But Wait, There's More

Mandrakesoft Chooses New Post-Merger Name: Mandriva

Having completed its acquisition of Brazilian Linux distributor Conectiva, Franco-American Linux distro Mandrakesoft has decided to change its name to show that it is a merger of equals. The company is now called Mandriva--part Mandrakesoft, part Conectiva.

Mandrakesoft has been in a long-running trademark lawsuit with publishing powerhouse Hearst over the use of the word "mandrakesoft," and by changing its name, it can just avoid the whole issue. Any site that was pointing at www.mandrakesoft.com is now pointing at www.mandriva.com. The company's Linux distro names have also been changed.

Analyst Firm Says Mid-Sized Firms Not Interested in Linux

Info-Tech Research Group, a market researcher based in London, Ontario, has just released a report called "IT Priorities 2005," and that report says that mid-sized businesses are not really interested in Linux and overwhelmingly prefer the Microsoft Windows platform.

Info-Tech surveyed 1,400 midrange shops in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to get their viewpoints on a wide range of issues, and released a trickle of its findings to try to drum up sales for the report that came out of the survey's findings.

About 27 percent of the midrange shops that Info-Tech talked to said they had Linux installed, which doesn't strike me as a lack of interest at all. However, 48 percent of the respondents said they have no interest in Linux whatsoever, and another 15 percent were not sure. Info-Tech said of the remaining 10 percent surveyed who said that they will evaluate Linux over the next three years, only a portion of these companies will actually deploy Linux after evaluating it.

"Microsoft still dominates this market and is the clear leader for mid-sized companies," said Frank Koelsch, executive vice president of Info-Tech in a statement accompanying the results. "Linux was initially hot, but interest has substantially declined. Companies are past the hype and taking a much more cautious approach toward Linux. For smaller organizations that already have a trained Windows-based support staff, adding Linux to the mix can add headcount, complexity, and create havoc. Unless there is a compelling business reason to implement a Linux system, IT decision makers in mid-sized enterprises should stick to Microsoft solutions, even though they are not perfect either."

If the people behind Unix had taken this attitude, we'd still be using dumb terminals from mainframes, and we wouldn't have the Internet. The fact of the matter is that the price disparity between Linux and Windows is nowhere near the order of magnitude between mainframes and Unix servers 10 years ago. If that were the case, companies would be grumbling, but they would also be moving to Linux at a much more rapid pace. Microsoft attained its market position in operating systems by being very aggressive on features and pricing, and it can maintain a monopoly on desktops and therefore fund its whole server stack by continuing to be aggressive on that front. But Linux can and will present a challenge to that monopoly, once desktop Linux gets a little bit better and Linux gets to be a little bit easier to use. Small- and mid-sized customers can't afford to change platforms, but they will if there is a compelling reason. Price will not be that reason.

SteelEye Adds Power, Red Hat 4 Support to LifeKeeper

Back in October 2004, high availability software maker SteelEye Technologies extended its LifeKeeper clustering software for Linux to cover the most popular open source infrastructure components in its new LifeKeeper for LAMP release--LAMP being short for the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the three Ps of program development: Perl, PHP, and Python.

Now, SteelEye has rolled out a new version of LifeKeeper--Version 5, to be specific--that includes support for Red Hat's new Enterprise Linux 4 implementation of Linux 2.6 as well as IBM's OpenPower variants of its "Squadron" Power5-based server platforms, which are only certified to run Linux. LifeKeeper for Linux V5 spans from 2 to 32 server nodes in a cluster and can cluster data that is spread across SAN and NAS storage architectures. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as well as Novell's SUSE 8 and 9 Linuxes are supported on LifeKeeper for Linux V5. LifeKeeper can cluster software RAID implementations that are set up within a single server node or that span multiple nodes in a network or SANs using the Linux Multiple Device (md) driver.

Volvo Buys Linux-Opteron Cluster, Ousting SGI Unix Box

Back in 2002, Swedish car maker Volvo was the first car company to buy a Linux cluster from IBM, and now it has come back to Big Blue to acquire a 150-node Linux-Opteron cluster that will reportedly be replacing an Silicon Graphics Irix-based Origin 3800 NUMA machine with 128 processors. Volvo is adding 150 of IBM's two-way eServer 325 machines, which use the 64-bit Opteron processors from AMD. These Linux-Opteron machines will be added to an existing IBM X86-based Linux cluster and a cluster of IBM's pSeries 655 HPC servers. All of these machines work together to simulate car crashes, which helps Volvo improve the safety of the cars it makes.

Red Hat Touts Big Linux Wins at Insurer, Bank

Red Hat last week announced two big deals for getting Linux on corporate desktops in Europe.

LVM Verisicherungen, a German insurance company, has decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Desktop on its 8,500 desktop machines, replacing a custom-built Linux implementation that has been running on LVM's desktops since 2000. After having built and supported its own Linux implementation for more than four years, LVM wants to pay someone else to do it. So the company did a pilot of Enterprise Linux 4 Desktop and put the Java-based front-ends of insurance applications on that Linux and found Red Hat Network could support it with a little tweaking.

A few days later, Banche Popolari Unite, Italy's seventh largest bank and its largest cooperative financial institution, said that it was moving its 8,000 Unix workstations from Sun Microsystems to PC workstations running Enterprise Linux Desktop 4. BPU said that the combination of X86 PCs and Linux will cut the cost of acquiring new workstations by 50 percent. It hopes to have all of the workstations moved over by the end of the year, which will be configured in a dual-boot mode so they can run Microsoft's Windows. Red Hat Network will be used to maintain these desktops, too. A bunch applications running on Unix servers will also be ported to Red Hat Linux on X86 iron.

IBM, Sun Tweak Financing Deals for Server Buyers

Server makers IBM and Sun Microsystems have both tweaked their server financing deals to try to drum up business and to reflect recent changes in interest rates.

IBM has pushed up the interest rates in its long-running Low Rate Financing program from its Global Financing unit. IBM had lowered rates in early January to stimulate demand, and now has pushed them a tiny bit above the levels rates were at before it dropped them in January and quite a bit higher than what IBM was charging last summer.

The Low Rate Financing deal has let companies buying from $25,000 to $1 million in hardware finance it under what IBM calls low rates; those buying pSeries products get the same rates, but get a sweetened deal that can span up to $2 million in a single deal. With the rejiggering of the deal, customers in Canada have a $25,000 minimum, but customers in the United States can now finance anything that costs over $1,000. The rate for pSeries, iSeries, zSeries, and xSeries servers and their associated storage is now 4.1 percent (up from 3 percent in May 2004). Software and consulting contracts from the Business Consulting Services line at IBM's Global Services group can be financed at 4.4 percent, which Integrated Technology Services can be financed at 4.9 percent. PCs can be financed for 4.85 percent. These low rates are only offered for qualified customers (meaning those with decent credit and solid financials), and they are only available on capital leases with a 24- to-36-month term with a $1 end-of-lease payout. This deal runs through December 31.

Over at Sun Microsystems Finance, the rates are a little bit lower under a special deal that runs through June 30. Sun is offering a 2.75 percent financing rate on 24-month and 36-month $1 purchase leases and 2.5 percent on 24-month and 36-month leases that require customers to pay the full market value for the hardware at the end of the lease. To synch up with federal, state, and local governments, these organizations can apply for payment deferrals that push payments out into the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1 for a lot of government organizations. The entire line of Sun products can be financed under these deals, notably Sun Fire and Netra servers and workstations, StorEdge disk arrays, and Spectrum support products; Sun will also finance third-party equipment under these deals. The minimum deal size is $25,000 for this offering.

IBM Takes High Road, Starts Expensing Stock Options

IBM has broken ranks with many of the powerhouses in the high technology industry and has made the wise decision to start expensing its stock options. For a long time, the stock compensation that companies like IBM give to employees-- mostly top brass--have been hidden and, equally importantly, pumped up by stock buybacks. Many critics have argued that this kind of compensation should be on the books. No one would argue that coming up with valuations of stock options and grants is easy, which is probably why companies should stop giving options on stock and just give employees actual stock that has a definitive price at the moment it goes from the company's hands into those of its employees.

Kudos to Big Blue for taking a 55 cent hit to earnings for 2005 and for backcasting the stock compensation expenses so that later this month we can all see what IBM's costs for buying and giving away its stock really are.