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COMMON User Group Meets in Orlando This Week

The fall COMMON iSeries user group and expo is underway this week, and as usual, The IT Jungle team will be there to talk to IBM representatives from the iSeries Division, chase down the stories in the iSeries market, and get all of the scuttlebutt from end users and partners in the iSeries community. IBM is not expected to make any major iSeries announcements, by the way, but is expected to emphasize some competitive wins against Windows platforms with the new i5s.

Oracle to Buy Siebel for $5.85 Billion

Oracle launched itself into the number one spot for CRM software in the world when it agreed last week to buy Siebel Systems for $10.66 per share, or $5.85 billion. While Siebel has struggled over the past few years, the Bay Area firm still commanded respect in the CRM sector, an area of the enterprise application market that the company and its founder, Thomas Siebel, largely defined. Oracle, which has its own line of CRM software (as well as two other lines of CRM software acquired from PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards), gains Siebel's 4,000 customers and 3.4 million end users--a sizable installed base by any measure.

The acquisition promises to be relatively quick and painless, especially compared to Oracle's 18-month hostile takeover bid of PeopleSoft, which eventually succeeded late last year. The Siebel board of directors has approved the acquisition, and Thomas Siebel, the chairman, has promised to vote his shares in support of the transaction. The acquisition does not require a vote by Oracle shareholders, and barring any unforeseen actions by government regulators, the acquisition should close in early 2006.

TomorrowNow Survey Says 80 Percent of JDE Shops Consider Third-Party Support

If Oracle was thinking that the vast installed base of JDE customers was going to just accept being told what to do by PeopleSoft and then Oracle took over the OneWorld and World software suites, then Larry Ellison and his team seem to be in for a big--and potentially costly--surprise.

According to a survey of JDE customers performed by Knowledge Infusion on behalf of TomorrowNow, a formerly independent third-party JDE support provider that has been eaten by SAP in January just as Oracle was dotting the Is and crossing the Ts in its PeopleSoft hostile takeover.

The survey indicates that 80 percent of the JDE customers who were contacted said they were paying too much for maintenance and support (which is under terms set by JDE, then PeopleSoft, and now Oracle) and that they were considering third-party maintenance suppliers like TomorrowNow. That customers are angry about software support and maintenance prices is not a new thing, but that such a high percentage are considering alternatives does raise some eyebrows. Some 87 percent of those companies surveyed said that their JDE suites were mature and stable, and that same percentage said they were satisfied with their applications and concerned about the future of their JDE suites and what upgrade path Oracle might try to put them on. TomorrowNow said that 48 percent of those contacted for the JDE survey said their biggest fear was that they would have to migrate to an Oracle database. About half of those surveyed said they wanted lower costs for the service and support of JDE suites and about a third said they wanted better response on the service they paid for. Sounds like someone has cut costs a little too far to try to pay for an acquisition.

IBM Pumps Up Business Partner iSeries Rebates Down Under

If you are an IBM business partner selling iSeries boxes in Australia and New Zealand, Big Blue has just sweetened the pot for you if you make your quotas for the third quarter of 2005. And if you are a customer looking to buy an iSeries box in those regions, you now know that business partners have a little more wiggle room than they might be letting on.

IBM has a 1 percent sales rebate plan in place for partner in the region who make 100 percent of quota, and a 2 percent rebate for those who do 120 percent of quota. With this special promotion, that ran from July 1 to September 23 (sorry I didn't tell you earlier, but I didn't know), IBM is taking another 2 percent on top of this. IBM is also giving customers who build a pipeline of Siebel customer relationship management software some extra points in the third quarter, too. To get a 1 percent rebate, partners have to have a Siebel pipeline in place that is 150 percent of the size of your third quarter sales target. In other words, if the partner has a Siebel-related quota of $1 million in the third quarter, they have to have a $1.5 million Siebel-related pipeline. Because Siebel's CRM is such a dense application, these are generally very big deals at least relative to other iSeries accounts. These few percentage points add up to real money.

I do not know if similar rebates are in place for business partners in other regions.

IT Managers Fear Platform Abandonment By IT Vendors

If you are sometimes a bit paranoid about the commitment that the vendor of your primary server platform has to that platform, you are apparently not alone. Ametek Computer Services hosted a series of Webinars on computer services in August and polled attendees about general IT trends. Some 200 people responded to the poll, and one of their biggest concerns was that they were worried that IT product manufacturers would abandon perfectly viable computing platforms. Specifically, more than half of those polled said that their vendor's lack of commitment to service was their main concern.

IBM, of course, has said time and again that it will keep the OS/400 platform alive for a long, long time, and it has positioned the iSeries and the pSeries to share the same iron to prolong the economic as well as the technical life of the OS/400 platform. (I would say that the OS/400 platform's vast profits have been subsidizing IBM's Unix ambitions for a decade, and that those profits would have been better spent improving the standing of OS/400 in the IT community, but that is another story.) Ametek, which has been providing third-party service for Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000 platform for 25 years, reminded everyone that HP ported the proprietary MPE platform (which had an integrated database) to the PA-RISC Unix platform in the mid-1990s, but when HP jumped from PA-RISC to Itanium, MPE didn't make the cut.

External Disk Market Continues to Grow, According to IDC

Moore's Law has not slowed down the server disk market, not even a little, according to research by IDC. In the second quarter of this year, IDC believes that companies sold $3.8 billion in external disk arrays, up 8.6 percent even after aggressive increases in drive and array capacity and vicious price cutting. Total disk revenue (including internal arrays shipped with servers) grew by 9.9 percent to $5.6 billion, the highest growth rate in the past two years. A whopping 457 petabytes of capacity shipping in the second quarter, up 59.3 percent from this time last year.

Across all types of storage, Hewlett-Packard was the dominant vendor of disk arrays, with $1.313 billion in sales, up 13.9 percent and giving it a 23.5 percent share of the $5.596 billion market. IBM was close behind HP, with $1.146 billion in sales, up 13.2 percent and giving Big Blue a 20.5 percent share. EMC came in third, with $807 million in sales, up 9.6 percent, followed by Dell with $463 million in sales (up 26.7 percent) and Sun Microsystems with $339 million in sales, down 10.4 percent. Other vendors accounted for $1.529 billion in sales, which was up 5.8 percent over last year's second quarter and which accounted for 27.3 percent of all array sales in the quarter.

Exabyte Says VXA and LTO Are the Fastest-Growing Products in Its History

Exabyte is one of the pioneers in tape storage technology for midrange servers, and got its start as the first company to bring 8mm tape technology developed by Sony to IT-related tape drives. Like many storage companies, Exabyte is located in Boulder, Colorado, which has been a hotbed for storage technology (pun intended) for years. Exabyte is one of the big backers of VXA and LTO tape technologies, and it was bragging recently about how well these two have been doing in the market, particularly in the SMB customer base where Exabyte has always been a key supplier of raw tape decks.

Exabyte also wants to sell autoloaders for these two tape technologies, and that is why it wanted to make sure that everyone knows that LTO shipments in the midrange market are expected to be up 35 percent in 2005, compared to 2 percent shipment growth for the overall market, according to forecasts made by IDC. And while low-end tape drive shipments contracted by 7 percent, VXA shipments are expected to grow by 86 percent this year. It is no surprise, then, that Exabyte's Magnum 1x7 LTO Autoloader and VXA PacketLoader 1x10 automated tape loaders are among the most popular products in Exabyte's 20-year history.