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Sun, HP Tout Big Unix Server Wins

Sun Microsystems was happy as a pig in cold mud last week after getting long-time financial services customer JPMorgan Chase to talk about its commitment to Sun's Solaris platform. JPMC is a huge user of IBM mainframes and Unix kits of just about every stripe, but had a particularly large installation of Sparc/Solaris servers that it built up over the 1990s--just like so many other financial services firms. While JPMC outsourced many IT operations a few years ago to IBM (and has subsequently moved many of those operations back inside the company) and was acquiring IBM's Power4 servers when Sun's Sparc platforms fell behind in performance and bang for the buck, Sun's improving Sun Fire product line and much-improved Solaris 10 platform seems to have got JPMC enthusiastic about Sun products again.

The forebears of JPMC were among the earliest customers Sun had, over 20 years ago, and now the Investment Bank Technology team inside JPMC has committed to build out existing computing grids (which are based on Linux) and to jointly build a virtualized data center and data archiving applications with Sun on the Solaris 10 platform running on both Sparc and Opteron servers. Sun has been piloting various technologies in JPMC operations in New York, London, and Hong Kong.

Hewlett-Packard was similarly relieved that the NASDAQ exchange has re-upped its commitment to the Unix-based NonStop fault tolerant server line that HP sells. More than 23 years ago, NASDAQ was one of the first big customers for the Tandem NonStop servers, and the stock exchange has just inked a three-year deal to buy 500 nodes to upgrade the cluster behind NASDAQ, which supports 700 brokerages and processes 7.5 million quote updates, 4.2 million trade reports, 2.6 million orders, and 2.3 billion shares traded per day. HP Financial Services provided the financing for the deal; it is unclear if NASDAQ was able to get a pay-per-use deal, but considering that it is growing its workload at 35 percent per year and has some pretty big transaction spikes to cope with--probably the worst in the world, in fact--a pay-per-use deal makes sense economically.

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, Spectrum support products; Sun will also finance third party equipment under these deals. The minimum deal size is $25,000 for this offering.

i2, IBM Test Power5-Based p5 Servers on Transport Manager App

Supply chain management software provider i2 Technologies and Unix server maker IBM are boasting that IBM has tested i2's Transportation Manager on Power-based servers with 4, 8, and 16 processors and was able to process 500,000 shipment orders in nine hours. The companies said this is the best performance to date on any benchmark for the Transportation Manager software. The tests were run on IBM's AIX 5L 5.2 operating system, which does not have support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which the Power5-based p5 servers have in their processors.

It is hard to assess whether or not this performance is better than other platforms can deliver, since i2 does not publish benchmarks in a way that makes it easy to compare them. In other words, this benchmark test is not really worth all that much, and I really only bring it up because some data is better than no data and if we all complain to i2 and IBM, maybe they will gather up the i2 benchmarks in one place (including those that are not yet public) so we can see how these tests rate with other tests.

MicroStrategy Ports BI Software to HP-UX on Itanium

MicroStrategy, a key provider of business intelligence software used in conjunction with data warehouses, said this week it will port its Unix-based software, which runs on Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX on the PA-RISC platform already, to HP-UX 11i running on Itanium-based Integrity servers from HP. MicroStrategy said it will have the port done sometime in the second half of this year, and that it is getting help from Intel and HP in doing the port, including access to Intel's future compilers to help MicroStrategy to tune its code for Itanium.

Tarantella Adds Solaris 10 Support to Secure Desktop Software

Tarantella, the middleware business of the former Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) that was spun out of the Unix vendor years ago and that still hails from the California city of that name, has announced that its Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition software has been ported to Solaris 10 running on X86 processors.

Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition is a remote access program that allows end users working from PCs and laptops to access server-based applications running on Unix, Linux, Windows, and proprietary platforms all from a single set of security software. The software had already been supported on Sparc/Solaris platforms and now can be used on Sparc/X86 platforms running the new Solaris 10. While Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition allows access to just about any kind of server and any kind of application, it is only compiled to run itself on Linux and Solaris.

Arkeia Partners with Federal Edge to Sell Backup to Uncle Sam

Linux backup and recovery software maker Arkeia has partnered with Federal Edge in hopes it will get both organizations more government business. Arkeia has backup software for Unix and Linux, and Federal Edge, which specializes in selling IT products to the federal government, has the GSA schedule that is tough to come by. By becoming a value-added reseller of Arkeia's, Federal Edge makes it easier for government agencies to buy solutions like Arkeia's Network Backup and Server Backup.

Lawson Profits Despite Slowdown in Software License Sales

Despite seeing its license revenue plummet by 45 percent during the most recent quarter, and its total revenue decline by 10 percent to $82.7 million, ERP software developer Lawson Software still managed to increase its net income as a result of aggressive cost cutting and corporate restructuring.

Revenue from new software license fees--the most important indicator of the health of a software company--dropped by $11.3 million to $13.9 million for the third quarter of its 2005 fiscal year, which ended February 28. Offsetting the decline slightly was a small up tick in Lawson's services revenues, which increased $2.4 million to $68.8 million during the quarter. Despite the poor showing in new license sales, the company was able to increase its profit by $200,000 to $2.8 million during the quarter, thanks to a combination of aggressive collections, favorable reductions in bad debt, product warranty and income taxes, and increased interest income. The improving profitability of the company satisfied Wall Street, and Lawson's stock, which is traded on the NASDAQ National Market, barely moved off its mark of about $6 per share, giving it a market cap of about $585 million.

Jay Coughlan, Lawson's president and CEO, said the company suffered from "ongoing questions about the direction of the software industry, which resulted in extended sales cycles and some delayed purchasing decisions." Indeed, Oracle's heavy-handed acquisition last quarter of PeopleSoft and the vast J.D. Edwards installed base left many ERP software users questioning their product decisions and strategies. But Lawson, like other players in the market for OS/400 ERP software, also senses this has opened up an opportunity to recruit disaffected J.D. Edwards shops. This strategy will target some Unix shops, but mostly OS/400 shops.