But Wait, There's More

Forrester Says IT Spending Picking Up

IT spending has inched up at large North American companies so far in 2004, Forrester Research says. The Massachusetts market research firm says a study of 870 chief information officers and IT decision-makers indicates that the total spending increase this year, compared with 2003, will amount to 2.4 percent, up from the 1.7 percent figure Forrester predicted in December. Companies with the most growth in their IT budgets are in the transportation, construction, consulting, and financial services industries, where the increase in total IT spending is expected to top 4 percent this year, the research firm says. Forrester says IT shops are using their 2004 budgets to "get back to basics" and are upgrading core technologies, like those for security, applications, and PCs. Mobile technology spending is also up, and so is ERP-related spending for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Forrester also sees more spending going to portals, content management systems, and business intelligence software, while spending has leveled off for SCM, CRM, and procurement software products.

John Fowler Appointed to Head Sun's Network Systems Unit

John Fowler, who joined Sun Microsystems in 1990 and has most recently been the company's chief technology officer, has been appointed as executive vice president in charge of the Network Systems Group. NSG, you will recall, was created in the aftermath of an executive management shuffle a month ago that saw Sun killing off its Volume Systems Products Group, and the top executives of that unit and its Enterprise Systems Group lost their jobs as Sun also killed off the future "Millennium" UltraSparc-V processor. NSG will push Sun's X86-based servers running Solaris, Linux, and Windows (yes, Windows), as well as entry Sparc/Solaris boxes.

The appointment of Fowler to the NSG job makes sense, and was made by new president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz. So far, Sun has not named a replacement to the CTO position, but with original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim back at Sun since the company acquired his secretive startup, called Kealia, a few months ago, it seems likely that this job will eventually fall to Bechtolsheim, who was Sun's CTO from 1984 to 1995. He knows the job inside and out, and in many ways Sun went astray once he left. He may or may not want the job, which is why Sun hasn't made an announcement yet.

Sun Adds Solaris OEM Partners, but Where's Fujitsu-Siemens?

Sun Microsystems said this week that it has added another 15 new partners who are distributing its Solaris for X86 operating system on various Intel Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices Opteron servers. With these 15, says Jack O'Brien, Sun's group marketing manager of X86 platforms, the total number of Solaris for X86 OEM partners stands at 20. He says that the company is working on another couple of OEMs in Asia, which it will announce at the Sun Network event in Shanghai, China, in a few weeks.

The new OEM partners are tier 2 or tier 3 suppliers, and these server makers are just as important to Sun's aspirations for building a Solaris on X86 ecosystem as tier 1 players like itself. The new OEMs include ASA Computers, Continuous Computing Corporation, Electronic Business Solutions, Flight System Consulting, NatureTech, Pinnacle Data Systems, Portable One, PSSC Labs, Rave Computer Association, S-Terra Group, System Works, Think Computer Products, and Tokyo Forex Financial. Just a few weeks ago, Sun inked a deal with Rackable Systems.

The most obvious Solaris on X86 partner missing from Sun's OEM list (and a tier 1 player to boot) is none other than Solaris partner and Sparc competitor Fujitsu-Siemens, which has a very large X86 server base in Europe and Asia. Why this didn't happen long ago is a bit of a mystery. O'Brien didn't seem to want to talk about this much, so maybe something is in the works. Then again, maybe it isn't. But it sure does make sense.

Sun Cluster 3.1 to Support Solaris on X86 Iron

If Sun Microsystems wants midrange and high-end customers to take its Solaris on X86 plans seriously, it has to get all of the add-on systems programs, that are often used in conjunction with Solaris, available on the Solaris-X86 platform, and it has to do it on both Intel Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors. To that end, Sun announced this week that Sun Cluster 3.1, the company's high availability clustering software for Sparc/Solaris environments, will offer that high-availability software on the Solaris for X86 platform. More than that, says Jim Sangster, director of marketing for Sun's high availability software products, the company is working with application providers, so the products that have been enabled to work with Sun Cluster on Sparc iron will also work with Sun Cluster on X86 iron. (This is not as simple as it seems.)

Sangster says that the one thing Sun cannot easily do is to allow a set of X86 machines act as a backup for a set of Sparc machines, even if they are both running the current Solaris 9 or the future Solaris 10, because of endian issues and other esoteric matters that have to do with chip architectures. He hinted, however, that Sun might be able to have Solaris machines fail-over to Linux boxes, provided they are all on X86 processors.

Sun Cluster 3.1 will become generally available at the end of June. It is available as a stand-alone product that costs $1,000 on an X86 server with a single processor; $2,000 on a server with two processors; and $5,000 on a server with four processors. The program is also part of the Java Enterprise System bundle, which costs $100 per employee per year. Sangster says that some Solaris customers who are looking to deploy clusters are opting for the JES bundle because the numbers work out better than buying Sun Cluster as a stand-alone product. Others are buying JES for the middleware stack and then deciding that since Sun Cluster is there for free, they may as well do high availability clustering.

Agilysys Reports Increase in Year-End Revenues

Revenues and profits are up for iSeries distributor Agilysys, which last week announced its fourth-quarter and year-end results for fiscal 2004. The Cleveland, Ohio, distributor reported net income of $4.8 million on sales of $371.6 million for the quarter ending March 31, a 42 percent increase in revenue from a year ago. The company, which acquired Kyrus Corporation and Inter-American Data during the year, reported total revenues of $1.4 billion, a 20 percent increase, and net income of $8.7 million for the year, which compares nicely with the $42.1 million loss it took last year. Arthur Rhein, chairman, president, and chief executive of Agilysys, indicated the fourth quarter results were a bit of a surprise. "We experienced strong sales performance across all customer segments, well beyond the strength we typically see in our fourth quarter," he said. The company expects to grow revenues between 13 and 18 percent in 2005.

New Offerings from UCCnet and EPCglobal

Industry bodies UCCnet and EPCglobal recently made two incremental steps toward the Holy Grail of universal collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR). EPCglobal, which is hashing out the data standards to be used with radio frequency identification (RFID) smart tag implementations, will provide oodles of RFID education at its first annual EPCglobal US Conference 2004, which will be held September 28-30 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Meanwhile, UCCnet, which, like EPCglobal, was cofounded by the Uniform Code Council, released UCCnet GLOBALregistry Version 2.3, the latest iteration of the product data synchronization registry, which is available to 3,000 UCCnet subscribers. With backing from major retailers, like Wal-Mart, RFID, UCCnet, and related technologies are increasingly vital components of CPFR in the consumer goods supply chain.