But Wait, There's More

COMMON Offers Pre-Conference Workshops

If you tend to travel to the COMMON midrange conference a little early, as many people do, you might want to check out a few new technical workshops that COMMON is sponsoring on the weekend before things gets rolling.

On the Saturday before the show, IBM is hosting two COMMON workshops on enterprise application modernization at its research center labs in nearby Markham, Ontario. One workshop will show how to modernize RPG applications from RPG/400 or basic RPG IV to full use of RPG IV and ILE features; this workshop costs $295. A second workshop will discuss the tools that IBM Toronto has created to extend RPG applications to the Web, notably WebFacing and other tools in WebSphere Development Studio. This one costs $395. On Sunday, when COMMON is just starting to come to life, three more workshops will be held in the Metro Convention Center, each of which costs $295. Bob Cozzi will host a workshop called "Moving to the Web with RPG," Jim Mason will present a Java Web programming workshop, and representatives from ASTECH Solutions will present a workshop on the WebSphere Portal.

COMMON requires that only registered conference attendees participate in these workshops, and attendees must sign up in advance. Space is limited, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. You can found out more on COMMON's Web site.

NetManage Boosts Profits As Sales Shrink a Bit

While there are pockets of optimism over the economy, times are still tough, and companies selling hardware and software are doing everything they can just to keep momentum going. The midrange is not immune to such pressures, either. Host access software maker NetManage, for instance, reported last week that its sales in the second quarter were $11 million, down 8 percent from the $11.9 million in sales the company booked in the same period last year. But NetManage did post net income of $257,000 for the quarter (including a gain of $213,000 on a foreign currency transaction), which is a lot better than the $1.7 million loss it posted this time last year. Last year's second quarter included a $909,000 restructuring charge and a foreign currency transaction gain of $854,000.

For the first six months of 2004, sales at NetManage were $22.9 million, down 12 percent, with a loss of $174,000. This time last year, the company had posted a $2.9 million loss for the first six months of 2003, including a $1.5 million restructuring charge. NetManage has $22 million in the bank as of the end of June (up $2.2 million since December 2003), so the company has a pretty hefty and growing cash cushion as it waits for the economy to improve.

What About Java Enterprise System on OS/400?

Sun Microsystems has been talking up its middleware software stack, which is an amalgam of homegrown Sun and acquired Netscape software, over the past six months, but the Java Enterprise System is only available on Sun's own Solaris Unix platform and the open source Linux platform. Last week, Sun announced that, by the beginning of next year, it will offer Java Enterprise System, which consists of Web servers, identity managers, J2EE application servers, and other middleware, on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix variant and Microsoft's Windows platform.

Although Sun has not talked about Java Enterprise System support for IBM's AIX and OS/400 platforms, it is a logical next move. For all of the talk about WebSphere within IBM, only a relative minority of OS/400 shops are running WebSphere in production. In the late 1990s, the Netscape Web servers were briefly supported on OS/400 through an agreement that Netscape had with a third party, called I/NET. But for the $100 per employee per year that Sun is charging to license the entire Java Enterprise System stack, this might be just the kind of software and price that will get OS/400 shops excited.

IBM Buys Cyanea for Systems Management Wares

IBM last week acquired a little-known private software company called Cyanea to bolster its Tivoli systems management software suite.

Cyanea, which is based in Oakland, California, and has only five employees, is a three-year-old company that has already partnered with IBM. In fact, IBM resells the Cyanea/One application performance management software as an adjunct to its WebSphere middleware, which Big Blue calls the WebSphere Studio Application Monitor, which is available on zSeries mainframes. Cyanea/One manages and tunes the performance of Java applications on mainframe and other platforms, as well as tuning applications written in the CICS transaction monitor and hitting IMS flat-file databases. The software also has predictive capabilities that allow system administrators to deal with problems before bottlenecks cause application performance to degrade.

IBM plans to integrate Cyanea into its Tivoli division, and it will hook deeply into the WebSphere middleware stack and eventually be woven into the Rational toolsets from IBM so that application coders can do deep performance analysis of applications on host-based systems like mainframes and iSeries boxes as well as on Windows, Linux, and Unix systems.

SCO Loses Ground in AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler Suits

The SCO Group has not gotten much traction in its first lawsuits against Linux and AIX users. The suits involve AutoZone, a Linux user, and DaimlerChrysler, an IBM AIX shop. SCO contends that AutoZone, a former SCO Unix customer, violated its licensing agreements with SCO as it moved to Linux. In its filing of a motion to stay the trial, pending the outcome of SCO vs. IBM and SCO vs. Red Hat, raging since March 2003, AutoZone told Judge Robert Jones, U.S. District Judge for the District of Nevada, that SCO had told AutoZone, a user of OpenServer, that it would eventually discontinue support for OpenServer and that that was the reason it made the jump to Red Hat Linux. While Judge Jones granted the stay, in lieu of the completion of the SCO vs. IBM suit, he denied a motion to move the case to the Tennessee court that is on AutoZone's home turf. The Nevada courts did give SCO the go-ahead to begin discovery in the AutoZone case, however, so the stay is not freeze-drying the lawsuit so it can be reconstituted later.

SCO is suing car-maker DaimlerChrysler in the Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan for violating the terms of its AIX license, one of which is to certify that it has properly licensed Unix licenses on its servers. When DaimlerChrysler ignored SCO's request to certify its Unix licenses, SCO sued the company for breach of contract to compel DaimlerChrysler to provide that certification. As it turns out, the car maker has not used AIX (at least not on the machines that SCO claims it did), and its Unix System V licenses, which came directly from AT&T, the creator of Unix, have not been in use for seven years. Oops! So Circuit Court Judge Ray Lee Chabot threw out the case and has only allowed SCO to argue for the damages that the car maker caused as it dragged its feet into providing the information SCO requested.

The AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler cases were meant to rattle Unix and Linux customers into certifying their licenses and acquiring Unix intellectual property licenses from the SCOsource unit of SCO. After an initial round of licenses of IP by some major players, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and a relatively minor service provider, the Unix IP licensing deals have pretty much dried up for SCO.

Intentia Cuts Jobs As Revenues Decline, Gets Cash Infusion

Swedish application software provider Intential International, a dominant midrange application provider in Europe, and one of the earliest companies to embrace Java as a programming language for core ERP software, has announced that it is cutting 16 percent of its staff of 2,709 in an effort to return to sustainable profitability. The move follows the appointment in May of new CEO Bertrand Sciard.

Sciard has been sharpening the focus of Intentia's development and sales activities, and he has been trying to expand sales of the Intentia suite of ERP software, which runs on OS/400, Windows, and Unix. The job cuts are the result of Sciard's desire to reduce Intentia's expenses by about 290 million krona ($39 million) a year, which is about a 10 percent reduction in overhead. The company's board of directors approved the restructuring plan, which, Sciard says, will cause Intentia to book a charge of approximately 250 million krona ($33 million) in the third quarter. Sciard also said that the bulk of the headcount reductions will occur in the third quarter, with about half of the employees coming from the company's services organization. The company will also consolidate a number of offices and is investigating how it might increase research and development and customer support capacity by using offshore operations. Intentia says that it will maintain its R&D budget of between 12 and 15 percent of its annual revenue.

Like other ERP vendors, Intentia has been struggling to boost license sales, and in its latest quarter the company did increase license revenues by 26 percent, to 260 million krona (about $34.7 million). But services revenues dropped by 11 percent, to 501 million krona ($66.7 million). Aggregate sales for the company were 767 million krona ($102 million), down 1 percent. That little drop in overall revenue pushed Intentia into a loss of 7.7 million krona (a bit more than $1 million) for the quarter. In effect, by lowering its cost base by 10 percent, Intentia is trying to get back to a revenue profit range of 9 percent.

A $50 million cash infusion from U.S. venture capitalist Tennenbaum Capital Partners, also announced last week, is giving Sciard some breathing room as he tries to make Intentia profitable and put it on the path to growth in this tough IT market. Intentia is issuing about $22.9 million in new stock for Tennenbaum as part of the deal, which will give it a 12.9 percent stake in Intentia. The remaining $27.1 million is coming through a five-year loan with 9 percent interest, due in one fell swoop.

IBM Offers BladeCenter Promotion

If you are thinking of buying one of IBM's BladeCenter blade servers, you might be interested in a special promotion the company is running. If you buy a BladeCenter chassis, which holds 14 of IBM's HS20 two-way Xeon DP blade servers, before September 20 through IBM's online store, you can get that chassis at half price. The chassis normally costs $2,789 when ordered over IBM's U.S. Web store.