But Wait, There's More

Red Hat Buys Netscape Server Code from Time Warner

Red Hat announced last week that it has bought the rights to the source code for components of the former Netscape Enterprise Server suite from the AOL unit of TimeWarner. Sun Microsystems licensed components of the same software several years ago and uses a heavily modified version of it within its Java Enterprise System middleware stack.

Red Hat has acquired the rights to Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System, and says that it will roll the software out as an adjunct of its Enterprise Linux operating system within the next 6 to 12 months. AOL uses both of these programs internally, and it would be interesting if this agreement is a precursor of AOL jumping from Solaris to Linux for portions of its infrastructure. AOL had signed a $500 agreement with Sun for systems and services as part of its acquisition of its $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape in November 1998; Sun agreed to buy $350 million in advertising on AOL's sites as part of the deal, so the net Sun spend was only $150 million. Red Hat reportedly paid $23.5 million for the rights to the two Netscape products.

Ex-Microsoft Hotshot Backs SourceLabs Support Biz

SourceLabs, a startup based embarrassingly in Seattle, Washington, which is Microsoft's stomping grounds and which aims to provide a single source to technical support and indemnification for a whole stack of open source software, announced last week that it has secured $3.5 million in venture capital funding from two investors, Ignition Partners and Index Ventures. Ignition Partners was founded by none other than Brad Silverberg, the senior vice president at Microsoft who ran the Windows platform from 1995 through 1999 and who is credited from growing the Windows platform from a $50 million to a $3 billion business; he also led Microsoft's Internet efforts during this time, too.

SourceLabs was founded this year by Byron Sebastian, the former vice president and general manager for the WebLogic middleware business at BEA Systems, and he says that while selling WebLogic, he discovered one of the main grouses he heard from big IT shops was that the lack of enterprise-class support was the main reason they did not deploy open source solutions. SourceLabs plans to roll out maintenance and support products for popular open source programs, such as Linux, MySQL, and Mozilla, starting in early 2005.

Lycoris Gets Into Linux Server Distribution

There are a number of desktop Linux distributions that aim to make Linux a little bit more user friendly, and Lycoris is one of them. The company's Desktop/LX operating system looks so much like Windows XP, you can probably even use it if you have no Linux experience (that is the idea, after all). Now that Lycoris has taken over the SME Server project, which was administered at contribs.org, maybe Lycoris will create a Linux server that has that look and feel of Windows Server 2003? SME Server was created several years ago by semiconductor and communications equipment maker Mitel Networks, and was based on an early release of Red Hat's Linux. The product was then handed off to a private company, called Resource Strategies, in 2001 and then released as an open source project under the General Public License in late 2003. Lycoris says that it will being hosting the contribs.org site immediately and roll out a version of SME Server with bug fixes and a commercial version of the product (meaning it has a price for support as well as distinguishing features such as automatic updates) as well as the GPL version, which is of course free.

Hanrahan Named OSDL's Head of Engineering

Open Source Development Labs has announced that it has tapped Thomas Hanrahan as its new director of Linux engineering. He has been working with OSDL for some time through IBM's Linux Technology Center, which is located in Beaverton, Oregon, just like OSDL. Prior to working for IBM, he was a software engineer and manager at Sequent, the NUMA clustered server maker that IBM acquired in July 1999 for $810 million.

OSDL also said last week that its founding director, Timothy Witham, has been given the position of chief technology officer for OSDL, which means he will be responsible for guiding the lab's Linux development efforts and interfacing with the Linux community. Witham was Intel's point man for Linux for many years, and Intel also did Linux in Beaverton. Stuart Cohen, by the way, remains CEO of OSDL.

Cray Lands Two Linux Supercomputer Deals

Supercomputer maker Cray announced last week that it has shipped two of its Opteron-based number crunchers, one a knock-off of the "Red Storm" Linux-Opteron cluster that it is building for Sandia National Labs and the other a version of the Cray XD1 (formerly OctigaBay) system, which is a different kind of Linux-Opteron system. Cray is hoping that both machines will help even out its sales as it also promotes the high-end Cray X1 vector supercomputers.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center has convinced the U.S. National Science Foundation to part with $9.7 million to build a 10 teraflops supercomputer based on the Red Storm design, which is being productized under the code-name "Strider" but which is not officially a product yet. PSC will be getting a Red Storm system with 2,000 Opteron processors, and it will be getting it pretty fast too, with installation expected by the end of 2004. The full Red Storm machine going into Sandia will be rated at 41.5 teraflops, and this marks the first time that Cray has not been vague about exactly what the performance of the Sandia Red Storm box will be. PSC is home to the "LeMieux" parallel AlphaServer-Tru64 Unix supercomputer rated at 6 teraflops of peak performance; this machine was acquired under the TeraGrid project being jointly funded by the NSF and IT vendors IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. PSC says that the Red Storm machine will succeed LeMieux, which provided 60 percent of the computing time used by NSF in the past year. LeMieux was great in its time, but the Red Storm machine would fit in a living room while LeMieux occupies a space the size of a basketball court. (Moore's Law is great, isn't it?)

Cray says that the Sandia implementation of Red Storm has sophisticated security features (which presumably add to its cost) that the PSC knock-off does not require, which is probably just a way to justify the fact that Sandia is paying $93 million, or nearly ten times as much money, to get a machine based on the same architecture that is only four times as powerful. The truth is, Sandia--and therefore U.S. taxpayers--paid for the development of Red Storm, and now other commercial and research institutions are going to benefit from that investment. PSC is one such institution, and Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which is getting a 20 teraflops Red Storm box in 2005, is another. This is how the very nationalistic supercomputer business works.

Cray also said last week that the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata, India, had acquired one of its XD1 Linux-Opteron boxes. The XD1s were created by an obscure and clever Canadian supercomputer maker called OctigaBay, which designed a sophisticated system that can scale from 12 to 12,000 Opteron processors and which offers very low costs compared to RISC/Unix parallel supercomputers. The Indian order came through Hinditron Group, Cray's reseller in India that is based in Mumbai. The machine that the institute is buying has 96 Opteron engines and is rated at 422 gigaflops.

Microsoft Leads Integration Server Pack, Says Nucleus

Considering Microsoft's lead in Gartner's Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) study, it really should come as no surprise that the Redmond, Washington, company also scored well in Nucleus Research's latest return on investment (ROI) study on the major integration platforms. The young Massachusetts IT analyst firm, which has popped many an ROI bubble with Ralph Nader-esque aplomb, says that integration isn't as complicated or risky as it once was, which Nucleus credits to "the current buzzword," which is--are you ready?--SOA!

Nucleus' latest ROI scorecard is on integration software, and Microsoft BizTalk Server takes the prize, followed by BEA WebLogic 8.1, IBM WebSphere 5, Sonic Software Business Integration Suite, TIBCO BusinessWorks, and webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, in that order. Microsoft scored a nearly perfect 4.8 rating across five categories (deployment, adoption, support, business impact, and vendor), while webMethods, which once led the integration broker market, along with TIBCO, brought up the rear with a 3.8 rating on the Nucleus scorecard; TIBCO was fourth, with a 4.0 rating.

Government Study Finds Offshoring Is Growing, but More Data Is Needed

A new government study indicates that offshoring is growing but there is not enough data to be certain of the total impact offshoring on the economy. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office analyzed the Department of Commerce's trade data and found that offshoring of IT jobs is indeed growing. From 1997 to 2002, the GAO found that offshoring of business, professional, and technical services grew from a $21.2 billion business to $37.5 billion, a 77 percent increase. What's more, the study found that outsourcing jobs to a subsidiary, what the GAO refers to as "affiliated trade," accounted for 71 percent of all IT outsourcing and is growing faster than unaffiliated trade, which grew at a 67 percent rate over the period. Among the different BPT services, computer processing, accounting and bookkeeping, and research and development jobs have grown the fastest since 1997, although, curiously, the amount of computer processing work being sent offshore actually declined from about $1.5 billion of work to $1 billion, from 2000 to 2002, while R&D grew steadily to $1 billion.

The GAO also looked at data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that, from March 2001 through June 2004, in industries commonly associated with offshoring, like computer system design and accounting and booking, Americans lost jobs at a higher rate than industries not associated with the phenomenon. The average annual rate of decline over this period was 5.7 percent of all jobs in computer systems design and related industries, and 7.9 percent for accounting and bookkeeping, while during this period total nonfarm employment actually increased by two-tenths of a percent. The study also found that total projected U.S. employment for the period from 2002 to 2012 is 2.4 million jobs lower than what was projected. However, the GAO says it cannot, based upon available data, come to any concrete conclusions about how offshoring is affecting the overall economy, and specifically cited the collapse of the dot-com bubble as one of the key events clouding the employment picture.