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March Madness Begins: No New Security Patches this Month, Microsoft Says

Yesterday will be remembered as the "Patch Tuesday" that never was. Instead of releasing patches and other updates designed to make its products more secure, as it typically does the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft decided not to release any new patches for March. So why did Microsoft, which steadfastly maintains its hard-core commitment to improve the security of its products, decided to skip a Patch Tuesday? Perhaps there were no new security threats or vulnerabilities (unlikely), or, more likely, Windows customers are still absorbing the dozen fixes Microsoft rolled out during the last fix foray on February 8 (see "Patch Tuesday Yields Banner Crop of 12 Fixes, 8 of Them Critical"). Microsoft plans to resume its normal schedule next month and release fixes on April 12, according to the company's TechNet Security Center.

Microsoft Boosts BI and SCM Stories with New Alliances with CODA, Manhattan Associates

Microsoft broadened partnerships with two prominent ISVs in the last week, including supply chain planning software vendor Manhattan Associates and CODA, an English developer of financial intelligence tools. CODA, which was one of the first ISVs to take advantage of a new development center Microsoft built recently in Denmark, has signed a multi-year alliance deal with Microsoft and pledged to build its next generation of business intelligence software on Microsoft's .NET architecture. Microsoft and Manhattan Associates, meanwhile, are teaming together to tackle the developing Japanese market for supply chain software. This deal includes joint sales and marketing activities in Japan; a unified exhibit at last week's RetailTech Japan 2005 conference, where Manhattan Associates showed off its array of Windows-based warehouse management and radio frequency identification (RFID) applications; and the inclusion of Microsoft as a platinum sponsor of Manhattan Associate's annual user conference, Momentum 2005, May 15-18 in Scottsdale, Arizona, which will be followed by a series of 15 different road shows around the world, which Microsoft will also sponsor.

WebSphere Voice Server Gains Windows Server 2003 Support

IBM yesterday announced the new release of WebSphere Voice Server, version 5.1.2, will run on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. WebSphere Voice Server is a Java and VoiceXML-based platform on which to voice-enable applications, and allow users to interact with database-driven applications over a telephone line. WebSphere Voice Server supports several speech and grammar recognition standards, including the Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) working draft, Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS), and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). IBM is supporting several different languages on Windows Server 2003 with WebSphere Voice Server 5.12, including U.S., U.K., and Australian English, Canadian French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. The software becomes available on Friday.

Microsoft Christens Office Communication 2005, Formerly 'Istanbul'

Microsoft formally christened Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, the company's integrated communications client that formerly went by the code name "Istanbul," (formerly Constantinople) at a product launch event in San Francisco, yesterday. Office Communicator 2005 is Microsoft's "preferred" client for its Live Communications Server 2005 software, a product that unites instant messaging, voice, video, telephony, and Web conferencing access into a single server-based product. The client delivers multimodal collaboration, says Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Information Worker Group at Microsoft. "Users now can view rich presence information for colleagues, partners, and customers; select the most efficient mode of communication, whether it's IM, a phone call, a Web conference, or e-mail; and instantly share ideas and information." The company expects to ship Office Communicator 2005 in the next 90 days. It will provide pricing and licensing information before it ships, Microsoft says.

Disk Array Sales Taper Off in Q4 2004

For the first time in a long time, sales of internal disk arrays embedded inside servers has buoyed the overall market for disk arrays, say the analysts at IDC. While disk capacity purchases are growing at a very fast clip, the price/performance pressure among makers of disk arrays is intense, and it is quite remarkable that there is any revenue growth at all. In the fourth quarter, worldwide disk array sales were up 1.8 percent to $5.8 billion, but sales of external disk arrays only grew by a scant 1 percent to reach $3.8 billion. The only reason that there was any growth at all is because a significant boost in server sales with embedded disk arrays helped push sales. Even still, embedded array sales were not spectacular, with sales of just under $2 billion, up 4 percent compared to this time last year. The disk array market remains one of the toughest markets in IT, and IDC said that sales in the final quarter of 2004 were weaker than expected.

For the full year, the aggregate disk array market was up 3.2 percent to $20.9 billion. Hewlett-Packard had the top spot in revenue rankings, with $4.9 billion in sales, even though its sales slipped by 5.6 percent. (HP's entry and midrange disk array business has been problematic since the Compaq merger, and its products were looking a little long in the tooth until they were refreshed in mid-year.) IBM, which has been pumping out various storage subsystems based on its Power5 family of servers throughout the second half of 2004, was able to boost its sales by 1.3 percent to $4.3 billion. However, in the external disk array market, where these Power5 products are sold, IBM's sales in 2004 declined by 4.3 percent--almost as bad as HP's own 6.3 percent decline in external array sales. IBM has its own issues, so don't think it is just HP. EMC and Dell partnered a year and a half ago to sell entry and midrange disk arrays, and that partnership has worked well--for now, at least. EMC boosted its revenue by 18.4 percent in the worldwide disk array market to just under $3 billion, and Dell saw 17.3 percent growth to hit just over $1.5 billion in 2004. Hitachi, which has Sun Microsystems and HP as its resellers for high-end arrays, was the number five disk array storage vendor in 2004, with $1.3 billion in sales and a fraction of a percent of growth. Sun slipped behind Hitachi after seeing a 4.7 percent decline in sales in 2004; it sold some $1.2 billion in disk arrays last year.

IBM to Pump $300 Million Into SMB Services, Consulting for Partners

Last week at its annual PartnerWorld event, IBM said that it would be investing $300 million to help its business partner channel sell services and consulting to small and medium business (SMB) customers. "Analysts are saying SMB services are one of the hottest growth areas in the industry, and at the same time it is a highly competitive and localized marketplace," said Jim Corgel, general manager of small and mid-sized business at IBM's Global Services unit in announcing the partner investment. "IBM is making a significant investment to expand its SMB technology and consulting services focus and collaborate with Business Partners around the world to create solutions that help SMBs improve their business performance." He said that IDC reckons that SMB customers will spend $360 billion on information technology in 2005.

To assist the largely regional system integrators who serve the SMB market, IBM is creating dedicated teams for each region to help partners figure out how to sell more services to SMB customers. Partners will also be allowed to resell various Express Managed Services created by IBM, which cover application management, business transformation outsourcing and other exotic services that small businesses do not typically think they can afford. IBM has been testing this concept with some partners in the United States and Europe and has found enough success to roll it out as a product that all partners can participate in selling. Partners will also be allowed to sell IBM's hosting and strategic outsourcing services.

Microsoft Stretches for the "Peak" in New Manufacturing Initiative

At the National Manufacturing Week 2005 conference in Chicago yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its "Peak Performance" initiative, a new program designed to help manufacturers improve their businesses by using information technology (IT). Microsoft has lofty goals with Peak Performance, including using the Microsoft platform to enable manufacturers and their suppliers to better collaborate with their value chain through the integration of mission-critical legacy applications using Web services, which will lead to a faster return on investment (ROI) and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). So far, 20 partners have signed up for Peak Performance, and will seek to unite ROI with TCO using SOA and IT in various ways, including: 1) Developing custom applications built on Office 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server; 2) Gaining visibility into plant floor operations; 3) Gaining real-time insight across the value chain, and; 4) Closing the loop on the sales and customer performance information lifecycle. When we have a better idea of the full ramifications of this announcement, you will find it in this newsletter.