But Wait, There's More

Novell to Announce openSUSE Project Today

While you could always get your hands on the source code behind Novell's SUSE Linux Professional version of the Linux operating system, the process that Novell went through to create that bleeding-edge Linux was completely closed off. And today, at the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco, Novell is expected to announce the opening up of SUSE Pro's development process through the creation of the openSUSE project.

Apparently, the SUSE Professional 10.0 beta will be released as openSUSE, and it will perform the same function for Novell as Red Hat's Fedora does: get new features in front of die-hard Linux users and allow community development of the software that will eventually be put into enterprise Linux releases.

Gartner Predicts Most IT Shops in the U.S. Will Hire in the Next Year

The IT market may not be roaring, but it certainly has picked up a bit compared to a few years ago thanks in large part to the stabilization of the economies in North America, Europe, and Asia. According to a new survey of 160 of the 3,000 CIOs who participate in Gartner's Executive Programs, the CIOs expect that they plan to expand their IT workforces over the next 12 months--albeit somewhat modestly. The 160 companies involved in the survey spanned all industry sectors and had an IT employee base of 48,586, which means they averaged over 300 IT employees per shop. These are obviously larger organizations.

Gartner found in its survey, which began in March, that the average salary increase for 2005 will be 3.5 percent, which is three-tenths of a percent higher than the rate of salary increase in 2004. Gartner noted that companies are boosting the variable portion of their compensation, allocating more money to IT employees if certain business and IT targets are met. By sector, 63 percent of companies in the financial services sector surveyed planned to increase their IT headcount in the next year, and among financial services firms, 22.2 percent of them said that they would boost their IT employee base by more than 10 percent. This is the most active sector for hiring, followed by public and non-profit organizations, of which 62 percent of companies plan to have headcount increases among salaried employees. In combining both full-time and contractual workers, some 66 percent of those surveyed by Gartner said they plan to add people in the coming year.

Of course, with a large number of IT shops looking to add talent, there could be some scarcity of resource out there in IT land. "Although the improved job market presents more promising opportunities to IT job seekers, it may also force IT and human resources leaders to respond to increasing IT staff turnover in their companies," warned Lily Mok, senior consultant with Gartner's Executive Program. "Total IT voluntary turnover was higher in the 2005 survey than last year. This may imply that as the IT employment market improves further, IT professionals will consider leaving their current jobs for better opportunities." Gartner said that the positions that were likely to have shortages of qualified applications include project manager, Web application developer, security analyst, database administrator, and network engineer. Companies polled say that skills for various ERP suites--PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle suites were frequently mentioned by name, which stands to reason since Oracle and SAP rule large IT organizations--were in short supply, as were Java, .NET, and XML programming skills.

Palamida Partners with SourceForce on IP, Too

As we reported in last week's issue, Black Duck Software announced it had forged an alliance with VA Software, one of the early commercializers of Linux and the owner of SourceForge distributed, open source development community, that would allow Black Duck's protexIP tool to integrate with the SourceForge repository. And a day later, after The Linux Beacon went to press, Palamida, a relative newcomer in the intellectual property right and software compliance tool market, announced it, too, had a partnership with SourceForge.

According to Mark Tolliver, the former Sun Microsystems executive who was named as Palamida's chief executive officer back in May when the company came out of stealth mode operation, Palamida actually had an alliance with VA Software that allowed the replication of the SourceForge site at Palamida's data center for the past for months, but the company has not been bragging about it.

When you sell products that are used to detect the presence of open source software in custom in-house or commercial applications, having a complete set of code snippets that provide the fingerprints for identifying the source or compiled code of a particular open source project is important. Such a software service is only as good as its snippet library, and with SourceForge housing more than 103,000 open source projects and representing the largest single repository of open source code in the world, keeping current with all the changes in SourceForge is not a trivial matter.

That is why, says Tolliver, that Palamida drove a 3 TB disk array down Highway 101 from its offices to VA Software's four months ago and made a snapshot of the SourceForge repository. (He jokingly called this "Highway 101-net," an homage to the old "sneakernet" that predated the Internet.) Since that time, Palamida and VA Software have kept these sites in lockstep remotely, so as new code is added to existing projects and new projects are added to the site, Palamida has access to all that new code, allowing it to make code snippet fingerprints that identify the open source projects and then their licensing terms. Black Duck, without knowing what Palamida was up to, set up a similar deal. "We both got with the program," explains Tolliver," and to SourceForge's credit, they have made the data available to both of us."

The amount of changed data in the SourceForge repository is, according to Tolliver, several gigabytes a day, and it sometimes hits as much as 10 GB a day. "This is not an amount of data you can crawl through from the outside using the Internet. It just isn't practical."

Having formed an alliance with SourceForge, Tolliver concedes that Palamida needs to go after other repositories--Apache.net and Collab.net are the next two obvious choices--because customers paying for Palamida's IP Amplifier and Black Duck's protexIP solutions are paying them for complete coverage. People buy antivirus software expecting for the provider of that software to keep on its toes and be current in identifying all threats; this is no different, in principle. Black Duck had a relationship with the projects on Collab.net already, and it seems logical that Palamida will go there next. "Ultimately, we'd like to do this with all code repositories," says Tolliver.

Black Duck also has a deal whereby VA Software can bundle protexIP with its SourceForge Enterprise Edition, which is the commercial version of VA Software's open source platform. Tolliver says selling IP Amplifier as a bundle with the commercial SourceForge tools is an option, but it is not something Palamida is pursuing right now.

Trusted Computing Group Serves Up Secure Server Specification

The Trusted Computing Group standards body, which is made up of major platform and component suppliers IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD, have announced the first specification for what will be called a trusted server.

This specification, which is available to all server makers free of charge, aims to make all server platforms more secure, and the consortium of sponsor vendors as well as dozens of contributors (including the likes of Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC, and Hitachi) are working toward making PC, server, and other platforms more secure by specifying and then certifying what features are necessary for such a system to be deemed to be trustworthy.

The trusted server specification is following fast on the heels of the trusted client spec, which has been adopted by PC suppliers and which accounts for 15 million PC shipments to date. The group is also working on specs for networks, storage, mobile systems, and other peripherals and has the goal of creating specifications that will outline what components and features are necessary to build a trustworthy IT infrastructure. The server specification spans X86/X64, Itanium, Sparc, and MIPS platforms, with Power platforms being notably but surely temporarily absent. The heart of the proposed Trusted Server platform is something called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM, and I like that acronym more than I like transactions per minute), which is a microchip you plug into a server that securely stores digital certificates and passwords. By having the TPM unit, makers and users of software that is used to configure, change, and access servers can rest assured of who has the right to access what assets in the server farm. The first servers that adhere to the Trusted Server spec are expected to be delivered before the end of the year.

Novell Hires Top Americas Salesperson, Trims Jobs in Europe

Commercial Linux distributor Novell late last week said that it has hired Susan Heystee to be president of its North America business unit. Heystee, who was once president of the American unit of one-time high-flying ERP software vendor Baan, now part of SSA Global, has held senior positions with SSA. She came to Novell in March 2004 as vice president and general manager of Novell's Midwest region. She will now be charged with running field sales, consulting, channels, and customer support in the entire North America region; she reports to Ron Hovsepian, who used to have the same job until he was made president of worldwide field operations for Novell.

Separately, in filing its 8K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Novell said that on July 26 its European management team had approved a plan to restructure its EMEA operations in the image of a similar restructuring that took place last year in North America. To that end, Novell plans to chop between 120 and 150 positions by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends in February 2006. This restructuring will cost between $10 million and $12 million, and will reduce quarterly operating expenses by between $3 million and $4 million.

HP Says Over 5,000 Applications on Integrity Servers

Being the dominant platform provider based on the Itanium platform has its benefits--you get to help design the chip and you get great prices on the processors--but Itanium has had to prove itself in the application space. But Hewlett-Packard, which is clearly the biggest seller of Itanium-based servers, also has some big responsibilities, chief among them being corralling the application vendors of the world and getting them to support its Itanium-based Integrity platforms.

To help show the momentum behind Itanium--and to goose it a little--HP has been keeping track of how quickly application vendors roll out support for the Integrity boxes. Rich Marcello, the general manager of HP's Business Critical Server unit, which controls the Integrity platform as well as HP's HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems and the use of Windows and Linux platforms on those boxes, said in his blog this week that the application count has risen above 5,000 on the Integrity machines. HP had set a goal of 4,500 applications by the end of 2005.

In April 2003, HP said there were over 300 applications on the Integrity machines and the company had hopes of getting 1,000 applications on the boxes within the following 6 to 9 months. The Itanium ecosystem beat that number a bit, hitting around 1,500 applications by the end of 2003, and then went on to double to 3,000 applications by early 2005. This is when HP set the goal of 4,500 Itanium applications by the end of 2005, and at that time it seemed logical that another 1,500 applications could be brought to bear. I also said that it was also possible that the base could do better and could double again to 6,000 applications. At the current rate, the Itanium ecosystem--which has been boosted by the addition of the OpenVMS and NonStop platforms--should have around 5,600 applications by year end.

Vendors Hold Their Positions in Middleware, Says IDC

The battle for control of the commercial middleware software market, which the analysts at IDC call the application deployment software market, has resulted in détente among the dominant players in 2004. This market is comprised of application, Web, and integration servers as well as message- and transaction-oriented middleware and various gateway and connector software for hooking ERP and other software together, and even though the market grew by 6.4 percent in 2004 to nearly reach $7 billion in sales worldwide, IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle had exactly the same market shares in 2004 as they had in 2003: 37 percent, 12 percent, and 7 percent, respectively.

IDC said that Big Blue had the lead in middleware software in 2004 for its own mainframe and OS/400 platforms as well as on Microsoft's Windows platform, while BEA had market share leadership on Unix and Linux platforms in 2004. While IDC is projecting a compound annual growth rate of 4.7 percent between 2005 and 2009 for this market, the company's analysts say that it is not necessarily the case that this application deployment middleware remains a separate feature of operating system platforms and ERP suites, and that the tight integration of middleware components within the operating systems and/or ERP suites could affect what sells and what does not.