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But Wait, There's More
NASDAQ Warns SCO of Impending Delisting
The NASDAQ National Market has notified The SCO Group that because it has delayed its filing for the fiscal fourth quarter and year that ended October 31, 2004, the company is at risk of having its shares delisted from the stock exchange. SCO has until February 25 to make an appeal to NASDAQ for an extension that will allow its shares, which are trading at around $4, to remain on the exchange.
In a statement, SCO said it was taking time to go over its stack compensation plans that were put in place in 2000 before making its final 10-K filing for the year.
Sun Creates Confusion with "Sun DB" Roadmap Item
Sun Microsystems caused a bit of head scratching when it introduced the line "Sun DB" into a Java Enterprise System roadmap that it divulged to the Wall Street analyst community a few weeks ago. If there is one big hole in Sun's middleware line up, it is a database. However, Sun does have key partnerships with Oracle and Sybase on the line, and it would seem like suicide for Sun to launch into the relational database market and compete with these strong partners.
While Sun could pick up one or more of the open source MySQL, MaxDB, PostgreSQL, or Ingres databases and commercialize them and possibly have more control of its destiny over the long haul, the cold shoulder from Oracle and Sybase would hurt it quite a bit in the short run. And that, say various Sun executives, is why Sun will not do this. What Sun is apparently going to do is commercialize its own database specifically for its use inside the Java Enterprise System middleware. It won't be used as a back-end transactional or Web database, but rather to keep track of identity and authentication data that is part of JES.
Shavlik Expands Patch Management to Unix, Linux
Shavlik Technologies, a security software vendor based in St Paul, Minnesota, that specializes in patch management solutions for the Windows server market, is moving into the Unix and Linux markets.
Shavlik has announced plans to port its HFNetChkPro and Security Agents software to the HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX variants of Unix from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM, respectively. Shavlik will also do patch management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Support for Solaris and Red Hat Linux will come out in the middle of 2005, with support for AIX and HP-UX following soon thereafter. Shavlik says the addition of Linux and Unix support is being entirely driven by customers who want one tool to do patch management.
LeftHand Networks Ports SAN Management to Unix
LeftHand Networks, a provider of SAN management software for the IP-based, iSCSI SAN architectures, announced this week it was expanding its SAN/iQ SAN management software. The software has run on Microsoft Windows 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and will now include Unix platforms.
Specifically, LeftHand says that its SAN/iQ 6.1 software, which manages iSCSI-based SAN arrays attached to various kinds of servers, now supports the triumvirate of Unix: Sun Microsystems' Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, and IBM's AIX. The SAN/iQ software replicates data across multiple iSCSI arrays in the SAN, and with the new 6.1 release, also includes the capability to add RAID 5 data protection to iSCSI arrays within the SAN.
GST Creates Market Guides to Help eServer Buyers
Midrange storage specialist GST has produced buyer's guides for iSeries, pSeries, and TotalStorage products from IBM as a service to midrange shops and as a means of promoting its own disk and tape products. GST is also a reseller of eServer i5 and p5 servers, and in addition to providing detailed feeds and speeds of the IBM Power-based servers, the company has the good sense to show the street prices it is charging for customers who buy these systems through GST.
The following buyer's guides are available:
Gartner's People3 Predicts IT Workforce Shortage
The People3 human capital practice of Gartner is raising the specter of yet another IT skills shortage. In a report titled "The Incredible Shrinking Workforce: Addressing Tomorrow's Issues Today," People3 analysts say future job growth in the IT sector will be concentrated in highly skilled and knowledge-based work (presumably meaning application design and system architecting based on deep knowledge of IT and business practices in particular industries). The report estimates there will be 21 million new IT jobs in 2012 and only 17 million new entrants, which seems to imply that companies will be raiding other companies for talent as they themselves get raided. Increased demand meeting shortening supplies always leads to pay increases, which is good news for employees, but not so good for employers who don't want their IT people to return to the kind of sports star status they enjoyed in the late 1990s.
People3, which is pronounced "people cubed," has some sound advice that has a familiar ring to it: Conduct a workforce analysis, find out who your key employees are and what their compensation is relative to their opportunities elsewhere, and make sure they don't leave. That workforce plan also recommends that companies cultivate the kind of IT employees needed for future IT projects, and plot out the expected career paths for employees. "Workforce planning helps IT leaders avoid making the same overstaffing mistakes they made during the technology boom era, which consequently caused the layoffs and downsizing during the recent economic downturn," said Diane Berry, managing vice president at People3. "It also prevents the pitfalls of understaffing that eventually lead to employee burnout, low morale and low productivity."
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