, mainly because it is going right after WebSphere and the enhanced support of Linux on the iSeries and i5 servers as well as the relatively low cost of Power4 and Power5 processors activated for running Linux, customers who might have been thinking about WebSphere on OS/400 may instead opt for WebSphere on Linux or Geronimo on Linux inside their iSeries and i5 servers. Customers will get to choose based on the merits of the two platforms--which is what a competitive market is all about. You can find out more about Geronimo at http://geronimo.apache.org.

Lakeview Rebrands Core Products to Fit New Naming Scheme

If you are thinking of buying high availability or data replication software from Lakeview Technology, you'll have to get to know some familiar products by their new names. Effective immediately, the MIMIX V4R4 high availability clustering software from Lakeview is now called MIMIX ha1, which is consistent with a trimmed-down version of the HA software that the company announced last year called MIMIX ha Lite, and a disaster recovery solution called MIMIX dr1, which is a sophisticated real-time data archiving solution that falls between tape archives and full HA in terms of functionality. The company's multiplatform data replication software, which was called OmniReplicator, is now called MIMIX replicate1. The renaming of the products also removes the VXRY naming scheme that IBM has used for OS/400 software for years and which Lakeview has been mimicking.

In addition to rebranding the products, Lakeview is also consolidating the OmniReplicator division fully into itself. It had been operating as a separate subsidiary after it was acquired many years ago.

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 the "OS/400 Alert" column in Four Hundred Guru on Wednesdays.