But Wait, There's More

Renegades Soltis and Haines Put Out the October iSeries Podcasts

Well, Frank Soltis, chief iSeries architect, and Malcolm Haines, chief iSeries propagandist, are at it again on their Podcastaways podcasting Website, promoting the iSeries in their obtuse way.

In the October edition, there is a new episode of The Podfather, where the Don brings in a new heavy named Guillermo to keep the family in line. Soltis also explains why there are no 100 GHz processors on the market--I haven't had time to listen yet, but I suspect it is because we already have one Sun in the solar system--and silly character Dr Heinz Kleinempfänger, author of mythical book The Id, the Ego, the Superego, and the 'i' cures a patient suffering from "the dreaded IT affliction Obsessive Server Reorder." Obsessive Server Reorder--now that is funny. There's also some relatively serious stuff about $100 laptops and feedback from early podcast listeners.

IBM Launches WebSphere Community Edition

Last week, IBM launched WebSphere Community Edition, which is not an open source version of Big Blue's own WebSphere Application Server for J2EE applications, but rather the open source code that IBM promised it would release after it acquired privately held Gluecode Software, a provider of support for the Apache Geronimo Java application server, back in May. Gluecode was just about ready to launch its Joe application server, a commercialized implementation of the Geronimo project, when IBM snapped it up this past summer. Last week, IBM made good on its promise to make Joe open source and to offer commercial support for it. The Joe app server has been given the boring name WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

WebSphere CE is a J2EE application server, and it has hooks into Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases, and somewhat ironically, support for IBM's own DB2/400 database for the iSeries and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows is not yet available. The current 1.0 release of the software has tools for porting from Gluecode Standard Edition (the release prior to Joe from Gluecode) as well as from Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat servers. There are not, as yet, porting tools to move to proper full-blown WebSphere app servers, but you can bet that such tools are in the works. You can also bet that eventually WebSphere CE will end up on the iSeries in some way, shape, or form.

Big Blue Tries to Promote Open Source Storage, Whatever That Means

A decade ago, the battle cry was open systems standards, and now, the battle cry is open source standards. One little word change has not made much of a difference. Last week, IBM got together with Cisco Systems, Engenio Information Systems, Fujitsu, Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, McData, Brocade Communications Systems, and Computer Associates to form an organization called Aperi, which aims to create open source storage management software. Aperi is a Latin verb meaning "to open," and it might have just done that to a can of worms.

I don't know about you, but I get suspicious about any organization that claims to be starting a standard where half of the major players in the market are not present. EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, and Dell, among others, all have huge storage businesses and in the case of the first three, their own storage management software. And where is Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell? You can't have a standard without them, and I cannot even imagine so many players agreeing on creating a single, open source--which means shared--storage management software program. The idea is not technically unthinkable--such software can surely be written--but it is politically and economically difficult to conceive of. Moreover, Aperi, for all of its goals of creating harmony among rivals, misses the fact that standards emerge from markets and through the action of market forces, not because vendors say so, but because customers do, and that you don't start writing a software first and then make a standard later, but rather a standard specification with customer requirements is written up first, there is much argument and disagreement, and then the standard is hammered out. Only then can each vendor in its turn implement the software that adheres to that standard. You cannot skip steps. Even the Eclipse Foundation that IBM helped spawn to form an open source framework for integrated development environments--to its great credit--did not bring enough people to the table immediately. Microsoft and Sun were noticeably absent, and still are. That is not a standard when two of the most influential application development tool providers and the standard bearers for .NET and Java are not at the table.

Aperi probably should not have launched until the other storage players were on board. But, because we are optimists, perhaps some good may come out of this in the long run. It is hard to say, really.

JDA Software Continues to Gain Financial Ground in Q3

Retail software specialist JDA Software announced its financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, and the company is quite pleased to say that software license sales were up 70 percent to $17.4 million compared to this time last year. Overall sales were not up as sharply, but did climb 10.5 percent to $55.6 million in the quarter. Net income was $3.7 million, more than double the amount of money JDA brought to the bottom line in the third quarter of 2004. Interestingly, the third quarter is traditionally JDA's weakest quarter.

Hamish Brewer, JDA's CEO, said the company closed 76 deals in the quarter, including a dozen multinational deals and three large contracts that have a combined license value in excess of $10 million--adding that some of that money has not been booked in this quarter. Two of those deals were for its .NET-enabled, Windows-based Portfolio retail suite, bringing the total customer count for this product up to ten. JDA saw software license sales rise in the Americas region by a stunning 91 percent to $14.2 million, with European sales up 30 percent to $2.8 million.

Computer Security Institute, FBI Release 10th Annual Computer Crime Report

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Computer Security Institute (CSI) last week released their tenth annual Computer Crime Report, outlining the nasty things that go on inside corporate data centers and on corporate desktops that no one wants to talk about publicly. The FBI-CSI survey of 700 companies, which you can read in full here, showed that attacks by computer viruses still represent the biggest financial losses for companies, but denial of service attacks have moved into the slot two position when it comes to causing the most economic damage. While cybercrime--by which the FBI and the CSI mean manual rather than viral unauthorized access to computer systems--was up slightly in 2005, the amount of economic damage it caused was down. Web sites are getting slammed more frequently. In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported ten or more incidents of hacking or attempted hacking on their Web sites.

Across the 700 companies surveyed, 639 suffered economic damage, and the total bill for computer crime at these sites came to over $130 million. $42.8 million was the result of viruses, $31.2 million from unauthorized access, $30.9 million from the theft of proprietary information, $7.3 million from denial of services attacks, $6.9 million from employee Internet abuse, and $4.1 million from laptop theft. Misuse of a public Web application only accounted for $2.2 million in damages, lower than the $2.6 million in damages from financial fraud.

SMBs Are Ill-Prepared for Security Threats, Trend Micro Says

Smaller organizations without dedicated IT professionals suffer the most for lack of security, according to a new study by security software firm Trend Micro. The study compared the security concerns of small and medium size business (SMB) users across the world, and found that the same security threats don't necessarily track across the globe. For instance, spyware is "much more likely" to be encountered by computer users in the U.S. than in Germany and Japan. However, the incidence if spyware encounters is growing the fastest in Japan, where one out of three users say spyware has increased in the last month. The Germans are more security conscious than their Americans and Japanese SMB counterparts, and are more likely to request security guidance from their IT department. However, only slightly more than half of German and U.S. SMB firms, and about a third of Japanese SMBs, even have an IT department. "Smaller businesses face a dilemma," says Steve Quane of Trend Micro. "Encounters with security threats are rising faster in smaller organizations, but these same organizations are restricted by time, cost, and available resources." The solution, according to Trend Micro, is to buy and use software that provides protection from online security threats, such as antivirus software, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems.