But Wait, There's More

Merrill Lynch Says Break Up HP

In anticipation of the security analyst meeting Hewlett-Packard hosted this week, Steven Milunovich, the top technology analyst at brokerage house Merrill Lynch, released a report that called for HP to break itself into two companies. No, Milunovich is not suggesting that HP undo the merger with Compaq, but rather split the company in a way that will give the resulting two halves of HP (H and P, presumably) some focus that will maximize profits.

Milunovich says HP had to do the Compaq merger, and now needs to either break itself into a printing and imaging company on one side and a computer company on the other, or split into one company targeted at consumers and another targeted at enterprises. Milunovich's argument is that the current printing and imaging piece of HP's business (which is the company's profit engine) has a value roughly equal to the company's current market capitalization. While this frustrates some investors, the reality is that HP's enterprise and PC businesses need the profits from that HP printing business. There is no way this will happen, and there is no way HP will do anything but ignore this whole idea, much as IBM did in the early 1990s, when it actually did contemplate breaking into five Baby Blues.

IDC Says Oracle, Not IBM, Rules Relational Database World

The great thing about having two large researchers in the IT market is that you can very rarely get them to agree on anything. Last week, we reported on the market share figures from Gartner, which showed that IBM squeaked by rival Oracle to capture the biggest piece of the relational database market in 2003. This week, we can tell you that IDC has declared Oracle the winner in 2003, and by more than a nose.

IDC says that Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft control three-quarters of the relational and object relational database markets, which accounted for $13.6 billion in 2003, a slight upturn. IDC reckons that Oracle had 39.8 percent of the market, followed by IBM with 31.3 percent, and Microsoft with 12.1 percent. The company's analysts reckon that the relational database market will grow to reach a $20 billion level by 2008. It is hard to figure how that growth will come about with the proliferation of open source and commercial derivatives of databases for all kinds of platforms.

Open Source Community Weaves Geronimo Java App Server Under Apache Project

IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' WebLogic J2EE-compliant application servers were served notice from the open source development community last week as the Apache Software Foundation announced the Geronimo Java application server. Apache Geronimo, started in August 2003, is now an official Apache project, and the foundation of open source developers hopes to have Geronimo certified as an official J2EE application server by the end of the third quarter this year. Geronimo will be supported on Windows, Unix, Linux, and other platforms that support Apache and J2EE.

Geronimo is a lot of different programs woven together to make a single server, including Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis; OpenEJB and ActiveMQ from Codehaus; JOTM and ASM from ObjectWeb; CGLIB and MX4J from SourceForge; and Jetty from Mortbay. Geronimo will compete with commercial application servers from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and BEA Systems. Customers will get to choose a Web application server based on its merits, which is what a competitive market is all about. Find out more on the Apache Geronimo Web site.

Vanguard Enhances Single-Sign-On Software

Administrators gain new deployment options with the Version 5.2 release of Vanguard Integrity Professionals' ez/SignOn, a password consolidation utility that lets users sign on to Unix and other types of servers with a single password. With this release, administrators can selectively deploy ez/SignOn to certain computers in their network, an improvement over previous releases, which, upon rebooting, would automatically deploy the software to all servers and workstations from the root domain controller. The new release of ez/SignOn is one component of the Las Vegas-based company's security software suite, called Vanguard Security Solutions, and it also includes ez/Integrator, which extends mainframe authentication, authorization, and auditing to other platforms; PasswordReset; Administrator, a reporting tool for mainframe RACF security; Advisor, which provides analysis, reporting, and electronic report distribution; the Analyzer auditing tool; the Enforcer for mainframe intrusion detection; the INCompliance auditing and testing tool; and the SecurityCenter Windows GUI for Administrator. There are 23 enhancements in the new release, Vanguard says.

WRQ Enables Unix Hosts to Play in Plumtree's Portal

Host integration provider WRQ and Plumtree Software have formed an alliance to provide Plumtree portal users with access to Unix and other hosts, the two companies announced last week. The alliance calls for WRQ's Reflection emulation and Verstream integration software to be used to let companies expose logic and data from these "legacy" green screen systems as Web services, which are then assembled and published as portlets, using Plumtree's software. Plumtree says the partnership with WRQ is critical in its strategy of "radical openness." "Our strategy of radical openness requires our suite to be open to all systems, including mainframe green-screen applications," says Jay Simons, Plumtree's director of applications. Organizations are increasingly turning to portals to try to simplify and consolidate users' access to disparate computer systems and data sources. Plumtree says that about 600 organizations use its software, including Boeing, Ford, and the U.S. Navy. WRQ claims its software provides host access to more than 6,000,000 people around the world.

UCCnet Offers Free Utility for Product Data Registration, Synchronization

UCCnet last week launched a free utility to help smaller companies get started with registering and synchronizing their product data with UCCnet's GLOBALregistry. The new UCCnet Sync Utility, which is available to UCCnet members small enough to qualify for the $100 per year UCCnet subscription fee, requires just a standard PC with an Internet connection and no other hardware, software, or services. The free utility walks users, step by step, through the process of entering their product, location, and company information, ensuring the data follows EAN-UCC standards, and completing the synchronization processes by allowing companies to publish their product data to its trading partners. The UCCnet was formed in 1998 to help reduce product data errors that cost the retail and consumer processed goods industry billions of dollars per year.