But Wait, There's More

SCO Clears OpenSolaris, Reports Second Quarter Results

In a conference call with analysts late last week reporting its first quarter results of fiscal 2005, Unix operating system supplier The SCO Group gave an almost entirely green light to Sun Microsystems's planned release of the open source variant of Solaris 10, called OpenSolaris. SCO has been hinting strongly that it would protect is intellectual property rights over Unix, and without giving 100 percent clearance, SCO's president, Darl McBride, came as close as he dared prior to actually looking through the OpenSolaris code when it becomes available in June.

"I believe that what they are doing will be well within the rights of our agreements and is something that will still be protective of our rights over the Unix operating system," he said. "Sun has been a great licensee, and if some of our licensees had toed the line the way Sun has, I don't think we would be having the issues we are in the courtrooms today."

Sun is in a somewhat unique position, since the original SunOS was heavily based on the open source Berkeley Systems Design Unix and was converged into AT&T's Unix System V through a technology pact between Sun and the telecom giant, which is the creator of Unix and the C compiler. While Sun has paid to license Unix from SCO, it could be fairly argued that Sun has rights that are stronger than any Unix supplier, including SCO. This is the only way to explain the fact that Sun is even able to open source Solaris without having SCO sue it. If this were not the case, IBM could file an immediate motion to dismiss, claiming that SCO is selectively enforcing its copyright and intellectual property as they pertain to Unix.

SCO said that its core Unix server business brought in $8.8 million in sales (including services) in the first quarter of fiscal 2005 ended January 31, and that the Unix business, even though it was down 22 percent, was cash flow positive in the quarter. SCO attributed the decline not to any animosity toward SCO, but rather to the cut-throat pricing in the operating system market. Gross margins on Unix software sales were nonetheless a very decent 84 percent, in fact. Overall, SCO said that sales were just under $8.9 million, with $77,000 in SCOsource intellectual property licensing and $500,000 in other income from Vintela, yet another Utah IT company that was created through founder Ray Noorda's stock when he was booted out of Novell a decade ago. SCO said that a third party has also swooped in and bought up SCO's stake in Trolltech for $779,100. From the outside, it appears that former SCO and Canopy Group (Noorda's IT incubator) are disassociating from SCO and its chairman, Ralph Yarro, who has been in a messy legal battle with Noorda's family but who now has absolute control of SCO since a settlement he reached with Canopy gave him its 30 percent stake in SCO (about 5.4 million shares).

Going forward, SCO is looking ahead to the June launch at Yankee Stadium in New York of its "Legend" OpenServer 6 operating system, which will allow OpenServer and UnixWare applications to run side-by-side on the one platform. McBride said that Legend is the culmination of several years and multiple millions of dollars of investment, and the fact that it will be able to support thousands of OpenServer and UnixWare applications would give it a strong appeal in the marketplace.

Symark Launches PowerKeeper Security, Adds Support for Solaris 10

Symark, a security software company that focuses on the Unix and Linux platforms that is expanding into Windows, has announced a new security tool for protecting the passwords of system administrators called PowerKeeper. PowerKeeper's software is actually implemented in an appliance, which currently supports a maximum of 10,000 systems and which, as the name suggests, acts as a gatekeeper for admins needing to access servers. Rather than having to change accesses on all of your servers for specific admins, you can change them once on PowerKeeper, which in turn controls access to all of the servers it is hooked into. PowerKeeper supports the Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX variants of Unix plus Red Hat and Novell Linux; the appliance allows both SSH and RPC access for Unix and Linux. It also supports Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 platforms, but you can only use RPC.

Symark, which is based in Agoura Hills, California, was founded in 1985. It also this week announced that its PowerBroker tool, which provides granular control over root privileges on servers, now supports Solaris 10, the latest Unix from Sun Microsystems. The two companies also extended their joint marketing agreements, and Symark will push Solaris 10 to its customers as Sun peddles Symark's tools to its customers.

BusinessObjects Partners with MySQL for Business Intelligence

The open source MySQL database keeps building momentum, and this week business intelligence software maker BusinessObjects announced a partnership with MySQL (the Swedish company behind the database) to embed MySQL (the database) inside the BusinessObjects XI data warehousing toolset. Specifically, BusinessObjects will embed MySQL inside versions of BusinessObjects XI running on Unix and Linux platforms to be used as the system repositior; the partnership between the two companies will also see MySQL on the official support list of database for the Crystal Reports XI reporting tool and Data Integrator, BusinessObjects' extract-transform-load (ETL) tool for data warehouses. By supporting MySQL, BusinessObjects is significantly increasing its chances of increasing its installed base from the current 30,000--which is the largest installed base in the business intelligence market, by the way.

Winchester Enhances SATA, Fibre Channel Disk Arrays

Storage vendor Winchester Systems has announced a new, top-end Serial ATA disk array that pretty much puts to rest the idea that SATA cannot scale. The new SA-700 array can lash together a stunning 800 of the 400 GB SATA disk drives, scaling up to 320 TB in a single subsystem; with future 500 GB SATA drives, it scales up to 400 TB. All of these disks spin at 7200 RPM, but if you want to move down to 74 GB SATA drives, you can get 10K RPM drives to boost performance. These arrays can be lashed together to create a network of arrays--all managed from a single console--that spans 6.4 PB (that's petabytes, or thousands of TB). Such large arrays are necessary for archiving dense data sets, like video and satellite imagery. The SA-700 has two RAID controllers, and it is supported on Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Winchester has also announced a new Fibre Channel array, the FX-400e, which has a single or twin (single plus redundant for hot spare) RAID controller, which can support up to four concurrent hosts, and which scales to 44 TB. The FX-400e is also supported on Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Middleware Market Up Modestly in 2004, Says Gartner

According to research performed by Gartner, the application integration and middleware (AIM) software market accounted for $6.7 billion in sales of products worldwide in 2004, an increase of 5.8 percent over sales levels in 2003. IBM continues to dominate this space, with a 37.2 percent share of the market. And IBM's main rival for mindshare in the application server space--BEA Systems continues to lose ground. As you can see from the table below, Oracle is growing faster than IBM but is starting out pretty small, and Microsoft is seeing explosive growth in the AIM space and looks set to pass Oracle and start vying with Fujitsu for the third pole position in the market. AIM includes application servers, portals, messaging middleware, and transaction processing monitors, by Gartner's definition.

Intel Reports Profit Up 25 Percent

On the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law--the celebrated axiom of Intel founder Gordon Moore that predicts processors will double in performance every 18 months or so--Intel announced that its net income had jumped 25 percent to $2.15 billion for the first quarter. The better-than-expected financial results from the Santa Clara, California, chip giant helped to stem the tide of bad news from the tech sector, which saw worse-than-expected results from tech giant IBM last week (see "IBM Comes Up Short in Q1 After March Fall Off"). Intel's revenue rose 17 percent to $9.43 billion for the quarter ended March 27, the chip maker announced yesterday. "Led by strong demand for our mobile products, Intel posted double-digit revenue and profit growth versus a year ago," said Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Intel said it benefited from lower-than-expected manufacturing costs.