But Wait, There's More

Judge Tells IBM to Stop Dragging Its Feet and Cough Up the AIX and Dynix Code for SCO Suit

The SCO Group has scored a minor victory in its $3 billion Linux-Unix lawsuit with IBM, with the U.S. Magistrate Judge on the case, Brooke Wells, issuing an order that compels IBM to respond to further discovery by SCO's lawyers and to make available more source code for the AIX and Dynix Unix variants that IBM controls. By opening the discovery process a little wider, SCO will presumably be able to find the smoking gun that proves IBM illegally dumped Unix code into Linux. This presumption may, of course, turn out to be just that: a presumption, not a fact. IBM has been given until March 18 to produce the additional code and related documents. Provided the summary motions to dismiss that IBM filed are not effective, the case will go to trial sometime in November. But you can bet IBM's lawyers will continue to push the legal limits of time-stretching, which is why SCO cleverly negotiated a cap on legal fees with its lawyers. By the way, if IBM doesn't cough up the code, Judge Wells has said she will then order SCO to have unfettered access to IBM's code repositories.

In a separate development, two weeks ago, SCO's lawyers filed a motion with Judge Kimball for IBM's chairman, Sam Palmisano, to be deposed as part of the lawsuit. Back at the end of 1999, when IBM first caught Linux fever, it was Palmisano, as head of IBM's Server Group, who lead the charge. Shortly thereafter, he was named president and chief operating officer, thereby being anointed as the company's future chairman and CEO once Louis Gerstner retired. IBM's lawyers, according to the SCO filing, have contended that, "Palmisano does not have 'any knowledge' of any facts relevant to this litigation." This seems unlikely, since he was the one who picked the Linux czar at IBM and realized that Linux was going to be a gravy train--at least if you believe the PR IBM was generating at the time.

IBM Cuts AIX Software Prices for Entry Boxes

IBM announced this week that it has created a new software group for its AIX 5L 5.2 and 5.3 Unix variants that will allow AIX to better compete against Linux when it comes to software licensing costs.

The dirty little secret in the Linux market is that no one who is creating a high-performance computing cluster actually pays for the server version of Linux, but, rather, uses a stripped down workstation version that costs a lot less. In order for AIX to compete on equal footing in the politically and economically important HPC space (IBM's customers have a large installed base of Power-AIX applications that are not so easily ported to Linux), IBM needed to cut AIX prices, which is exactly what the company did this week.

Specifically, IBM has created a new D5 software group for AIX 5.2 and 5.3. The ValuePak low-cost version of AIX 5.2 and 5.3, which is missing some features of the full releases, will cost $150 per processor. A regular AIX license will cost $170 per processor. This new lower-priced license is available on the two-way, Power5-based eServer p5 and i5 servers, as well as on the two-way, PowerPC 970-based JS20 blade servers for BladeCenters. Before this announcement, customers had to pay $385 per processor on either a p5 520 or an i5 520. That higher pricing remains in effect on the p5 550 and the i5 550; on the bigger p5 570s and i5 570s, which scale up to 16-way processing, AIX costs $1,225 per CPU. Virtualization Engine features for AIX 5.3 cost a few hundred dollars per CPU on top of that in the p5s, and is bundled for "free" in the i5 line.

Hitachi TagmaStore Arrays Virtualize EMC Arrays

Disk array maker Hitachi said this week that the software engineers who create its disk controller and virtualization software have managed to extend the virtualization capabilities of its TagmaStore high-end disk arrays such that this virtualization software can wrap around competitor EMC's Symmetrix arrays. Back in November, Hitachi already offered similar virtualization extensions for IBM's Shark disk arrays

By extending its virtualization software from TagmaStore to Symmetrix and Shark arrays, Hitachi is trying to put its arrays at the center of disk planning, while at the same time helping customers with these boxes, since they will no longer have to buy EMC or IBM software for disk mirroring, snap-shotting, and other virtualization features. Hitachi's approach is noteworthy because both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, which are neck-and-neck in the Unix market, rebrand the TagmaStore arrays for their Unix server lines.

Meiosys Ports MetaCluster to Solaris from Linux

Meiosys, a Palo Alto, California, creator of virtualization and clustering software for middleware software running on top of the Linux operating system, announced this week that it has released its MetaCluster UC 3.0 software and is porting it to the Solaris Unix environment.

MetaCluster UC, unlike virtual machine partitions that virtualize at the operating-system level, virtualizes between an operating system and an application running on that system. Meiosys says that virtualizing at the operating-system level can place overhead of anywhere from 10 to 30 percent on systems, and says further that it believes the best way to ensure application uptime (thereby meeting service-level agreements for those applications) is to virtualize at the application level and then move applications (rather than whole operating systems and their application stacks) around the network as conditions dictate. By the way, MetaCluster can run inside virtual machine partitions, if that is what customers want to do.

With MetaCluster UC 3.0, Meiosys is supporting Linux applications running on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X86 and Opteron processors. In the first quarter of this year, this software will be ported to Sun Microsystems' Solaris 8 running on its Sparc-based servers, and later this year the software will be ported to the new Solaris 10 operating system running on either Sparc or X86 platforms.

Wary CIOs to Spend 2.5% More on IT in 2005, Says Gartner

The analysts at Gartner have dusted off their crystal balls and finally joined the shrinking crowd of analysts (last year Forrester Research bought GIGA and Gartner bought META Group) in prognosticating about IT spending growth in 2005. According to a survey of 1,300 chief information officers, who have a combined spending budget of $57 billion (or about $44 million each, on average), across a cross section of industries that is representative of the worldwide economy, IT budgets are expected to rise only 2.5 percent in 2005. This is considerably lower than all but the most pessimistic estimates for IT spending growth that came out as 2004 was coming to a close, which had growth pegged at somewhere between 5 and 7 percent.

The respondents of the Gartner survey showed why the budget numbers were lower than expected, and why that number is increasingly irrelevant. First and foremost, two-thirds of the chief information officers polled say that there is a disconnect between what they believe and what their CEOs believe they can and need to do with IT systems, and these CIOs portrayed themselves as being "at risk" because of the way CEOs view the performance of their IT departments.

And while CIOs ranked business process engineering, beefing up security, cutting operating costs, supporting the competitive advantages of their business, and revenue growth as key business factors, the top IT priorities do not map one-to-one, with IT executives saying that they want to have better security tools, more business intelligence and analytics, wireless and mobile access to systems for the workforce, and ERP upgrades. There is a big disconnect here, and that does not bode well. The other disconnect, which companies like IBM and Accenture are hoping to exploit, is one between the skill sets for business process engineering (which involves a rethinking of the processes that get automated into systems to simplify business and streamline the applications that support those processes) that companies have in IT and other departments and the skills that IT directors believe they will need to do business process engineering. Some 61 percent of IT executives polled said they did not have the skills they needed in general, and of those who ranked BPO in the top five of priorities for this year, 80 percent said they didn't have the skills to do BPO. Yikes.

Survey Says IT Salaries Stagnated in 2004

IT Salary survey specialist Janco Associates, based in Park City, Utah, has just released the results of a salary survey for the second half of 2004, and the results seem to indicate that IT salaries in North America are still under pressure from the combined effects of weak economic conditions and offshoring.

We keep hearing how IT budgets grew in 2004 and are expected to grow again in 2005, but Janco's surveys suggest that average compensation across all IT jobs and business sizes that Janco surveys (midsized and large enterprises) actually fell by 0.75 percent from June 2004 to January 2005, to $77,841. For many job titles, including operators, analysts, customer service managers, Webmasters, office automation managers, graphics and forms designers, and project managers, average salaries fell by 5.1 to 13.2 percent over that time. Salaries for voice and wireless telecom managers fell by 15.2 percent, which is stunning. At large enterprises, salaries for IT administrators, Web application developers, data warehouse managers, LAN application managers, and other hot areas--where the average salaries tend to be larger--grew from 5.1 to 8.5 percent. Only nine of 24 non-executive positions tracked by Janco saw average salary growth, but the salaries that these top people command are large enough to raise the class average and to mute the declines across all titles. To put it bluntly, the IT industry average salary masks huge declines in salaries for key IT positions.

In the executive ranks, Janco says, total average compensation for CIOs at large enterprises was up by 4.2 percent in the six months, to $169,601. At midsized companies, the average salary was up only 1.4 percent, to $171,791. Those numbers are not typos. You see it right; on average, CIOs at midrange companies are getting paid a little more than those at large enterprises. That's because big companies have been cutting executive compensation (mostly by paying less for new people) since it peaked in 2000. Across all industries and job titles, Janco says, many people who had planned to retire in 2003 and 2004 have still not seen their retirement portfolios recover from the recession of 2000 to 2003, and they have opted to keep working and not push for big pay raises.

McDATA Acquires Storage Rival CNT

Storage networking specialists and sometimes brutal competitors McDATA and Computer Network Technology announced last week that they will merge. The companies, which both sell specialized switching equipment for storage area networks and services for implementing SANs, have agreed to merge to take on bigger competitors, like Brocade and Cisco Systems. McDATA acquired CNT for about $235 million, which includes a big block of McDATA stock, and assumed the company's debts.