But Wait, There's More

Foote Partners Says IT Salaries Are on the Up

According to compensation analysts at Foote Partners, IT salaries started to rise in late 2004 and they continued to do so through the early part of 2005. Based on surveys of 48,000 IT workers in North America and Europe from January through April of this year, Foote Partners profiled salaries for 170 different job types.

Foote Partners says companies are hiring again and they are also concerned about retaining talent for their existing and often legacy systems. "But it's really much more than that," explains David Foote, the firm's president and chief research officer. "Employers are once again investing in onshore applications development skills notwithstanding their desire to offshore some applications and business processes. They're demanding more industry-specific experience to go with tech skills mastery, and even systems-specific solutions experience within an industry, which is a fairly new development on the scale that we've been seeing it."

For the 12 months ended in April, salaries for IT workers with non-certified skills were up 3.6 percent, and salaries were up 2.8 percent in the first quarter. IT workers with certified skills tend to get paid a little higher, yet their salaries continued to climb by 4 percent in the past 12 months (again, ended in April), but only grew by 1.6 percent in the first quarter of the year. A year ago, salaries were shrinking. And now, it seems, a lot of certifications (particularly project management certifications) are being required to get that base salary and are not given any incremental value beyond that. The hot skills that IT managers are looking for right now are for Microsoft's SQL Server and .NET and IBM's WebSphere, and the highest-paying skills are for security, extreme programming, storage area networking, Oracle databases and applications, and SQL Server. Generic database and Web programming skills are losing value, and HTTP, HTML, WML, PowerBuilder, and Perl skills are "cold" skills.

IBM Finishes Building ASCI Purple Super for DOE

Last Friday, IBM said it has finished building the ASCI Purple massively parallel supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as part of a $290 million contract that Big Blue won from the U.S. government's Department of Energy back in November 2002. That contract included about $100 million to build the Blue Gene/L ridiculously parallel supercomputer (well, what else do you call that which is far beyond massively parallel?), with the remaining $190 million going into the ASCI Purple machine.

The initial ASCI Purple specs called for the cluster to be comprised of 196 64-way Squadron servers using dual-core Power5 processors running in the vicinity of 2 GHz, with a total of 12,544 processor cores and using a daisy chain of IBM's "Federation" High Performance Switch (HPS) system interconnection switches to link them all together. The ASCI Purple machine has 12,288 Power5 processors running at 1.9 GHz, which is comprised of 1,536 of p5 575s. The expected peak Linpack performance rating for ASCI Purple a few weeks ago, before the trials were run, was around 93.4 teraflops.

Supercomputers like ASCI Purple are usually built in stages, starting with then-current technology and a subset of the hardware and gradually building up to the fully capable machine. You build in stages, do performance and architecture tests, and as the machines pass milestones, they move on to the next stage. Last Friday, IBM announced it had finished building the pieces of the ASCI Purple machine and that the boxes will be delivered to the new Terascale Simulation Facility at LLNL in August, with final acceptance testing to begin in October. That facility has some pretty impressive power requirements, since it needs to juice up those 12,288 processors, 50 TB of main memory, and a 2 PB (petabytes, or 1,000 TB) file system with over 8,000 disk drives. The whole shebang takes 4.8 megawatts of power, which is about as much electricity as 4,800 homes use, and generates 16 million BTU/hour in heat. Getting rid of that heat also a huge amount of electricity.

To get to the stage where LLNL would take delivery, IBM powered up a demonstration system of 1,280 servers, which ran a mix of supercomputer applications modeling turbulent hydrodynamics and unstructured mesh radiation transport. The deal required IBM to measure theoretical peak performance on this system such that peak performance on one workload plus sustained performance on the other added up to 101 teraflops. As it turns out, the system came in at 111 teraflops, which obviously made IBM pretty happy. Big Blue also ran the Linpack Fortran benchmark on the system with 1,185 nodes active, and it came in at 60.5 teraflops.

The ASCI program was founded in 1995 to encourage computer makers to hit the 100 teraflops performance point in the 2004-2005 timeframe, but this goal is important not in the abstract. It had a very specific purpose aside from generating innovation in computing, and that was to run massive simulations to make sure that the arsenal of nuclear weapons in the United States that have been sitting in holes in the ground for decades still work.

Big Blue Bags A High-Profile Tru64 Unix Shop

IBM's Unix server business might have slowed down a bit in the first quarter, but it certainly revved up in the second quarter. And one of the key ways that all IT vendors maintain momentum is by getting their big wins in the press, as IBM has succeeded in doing with this particular story. We are barraged with zillions of these stories on all fronts and on all aspects of IT infrastructure, but occasionally the stories are interesting and the news flow is slow, so they end up in the issue.

Last week, IBM announced that car rental company Dollar Thrifty, which had been running its in-house developed car reservation system on Hewlett-Packard's AlphaServer systems running Tru64 Unix and its TruCluster clustering extensions had decided in the first quarter of this year to move to different iron. This comes as little surprise since Tru64 Unix is not being supported on HP's Itanium-based Integrity line and the TruCluster extensions that were supposed to be available in HP's HP-UX Unix variant were mothballed and replaced with file systems and clustering software that is a hybrid of HP's own MC ServiceGard and Veritas software. Once Dollar Thrifty had to look at moving to a different HP platform entirely with Veritas software, it might has well have looked at all the options in the Linux market, and executives at the car rental firm did just that. None of this is the interesting bit. What is interesting is that way back when, as Dollar Thrifty created its reservation system, it did so in the Oracle database using Oracle tools. What that meant is this: Dollar Thifty made the decision to move in the first quarter, and after putting out RFPs and doing the vendor dance, the company could pick a vendor--IBM--and a new platform--IBM's pSeries p5 570 midrange AIX servers running AIX 5.3 and the Oracle 10g database--and then do the entire migration of its reservation system in a mere three months. Multiple p5 570s are clustered for high availability using IBM's HACMP V5.3 clustering software, which will be generally available on August 12.

Karl Freund, vice president of pSeries product marketing at IBM, says that Big Blue has an easy time convincing customers it has competitive Unix boxes, but it has a hard time convincing customers that such migrations are not even possible, but doable on a regular basis. But, of course, you can't be tied tightly to the operating system or the underlying iron to do that. Dollar Thrifty Group, which runs the Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental chains, is based in Tulsa, Okla., which is just a stone's throw away from the Migration Factory that IBM has set up in its Austin, Texas, facility to make such migrations easier. Those migration services were a key part of this deal, which brings IBM the sale of several p5 570 systems and related storage, but equally importantly, denies HP a sale of one of its Integrity servers to an old Compaq customer.

Vision Solutions Delivers ORION for IBM's AIX on the iSeries

High availability software vendor Vision Solutions said last week it has extended its ORION high availability clustering software so it supports IBM's AIX Unix variant.

The ORION suite of products, which started shipping in September 2003 after two years in development, were designed to support OS/400, Windows, Linux, and AIX from the get-go. The initial 2003 products obviously supported OS/400 very well, given the OS/400 heritage of Vision Solution's prior products, but also delivered data replication and switched disk services for Windows servers, switched disk services for Linux, and data replication between DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server. ORION for AIX can be used on AIX partitions running on the iSeries and supports either Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools (iASPs) or plain SCSI disks (which is what Unix is used to looking at). The software allows two or more servers connected to a common storage tower or subsystem to failover for each other in the event that one of the servers is knocked out. ORION for AIX can also be used on IBM's pSeries servers as a standalone product as well.

IBM Splits Services Unit as Joyce Leaves for VC Firm

After reporting its financial results last week, IBM announced that John Joyce, who has headed up IBM's Global Services unit since May 2004 and who was the company's chief financial officer prior to that for five years, has departed Big Blue to join venture capitalist Silver Lake Partners. In the wake of his departure, which comes as the Global Services unit has stumbled a bit and forced a massive reorganization, IBM's chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has decided that the Global Services unit, which represents more than half of IBM's annual sales but only a third of its profits, needs to be broken up to be more manageable.

To that end, Mike Daniels, head of IBM's Americas sales operations, has been tapped as senior vice president of the new Information Technology Services group within Global Services. This group will take over strategic outsourcing, e-business hosting, financing, and services aimed at small and medium businesses. Marc Lautenbach, who was running SMB sales at IBM, takes over the Americas region. Ginni Rometty, who has been heading up the integration of IBM's PricewaterhouseCoopers business process consulting acquisition for the past several years, is now senior vice president of the Enterprise Business Services group within Global Services. This group will deal with consulting and systems integration, business transformation outsourcing. IBM also tapped Bob Moffat to be senior vice president of Integrated Operations, which essentially means managing IBM's own supply chain, call centers, and outsourced operations. All three executives report directly to Palmisano.

Nick Donofrio, a long-time IBMer who has lead many initiatives at Big Blue, was also named executive vice president of innovation and technology, and he will be tasked with driving innovation deeper into the IBM culture.

Dell Shoots for $80 Billion in Sales by 2009 or So

You have to have goals in life, and no one would ever accuse PC and server maker Dell of lacking in ambition. At the company's shareholder meeting a few weeks ago, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins said Dell believed it could get into the same revenue class as rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Specifically, Rollins pointed to the upper deck and said that Dell's management believed that the company could reach $80 billion in sales within the next three to four years.

That would be a stunning feat. Dell had sales of $31.9 billion in its fiscal year ended February 2001, and sales actually dipped a tiny bit in fiscal 2002. That dip occurred during most of calendar 2001, which was also when the IT industry was hammered pretty hard by what could only be called an economic depression. Dell's sales recovered a bit in fiscal 2003, growing to $35.4 billion, and continued to grow in fiscal 2004 to $41.4 billion and to $49.2 billion in fiscal 2005. At current growth rates, Dell should be able to easily hit $80 billion in sales in fiscal 2009, which ends in January of that year. Dell is hedging a little by saying $480 billion in three to four years, just in case the IT market doesn't grow as fast as it would like.

While Dell's server market is growing nicely, Dell is going to have to sell a lot more servers to add more than $30 billion to its revenue. Rollins said that Dell would focus on products and services where it believed people were spending too much on technology, and singled out servers and storage, notebooks and other wireless devices, printers, and televisions and monitors as key growth areas. He also said that Dell would be expanding into other areas of the world with its direct marketing model. However, European and Asian IT vendors have been pretty agile themselves, and have kept Dell at bay.

IBM Launches WebSphere-based Banking Solution for eServers

In late June, IBM launched a new WebSphere-based banking solution for pSeries, iSeries, and zSeries servers. The new solution, which goes by the name Core Systems Transformation (CST), is a collection of transaction processing software and services from IBM and ISV partners that "allows banks to migrate their back-office systems to modern Internet-based solutions in a phased, risk-minimizing manner," the global IT giant says. IBM says its new CST solution includes WebSphere Extended Development technology, which enabled Fidelity Information Services to integrate its banking software with IBM's WebSphere technology. To help WebSphere meet the mission-critical operating requirements of banking systems, IBM says it has boosted WebSphere transaction processing throughput, incorporated new batch processing capabilities, and delivered new system monitoring and management capabilities. IBM also plans to work with other providers of banking software.