My deepest apologies, Peter and Bill. But the analogy does beg a few questions. Is Shearer then Commissioner Gordon? Or is that Sam Palmisano or Bill Zeitler? That would make Jim Herring, er, Alfred the Butler? You don't think the Caped Crusader actually invented all those wonderful toys, do you? We all know that Linus Torvalds is obviously The Penguin. "Wah wah wah." Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina could have been Catwoman if she had kept her job as chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems' founder and CEO, Scott McNealy, would be The Riddler, Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, would be The Joker, and Microsoft founder and chief software architect, Bill Gates, would be The Bookworm. (OK, OK, that is quite enough . . . .)

All silliness aside, the 25 percent revenue growth has come about in part because Shearer and his team are getting through the Power5 transition, are spending money promoting the iSeries, and are focusing the sales force and the reseller channel. According to Donohue, each of the managers in the 16 iSeries geographic sales areas have been given permission to reach out to the local press and analyst community and to do an assessment to make sure that they not only have the right resellers and software partners for the customers in their region, but also to focus on partners and profits as much as on traditional "leads and loads" measures. "I want the country leaders to become general managers in their territories," explained Donohue.

Donohue could not give any country by country detail or any product sales by model, but he did say that there was "very good growth" in the Americas and Europe, the latter being a nice change. He said that splitting Western Europe into two pieces has helped. He said that contrary to what many people are thinking, that the smaller iSeries machines sold well, and that sales at SMB accounts (by which he meant companies with fewer than 1,000 employees) were up 22 percent. Sales at larger enterprises were up higher, obviously, for the overall sales level to be up 25 percent in the quarter. He said that iSeries shipments during the third quarter were up 35 percent. I can't even remember the last time I saw numbers like this. I think it might have been in 1996 when the RISC AS/400s were first announced. Donohue said that it was the best quarterly growth rate for the iSeries in a decade and was particularly pleased because the iSeries grew by 25 percent when all IBM servers with a price tag in excess of $10,000 only grew by 2 percent. The iSeries was bringing up the eServer class average, big time.

Check Out the New iSeries Server TV Advertisement

We reported last week in our Four Hundred Stuff newsletter that IBM would be rolling out a new television advertising campaign that actually says the word "iSeries" and actually shows it. The new "I am the man" ads are funny and will catch people's attention. They are part of a broader server marketing campaign that IBM kicked off earlier this you. I have managed to get my hands on an MP3 file for the ad, which you can download from one of our backup Web sites by clicking here. It is a pretty big ZIP file, and if downloads get out of hand, I will have to kill the file. Have fun!

Gartner Says IT Spending to Rise 5.5 Percent in 2006

The analysts at Gartner have dusted off their crystal balls and taken a gander into the hazy future to declare that IT spending will increase by 5.5 percent in the United States in 2006. Gartner's preliminary results are based on surveys of IT departments, who are saying that some of this increase will be dedicated to application development and integration (of what, Gartner doesn't say). The 1,500 customers surveyed by Gartner say that spending on security and storage is going to level off, but they will boost spending on mobile computing and related infrastructure as well as on middleware and development tools. The survey results indicate that companies will boost spending on IT personnel in the areas of project and program management, systems management, and network management, but that they expected to spend less on contract employees.

While the average increase in spending among those U.S. companies surveyed was 5.5 percent, companies in the services industry set the high water mark with an average expected increase in IT budget of around 11 percent, with all other industry sectors expecting to grow in the single digits; banks and financial institutions expected, on average, to increase spending by only 3.4 percent. "On the surface, these results paint an optimistic picture of long-awaited IT spending recovery," explained Barbara Gomolski, the vice president of research at Gartner who created the spending forecast. "But the increases involved are relatively modest. Many industries will see revenue growth outpace IT budget increases in 2006. As a result, although absolute dollars spent on IT will increase in 2006, IT spending as a percentage of revenue will actually decline in some organizations." Gartner presented its first pass on 2006 predictions at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla., last week.

IBM Acquires XML Appliance Maker DataPower

Last week, IBM acquired a privately held maker of XML appliances called DataPower for an undisclosed amount of money.

When people talk about services oriented architectures (SOA), more times than not what that means is using XML as a glue to connect disparate file systems, Web servers, application servers, and transactional systems that might span multiple companies into a giant, integrated, hybrid application. But XML is not the fastest language in the world, and like many other technologies, it could use a little boost. And to that end, DataPower has created a line of appliances to not only speed up the performance of XML parsing by a factor of ten or so, but also to add a tight layer of security to it and to take non-XML data such as flat or binary files and wrap them into XML so you don't have to put code on your servers to do this. These are very interesting gadgets. And they might just end up as co-processors in future Power-based servers and mainframe servers from IBM. And down the line, the XML smarts that DataPower has will undoubtedly be used to add XML acceleration to future Power processors, which is being speculated about in the Power6 or Power7 generation of chips.

IDC Predicts Virtualization-Related Tech to Balloon to a $15 Billion Biz by 2009

Sometimes, I wonder about the projections being made by IT market researchers. Last week, IDC released a report that claimed that "virtual servers translate into real dollars: and that spending around virtualization technologies would "balloon to nearly $15 billion worldwide by 2009." IDC reckons that a "disruptive change" is at hand and that soon two-socket and four-socket servers will become routinely virtualized. In other words, server virtualization will go mainstream.

I have no qualms with that statement, but I do have some serious issues with those projections and the way that people are thinking about money in the server virtualization game. When you consider that VMware is at a $100 million or so run rate per quarter and may be at a $150 million to $175 million run rate next year, and maybe a $250 million rate per quarter in 2007, and then maybe $325 million per quarter in 2008, and then may even approach $400 million per quarter by the end 2009, that still only works out to a $1.6 billion-a-year business. And those back-of-the-napkin estimates I just made assume that VMware grows its shipment volumes by an order of magnitude and radically drops its prices, because I can tell you, only enterprises with cramped data centers are going to pay $5,000 for a virtual machine bundle for a server that itself may only cost $2,500. I will agree that server virtualization is very important, but it is like mufflers: All cars will have them, and people will not pay a lot for them. That $15 billion projection, even if you want to be generous and throw in storage virtualization, seems ridiculously high. Unless, of course, IDC is counting the value of the servers as well as the virtualization software. And if it is, then this is folly.

What probably will turn out to be true is this: There will be multiple server virtualization technologies available, and more companies will probably join the fray. Already there are a number of players besides VMware, including Microsoft, SWsoft, the open source Xen project, and now Parallels all peddling virtualization tools on X86 and X64 boxes. Unix boxes all have their own virtualization technologies and so do IBM's iSeries servers and mainframes. These latter machines do not have much of a premium for virtualization technologies, and I believe that over time, the premium that vendors can command for these logical and virtual partitioning technologies will diminish--just like every other server technology you can think of. The other thing to think about is this: as the server market uses more virtualization technologies, the box count footprint will shrink--big time. So while vendors may make some dough selling virtualization software, they are going to lose a lot more dough because they are going to ship a lot fewer physical server boxes that used to run at 15 to 25 percent of CPU capacity. IDC's and Gartner's server projections had better count on this effect, and if they believe that virtualization software will make up for lost server hardware sales, both the IT vendors and the IT consultants are going to be sorely and surely surprised. Ask yourself this: how much of a premium can a server maker charge for simultaneous multithreading support in their processors? Or integrated RAID cards? Or ECC on the main memory? The answer is very little.

I think this whole projection can get turned on its ear really easily, particularly if the members of the Xen open source virtualization project do one simple thing: What if XenSource starts making a little bit of money selling add-on systems management software to its Xen hypervisor for X86 and X64 servers, and then takes a bunch of that cash and decides to create a cross-platform hypervisor that works on X64, Itanium, Sparc, Power, and MIPS processors? Imagine a cross-platform VM. You think companies wouldn't adopt that? They would in a heartbeat. Remember: Linux started out on X86, and is now running on more platforms than any operating system in history, rivaling the open source BSD Unixes. And if there hadn't been such platform consolidation in the past decade, I think Linux would be running on a lot more boxes. What happened for Linux can happen for Xen--and probably will.

According to surveys by IDC, more than 75 percent of companies with more than 500 employees are deploying servers with virtualization technologies, and customer satisfaction with these technologies is very high. More than half of the virtualized machines deployed to date are being used in production, including for mission-critical workloads. As for revenue, virtualized systems that run Unix, OS/400, and mainframe operating systems like z/VM and z/OS currently account for the bulk of spending on virtualized systems, but there is rapid growth on Windows and Linux platforms, says IDC's analysts. Server buyers are telling IDC that, on average, they expect about 45 percent of all servers they buy in 2006 to have virtualization technologies. All of these statistics sound perfectly reasonable.

Jacada Partners with Avaya on Call Centers in India

If you are chasing call center business with your middleware integration software, where do you go? India, of course, and that is what Jacada has done with its Jacada Fusion collection of products. Last week, Jacada said that it has signed a distributor agreement with Avaya Global Connect, the largest provider of contact center solutions in India. So what use is Jacada Fusion in these contact center applications? Well, representatives have to access a multitude of applications, which are often scattered across many different kinds of systems. Their desktops are, to put it mildly, a mess. And having a single product that can integrate these applications from the outside can make a big difference in how smoothly customer support goes.

Lakeview Technology Appoints Operations Manager in the U.K.

iSeries high availability clustering software provider Lakeview Technology has announced that it has created a new sales area that encompasses the United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa and has put Andy Weir in charge as operations manager for that region. Weir used to be technical director at REAL Solutions, one of the largest iSeries resellers in the United Kingdom. One of the big solutions that REAL Solutions peddled was Lakeview's MIMIX high availability software for the iSeries, and Weir was in charge of this line of business. Prior to working at REAL Solutions, Weir was technical support manager and infrastructure systems manager at Kwik Save for 14 years, one of the largest food retailer in England and a company that was jam packed with iSeries, pSeries, and X86 servers and--you guessed it--MIMIX high availability software running on the iSeries machines. So in his 22 years, Weir has been a Lakeview customer and a Lakeview partner--and now he is a Lakeview employee. Weir will report to Mike Khattab, vice president of EMEA sales.