But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• September 27
• September 20
• September 13
• September 6
• August 30

• About a month ago, the lead story in this newsletter was about how the economy and IT spending appeared to be perking up a bit. One of the reasons why everyone was encouraged was that the Technology Demand Index, from analysts at Gartner, seemed to be showing a positive upward trend. The index polls a small number (75) of the total 20,000 IT managers that participate in Gartner services and asks them what percentage of their IT budget is spent on certain categories. Gartner then comes up with a composite index. In August, that composite index dropped to 81, after growing steadily in the 90s. That means that, in aggregate, chief information officers left 19 percent of their budgets unspent. In a healthy market, chief information officers spend all of their budgets--and maybe even then some. Small and large enterprises are the main drag on spending, while midsized companies are close to spending all of their budgets. Gartner is still keeping a chin up about the poor numbers for August, and suggests that IT spending will still increase in 2004. Some free advice to Gartner: maybe it should increase its sample size. All of this could be noise in the data, with only 75 executives being polled. Bad data from Gartner could hurt IT spending, since so many IT managers look at it.
  
  
• iSeries security experts SkyView Partners has teamed up with Symbiont Healthcare Systems, a specialist in IT systems for the healthcare industry, to provide assessments to OS/400 shops in that industry in order to assess the potential security risks and vulnerabilities that their systems may have with the new HIPAA rules regarding information security. SkyView's key founder is Carol Woodbury, former chief security architect at IBM for the OS/400 operating system, so she clearly knows her way around OS/400, which is a popular platform in the healthcare industry. The HIPAA assessment is available immediately from both SkyView and Symbiont; pricing was not available at press time.
  
  
• Hewlett-Packard claims to be the dominant supplier of information technology to small and midsized businesses, with over $21 billion of its $72 billion in annual revenue in fiscal 2002 coming from customers in this market. HP thinks these customers don't get enough hand-holding when they choose these technologies or get support from vendors. That's why HP plans to spend $750 million to chase the SMB market with a new set of products and services called Smart Office. If you have a channel of 210,000 hardware and services partners in your channel, as HP does, you have to figure out some way to leverage these companies in order to compete against Dell's direct-sales model (which leaves customers to figure their own way around different technologies). You also have to compete against IBM's direct-channel hybrid model, which targets customers with simplified products (which have the Express moniker, like DB2 Express or WebSphere Express), as well as against the combined IBM-partner services. About the only choice HP has is to somehow use those partners to give small and midsized businesses, which are still mostly ignored after they pay their invoices, some help in choosing the technologies and onsite support that local partners can bring to the game. That's what Smart Office is all about. Carly Fiorina, HP's chairman and CEO, got to the heart of the matter in describing what Smart Office is about. "There are some companies that claim their products are easy to use," she said. "The 'easy' starts with the choosing and ends with the buying. Easy to buy is not enough." What these customers want, she said, is three things: someone to tell them what they need to buy and only what they need to buy to solve business problems, someone to give them the kind of financing options that big businesses use to not mess with their cash flow as they invest in IT infrastructure, and someone to actually come to their shop and fix something immediately when it breaks. This is what HP is promising to do, in conjunction with its partner channels. One of the first Smart Office products will be an HP ProLiant server preconfigured with Microsoft Small Business Server variant of the Windows 2003 operating system. This will start shipping in mid-October. On top of this, HP is going to work with partners to bundle on and support vertical applications specifically aimed at doctors' offices, law firms, accounting firms, and other professional offices. Perhaps most significant, HP is establishing an IT help desk that gives each customer a single point of contact for HP and its partners to discuss hardware and software technologies and to get support for over 160 products from HP and its partners. Presumably a big part of that $750 million is to pay partners to provide these handholding services. The Smart Office initiative also includes an online backup/data vault service so small and midsized businesses can store their data offsite and for an extended maintenance warranty on HP ProLiant servers that covers natural and man-made disasters. These latter three items will be sold by HP and by its partners under its CarePack umbrella moniker for services.
  
  
• If you bought a Linux license packaged by a major commercial Linux distributor such as Red Hat or SuSE from Hewlett-Packard, then installed it on an HP desktop or server, and have not messed around with the source code inside Linux (but are just running the binaries straight out of the box), then HP will indemnify you from having to pay Linux intellectual property licensing fees to The SCO Group and will cover your legal bills in the event that SCO takes you to court. HP has not yet been directly involved in the SCO-IBM Unix intellectual property lawsuit, nor has it stuck its nose into the countersuit Red Hat has filed against SCO. But HP wants to surf the upwardly flowing Linux market, which, depending on the platform, is growing at 30 to 40 percent, and it wants to be the dominant Linux vendor. And that means sucking it up and doing what IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystems haven't: covered their Linux customers backs and backsides.
  
  
• Back in January, IBM got serious about setting up computer grids for companies to solve real business problems and to make some money for itself. At the time, IBM rolled out ten so-called grid offerings, aimed at early grid adopters in niche markets where grid technology is being embraced. For each niche, IBM has put together a complete offering, including open source software technologies, its hardware and middleware, and products from dominant third-party grid computing experts who have been in this market longer than Big Blue. IBM now has 17 such grid offerings, after rolling out two more last week. The grid offering for analytics acceleration-customer insight in banking is a grid-based solution running on IBM's pSeries AIX servers or Intel-based xSeries server running Linux. The solution is based on an application called SAS Credit Scoring, from the SAS Institute, perhaps the most influential and pervasive analytic software makers on the planet. This module is part of SAS's banking intelligence suite, which can be run on grids as well as on monolithic servers. Another new niche for IBM in the grid field is the grid offering for risk management and compliance: capital markets and retail banking. DataSynapse is one of many grid middleware software suppliers, but it has also developed sets of vertical applications (aimed at the financial services, energy, and public sectors) that ride on top of its GridServer middleware. This particular grid application provides real-time credit limit monitoring for risk managers at banks, an application that generally runs in batch mode overnight. By moving to a grid architecture, IBM and DataSynapse say that companies can stop doing this in batch mode and go online with it, since the grid architecture will only make use of excess capacity on existing servers.
  
  
• Microsoft has released the Small Business Server edition of its Windows 2003 operating system to manufacturing last week, which means that OEMs will start taking orders for it now and the IT channel will soon have shrink-wrapped boxes of the code to sell to companies. Windows SBS 2003, like its predecessors in the Windows 2000 line, is a stripped-down, integrated, simplified version of the Windows stack that is aimed at smaller companies with small IT budgets and little or no IT staff. Windows SBS 2003 will come in two flavors. The standard edition includes the Windows Server 2003 operating system for print, file, and application serving. Microsoft's Windows SharePoint Services instant messaging and collaboration software is bundled in, as is Exchange Server 2003, the new e-mail and calendaring server. Microsoft also tosses in a Shared Fax Service, which lets company employees share a single virtual fax machine, running on the SBS box. The premium edition of Windows SBS 2003 adds Microsoft's Internet Security Accelerator Server, its Office FrontPage 2003 Web development tool, and a license to the SQL Server 2000 database. The standard edition will cost $599, including the cost of five Client Access Licenses. The premium edition will cost $1,499 with five Client Access Licenses. Additional licenses will cost $99.
  
  

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