But Wait, There's More

IBM Says WebFacing Is Catching On

A little more than four years ago, as many OS/400 shops were trying to move their RPG applications to the Web, IBM jumped into the market for Webifying legacy applications with the WebFacing features of its WebSphere Development Studio tools. With WebFacing, you can take legacy green screens and move them to the Web in a way that is more malleable than earlier screen-scraping tools first delivered by Big Blue about a decade ago when the Web first took off in commercial environments. WebFacing is important to IBM because it drives WDS installations, and it is important to customers in that the tool does not require the allocation of so-called 5250 interactive or "enterprise enablement" capacity on an AS/400 or iSeries server. Simply put, to drive the adoption of WebFacing among ISVs, their customers, and companies running home-grown applications, IBM took the green-screen governors off for its own WebFacing tools.

So how has WebFacing done out there in the market? According to David Slater, application development product line manager for the iSeries, IBM estimates that it has between 20,000 and 25,000 OS/400 shops using the tool. "WebFacing has the lion's share of the market, which is not too bad for a product that was just introduced in 2001," brags Slater.

To help drive the adoption of WebFacing and its companion Host Access Transformation Server (HATS), which takes both 5250 and 3270 applications to the Web, IBM has partnered with eLearning Labs to push courseware and training on both WebFacing and HATS. According to Slater, eLearning Labs has also announced a special deal that will provide the education on how to use these two tools and mentoring services for $15,000 to help OS/400 shops Webify their own applications. eLearning Labs is not doing the coding for customers, but is apparently guaranteeing that customers who go through their training program can get their apps Webified in under two weeks with two developers. Ironically, because this skill is so valuable once developers have it, you might want to make sure they are happy with their workplace before they get the training. Slater says that at one company, they trained their one developer, he did the work, and then he struck out on his own.

Gartner Predicts Most IT Shops in the U.S. Will Hire in the Next Year

The IT market may not be roaring, but it certainly has picked up a bit compared to a few years ago thanks in large part to the stabilization of the economies in North America, Europe, and Asia. According to a new survey of 160 of the 3,000 CIOs who participate in Gartner's Executive Programs, the CIOs expect that they plan to expand their IT workforces over the next 12 months--albeit somewhat modestly. The 160 companies involved in the survey spanned all industry sectors and had an IT employee base of 48,586, which means they averaged over 300 IT employees per shop. These are obviously larger organizations.

Gartner found in its survey, which began in March, that the average salary increase for 2005 will be 3.5 percent, which is three-tenths of a percent higher than the rate of salary increase in 2004. Gartner noted that companies are boosting the variable portion of their compensation, allocating more money to IT employees if certain business and IT targets are met. By sector, 63 percent of companies in the financial services sector surveyed planned to increase their IT headcount in the next year, and among financial services firms, 22.2 percent of them said that they would boost their IT employee base by more than 10 percent. This is the most active sector for hiring, followed by public and non-profit organizations, of which 62 percent of companies plan to have headcount increases among salaried employees. In combining both full-time and contractual workers, some 66 percent of those surveyed by Gartner said they plan to add people in the coming year.

Of course, with a large number of IT shops looking to add talent, there could be some scarcity of resource out there in IT land. "Although the improved job market presents more promising opportunities to IT job seekers, it may also force IT and human resources leaders to respond to increasing IT staff turnover in their companies," warned Lily Mok, senior consultant with Gartner's Executive Program. "Total IT voluntary turnover was higher in the 2005 survey than last year. This may imply that as the IT employment market improves further, IT professionals will consider leaving their current jobs for better opportunities." Gartner said that the positions that were likely to have shortages of qualified applications include project manager, Web application developer, security analyst, database administrator, and network engineer. Companies polled say that skills for various ERP suites--PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle suites were frequently mentioned by name, which stands to reason since Oracle and SAP rule large IT organizations--were in short supply, as were Java, .NET, and XML programming skills.

Vendors Hold Their Positions in Middleware, Says IDC

The battle for control of the commercial middleware software market, which the analysts at IDC call the application deployment software market, has resulted in détente among the dominant players in 2004. This market is comprised of application, Web, and integration servers as well as message- and transaction-oriented middleware and various gateway and connector software for hooking ERP and other software together, and even though the market grew by 6.4 percent in 2004 to nearly reach $7 billion in sales worldwide, IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle had exactly the same market shares in 2004 as they had in 2003: 37 percent, 12 percent, and 7 percent, respectively.

IDC said that Big Blue had the lead in middleware software in 2004 for its own mainframe and OS/400 platforms as well as on Microsoft's Windows platform, while BEA had market share leadership on Unix and Linux platforms in 2004. While IDC is projecting a compound annual growth rate of 4.7 percent between 2005 and 2009 for this market, the company's analysts say that it is not necessarily the case that this application deployment middleware remains a separate feature of operating system platforms and ERP suites, and that the tight integration of middleware components within the operating systems and/or ERP suites could affect what sells and what does not.

Big Blue Acquires DWL as Perna Retires from Database Unit

IBM announced last week that it had acquired DWL, a relatively unknown and privately held provider of data hub and integration software specifically for integrating customer data into a single view even though the data resides in many different databases underneath many different applications. The DWL announcement came as IBM also said that Janet Perna, general manager of the Information Management division within its Software Group would retire on August 15 after 31 years at the company.

The DWL acquisition is interesting because it further fleshes out IBM's data management products--which include its DB2 databases and myriad add-ons for them, and because it will probably be the last acquisition that Perna does on behalf of Big Blue. Perna was spearheaded the acquisition of competitor Informix Software's database business and then, several years later, the acquisition of Ascential Software, the other half of Informix that had expertise in data transformation and integration. Perna also pushed IBM to acquire other companies, including Alphablox, Systems Research Development, Venetica, and was also one of the key factors in IBM's expansion into the market for databases for Windows and Unix platforms that ultimately allowed Big Blue to take on Oracle for the dominant position in that market.

Ambuj Goyal, who is general manager of workplace, portal and collaboration software at the company's Lotus unit, will take over the reins for Perna when she leaves. Goyal used to be an IBM researcher, and he had a hand in the coding of the DB2 Universal database edition of IBM's database for Windows, Unix, and now Linux platforms. Goyal's replacement at Lotus will be Mike Rhodin, who was previously vice president of development for the new Workplace portal and collaboration products. He has also been in charge of the development of Notes/Domino and other Lotus-related products; between 1999 and 2003, Rhodin was also in charge of IBM's various pervasive computing software efforts.

Trusted Computing Group Serves Up Secure Server Specification

The Trusted Computing Group standards body, which is made up of major platform and component suppliers IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD, have announced the first specification for what will be called a trusted server.

This specification, which is available to all server makers free of charge, aims to make all server platforms more secure, and the consortium of sponsor vendors as well as dozens of contributors (including the likes of Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC, and Hitachi) are working toward making PC, server, and other platforms more secure by specifying and then certifying what features are necessary for such a system to be deemed to be trustworthy.

The trusted server specification is following fast on the heels of the trusted client spec, which has been adopted by PC suppliers and which accounts for 15 million PC shipments to date. The group is also working on specs for networks, storage, mobile systems, and other peripherals and has the goal of creating specifications that will outline what components and features are necessary to build a trustworthy IT infrastructure. The server specification spans X86/X64, Itanium, Sparc, and MIPS platforms, with Power platforms being notably but surely temporarily absent. The heart of the proposed Trusted Server platform is something called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM, and I like that acronym more than I like transactions per minute), which is a microchip you plug into a server that securely stores digital certificates and passwords. By having the TPM unit, makers and users of software that is used to configure, change, and access servers can rest assured of who has the right to access what assets in the server farm. The first servers that adhere to the Trusted Server spec are expected to be delivered before the end of the year.

IDC Evaluates the ROI of TeamQuest Performance Tools

TeamQuest, the Clear Lake, Iowa, maker of performance management and capacity planning software for OS/400, Unix, Linux, Windows, and mainframe servers, is touting the results of an economic study on its tools performed by IDC. The report, entitled "Optimizing Datacenter Performance and Building ROI: The TeamQuest Approach," is available for free from TeamQuest's Web site, and it shows how customers' improved application performance often made it possible to avoid upgrading to new hardware by better managing the performance of their existing hardware and software.

TeamQuest sells a four-piece tools suite called Performance Software. Included in the suite are the TeamQuest Model, TeamQuest View, TeamQuest On the Web, and TeamQuest Alert products, which can be used separately or deployed in unison. A fifth product, TeamQuest Manager, functions as a data collection agent and ships with the View and Web products. TeamQuest Model does hardware capacity planning, performance prediction, and what-if analysis. TeamQuest View takes the performance data gathered from the above tool and presents this information in a visual format. TeamQuest On the Web is for remote monitoring of servers, including OS/400, z/OS, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, and Windows boxes. TeamQuest Alert is a console for monitoring hundreds of servers; it does not run on OS/400 boxes.

IDC said that TeamQuest was noteworthy in terms of its ROI benefits in that at one customer site where the company had spent $500,000 on new software, the use of its performance tools allowed the company to install that software on existing machines, thereby avoiding a $5 million hardware upgrade. Another customers that had spent $2 million on an application was able to avoid scrapping it because TeamQuest tools allowed it get squeeze the performance out of it that was necessary to put it into production.

Novell Releases Service Pack 2 for SLES 9

Commercial Linux distributor Novell has started shipping Service Pack 2 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. SP2 supercedes SP1, which was announced in January 2005, and it includes all cumulative bug fixes and security patches that have been announced since SLES 9 was announced in August 2004. SLES 9 SP2 has been updated for all platforms--X86, X64, Itanium, Power, and mainframe.

SLES 9 SP2 includes the open source Oracle Cluster File System 2, which is available on X86 and X64 platforms as well as on Itanium boxes, to support Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters. The SP2 update also includes support for dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel; the dual-core Power chips have been supported by SUSE for years (dating back to SLES 8). Novell has added NUMA clustering support to SLES 9 SP2, which means that Linux can scale across more than four processors on Power-based machines. The SP2 update formally supports Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based Integrity Superdome machines. SP2 update also allows database performance to be boosted on 64-bit servers by allowing shared memory segments that are larger than 2 GB (a limitation of 32-bit machines that is often carried forward on 64-bit machines). SP2 is available to all customers who have support contracts with Novell. You can get the nitty gritty detail on SP2 on Novell's Web site.