But Wait, There's More

Over 500,000 Downloads of Solaris 10 Beta So Far

Sun Microsystems said this week that customers and tire kickers have downloaded more than 500,000 copies of its Software Express beta copies of the future Solaris 10 operating system, which did not make it into the latest round of quarterly announcements from the company. This is a very big beta program for any Unix vendor, and probably the most widespread testing of a Unix platform in history.

The Software Express program started last July, and every month or so Sun adds a new Solaris 10 feature to the mix and lets customers play with it. Sun did not announce a new Solaris 10 beta this week, but Glenn Weinberg, vice president of Sun's Operating Platforms Group, said that, later in the fall, Sun will expand the number of predictive self-healing features in the Solaris 10 beta, and that 64-bit Opteron and Xeon-64 support would beta in the next few weeks. Weinberg said that this 64-bit support was not yet completed and fully integrated within Solaris 10. When asked if Solaris 10 would slip into 2005, he said that Sun was going to "try real hard" to not let that happen. Whenever it does ship, Solaris 10 will run on Sparc, Opteron, and Xeon platforms from day one.

Weinberg said that some 700 partners are working on porting some 1,100 applications to work on Solaris on Opteron processors (which also means they will work on Solaris for Xeon-64). He said that about half of the core Sparc/Solaris partners have plans to move their applications to Solaris on X86, and that most would be ready with their code within 30 to 60 days of the official launch, with some stretching out to 60 to 90 days.

HP Says It Has Converted 200 Sun Shops in 18 Months

Trying to steal a little thunder as its rival, Sun Microsystems, was hogging all the headlines this week, Hewlett-Packard released a statement reminding everyone that it has converted some 200 of Sun's customers to the HP fold in the past 18 months under its Sun Eclipse competitive replacement program, and 40 of them have been in the financial services sector that Sun wants to own. Rubbing salt into the wound, HP added that, in the past three months, the migration rate from Sun to HP shops has increased by 50 percent.

While Sun and HP have been in a PR contest to prove who is raiding whose base best, the fact is that only a very small percentage of customers are pure shops, and only a small portion of the remaining customers are in play at all. That said, converting large customers can bring in millions of dollars a pop, so competitive replacements are not just good PR, but good business--when you can get it.

Veritas Beefs Up AIX Support for File Systems

File systems and storage management software vendor Veritas said this week that it has extended its support for the AIX Unix variant from IBM. Specifically, Veritas has added AIX support for its Storage Foundation 4.0 suite, which includes Cluster File System, Cluster Server, Volume Replicator, Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Databases (for regular DB2 and Oracle databases), and Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC. While the basic Veritas file systems have been available on AIX for ages, now the full suite of Veritas software, which is already available on Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows, is available on AIX.

ConsoleWorks Now Works with HP-UX on Itanium

TECSys Development says that it has ported its ConsoleWorks 2.0 system administration console now supports HP-UX 11i running on Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based line of Integrity servers. ConsoleWorks was already supported on HP-UX for PA-RISC as well as for the Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS platforms for HP's AlphaServers; AIX and Solaris Unix servers, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers, and Red Hat Linux servers are also supported.

JBoss 4.0 App Server Takes on IBM, BEA, and Oracle

JBoss has turned up the heat in the middleware market now that it has delivered JBoss Application Server 4.0, the first open source application server to be certified as a J2EE 1.4 application server. The software, being released under the Lesser General Public License and as a commercial product through JBoss, is the result of three years of development, and it is sure to upset some of the marketing plans of commercial J2EE application server makers IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle, which dominate the Unix market.

JBoss AS 4.0 runs on Unix, Linux, and Windows, and it comes with other open source components, including the Tomcat 5 Java server, which has been integrated with JBossCache, a distributed Java cache for transactional Java objects. JBoss AS 4.0 also includes Hibernate 2.1, a Java object relational mapping engine that allows simple Java objects to have persistence qualities that you would normally have to create Enterprise JavaBeans to get the same effect. The application server also includes the JBossIDE development tool. This software is all free, but you have to pay JBoss for support.

Lawson Warns of Big Declines in License Fees, Net Loss

Traders pushed Lawson Software's share price down 13 percent last week, following the release of the company's preliminary first quarter results, which, needless to say, were not good. The St. Paul, Minnesota, company, which writes ERP software for Windows, Unix, and OS/400 platforms, said it expects total revenue for the quarter to be about $82 million, which would be about a 7 percent decline from the $88 million it posted for the first quarter of fiscal 2004, which ends August 31. That translates into a one to two cent loss using the GAAP method. Perhaps more worrisome is the paltry $13 million in software license revenues Lawson expects for the quarter, a 43 percent drop from the $22.7 million it recorded for the quarter last year. Lawson CEO Jay Coughlan said there were many causes for the shortfall, including industry consolidation, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and the Department of Justice's lawsuit again Oracle, which Oracle won, and which should bolster Lawson's argument that it's a tier-one player that can hang with the big boys. "Lawson experienced what many other enterprise software companies have recently announced: lower business activity, longer customer decision cycles, and contract deferrals," Coughlan says. He added that he is committed to cost cutting and keeping Lawson profitable for the year--on a non-GAAP basis, anyway. Final financial results will be announced September 30.

Meta Says Passwords Aren't Effective

Passwords have failed as an effective identity management tool, according to a new report from META Group. Before saying to yourself, "Well, duh," and slinking off to read more "obvious" news reports on www.fark.com, consider this: the problem with passwords is not the sheer number of passwords you must memorize, as your experience may have led you to (mistakenly) believe. No, the problem is actually due to a lack of respect for the sheer level of access and authority that passwords afford, META says. Or, as Earl Perkins, vice president with META's security and risk strategies advisory service, puts it: "The issue with password protection isn't just a number issue. Rather, from a cultural standpoint, many individuals do not believe the value of the password reflects the value of the assets it protects."

So how best to resolve this password conundrum? Whatever it is, it ain't single sign-on, which, META says, will just "inject new problems regarding the balance between authentication and authorization." Instead, META says, the "ultimate solution" (which we understand has not yet been finalized) to this password problem will be based on these three facts: that people want to know their identity is secure, they want to identify themselves easily, and want to know the value of what they're accessing, based on how they access it. After running this through our cultural translation device, the answer is actually quite simple: biometric brain implants! And just think of how easy it will be to check out at Wal-Mart. Okay, you can go back to www.fark.com now.