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two
Volume 2, Number 11 -- March 16, 2005

Microsoft Gets Into the Collaboration Groove with Acquisition


by Dan Burger


When Microsoft announced last week it acquired collaboration rival Groove Networks, the element of surprise was surely missing. For this purchase was not a matter of if, but only a matter of when. Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates has been a long time admirer of Groove's collaboration products and a long time friend of Groove's founder, Ray Ozzie. Microsoft is never above acquiring a rival, especially if that company has as its head technologist the person who created both IBM's Notes and Groove's Virtual Office products.

The acquisition is as much an offensive as it is a defensive move by Microsoft. Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and chief software architect, knows that Groove has features that Exchange Server and the Office System does not and furthermore has the potential to compete effectively with Exchange and Office over the long haul. Moreover, if Groove were to fall into enemy hands--such as IBM or Novell, two companies with big installed bases of email and collaboration products to protect--that could cause real grief for Microsoft.

Groove's Virtual Office collaboration products are expected to mesh with Microsoft Office, and because of their personal relationship, Gates and Ozzie, his newly anointed chief technology officer, should work equally well together. And if they don't work well together, as happened at IBM back in 1997 a few years after Big Blue acquired Ozzie's baby, Lotus Notes, then Ozzie can always go and start a new collaboration company.

The main benefit of Groove technology to the Office System is the inclusion of server-based, peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration capabilities for distributed work groups. In other words, it makes Office a more useful tool in the increasingly mobile and global business world where sharing documents and maintaining communications while on the road is expected. Groove's Virtual Office will eventually supplement Microsoft Office's Live Meeting 2005 and Live Communications Server, as well as SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services.

"Together, Microsoft and Groove will make anytime, anywhere collaboration a more natural and easy extension of how information workers coordinate their projects and document-centric work," said Jeff Raikes, vice president of Microsoft's information worker group, in a prepared statement. Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net will become Groove's primary development platform. All of this blending of technologies is likely to take years.

Many industry wonks are saying Microsoft bought much more than the collaboration products to make Office a force at the enterprise level. For Microsoft to bring Ozzie, an industry legend, to its team, is analogous to the Yankees adding Randy Johnson to its pitching staff. It is not going unnoticed that Ozzie was the key figure in the creation of IBM's Lotus Notes, which has been the principal collaboration technology in enterprise applications since day one. Notes was the first real collaboration platform. It is quite obviously seen as a powerful retort to IBM's Workplace collaborative technology, which is now a combination of Lotus and WebSphere.


Ozzie's company, Iris, sold the rights to the Notes collaboration product to Lotus in 1987, and ten years later Ozzie made his move to create Groove. While building Groove, he was a major contributor to the improvement of the Windows operating system and has received recognition as a "Windows pioneer," an honor shared with only six other individuals.

During a conference call at the time of the acquisition announcement, Gates made note of Ozzie's past efforts on Microsoft's behalf, particularly with regard to Windows user interfaces and Visual Studio. "He's made a huge contribution in terms of giving us feedback about the platform," Gates said. "It's very exciting to have Ray and his team joining Microsoft." Ozzie will direct the development of Microsoft communication and collaboration products and related platform infrastructure. He is one of three CTOs at Microsoft.

Microsoft invested $51 million Groove in 2001 and followed that up with an additional $38 million in 2003; Groove had raised a total of $155 million in venture capital since its founding. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2005. Microsoft did not say what it paid for Groove, so we will have to wait until it files its reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission to see how much it thought Groove was worth.

Sponsored By
VISION SOLUTIONS

Contact:
Jennifer Brannon
Vision Solutions, Inc.
(949) 253-6543
jbrannon@visionsolutions.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

VISION SOLUTIONS TO ACQUIRE OS SOLUTIONS

Combined Companies Will Expand Technology, Channels and Solution Offerings to include Systems Management and New SMB High Availability

IRVINE, CALIF. - February 28, 2005 - Vision Solutions, the industry standard in eServer High Availability, today announced that an agreement has been reached to acquire the business of UK-based OS Solutions, a leading provider of advanced systems management, disk and data optimization and SMB High Availability for the iSeries market.

This is a strategic acquisition for Vision that adds highly complementary new products based on leading edge technology as well as new channels of distribution for Vision. The combined companies will share more than 2,200 customers and leverage their respective unique technologies and channel partnerships to offer the most complete and cost-effective availability solutions currently in the market. The new solution line up will extend Vision's industry leading ORION™ solution offerings with a new, pure remote journaling based high availability offering as well as market-proven tools and solutions to better manage data and disk resources, optimize system performance and manage archiving and database reorganizations; functionality which is critical to any enterprise. No other vendor can deliver such a complete solution set offering autonomic functionality integrated into high availability.

"The HA market continues to evolve and new requirements have developed to more carefully preserve data, increase performance and maximize system resources while keeping them highly available," said Nicolaas Vlok, CEO of Vision Solutions. "Vision has been building solutions with this specific design in mind and the acquisition of OS Solutions rapidly advances our work and makes possible the integration of systems optimization and data management with high availability. The result will change the way companies think about and manage their high availability environments in an on demand computing world."

The OS Solutions family of products is a highly integrated suite of data and systems management solutions for the IBM iSeries platform and include:

OS Director - a systems optimization and performance tool that provides an extensive range of functionality for monitoring, managing and optimizing an iSeries machine including object management and optimization; automated job and user tracking; complete cross reference including IFS with full forecast action control and action history. The result is greatly improved operations and planning with faster response times and cleaner, quicker disaster recovery.

OSD Data Manager - a data management and archiving tool that allows users to maximize application performance through managing the database and active archives. This function is unique to OS Solutions and had been adopted by leading application users worldwide.

OSD High Availability - a pure remote journaling high availability solution built on IBM technology and the 8 pillars of autonomic computing. This full featured product includes data and object replication utilizing a highly optimized multi-apply process. The product leverages the OS Director tools to optimize the data and objects so replication is streamlined and recovery is far faster than any other solution.

"By implementing the new technologies, customers will experience significant performance gains in disk and application function as well as optimize their core HA solutions to run cleaner, faster and with fewer issues" said Mike Ryan, CEO of OS Solutions. "There is also the benefit of integration with ORION and its multi-platform solution set. Customers now have more options and a clear roadmap for growth from simple data replication through the most advanced high availability solutions in the market; all from one vendor."

About Vision Solutions
Vision Solutions, headquartered in Irvine, CA, is the industry standard in eServer High Availability providing software, services and support solutions for managing a company's mission-critical applications and data. With more than 1,850 customers and 11,000 licenses around the world, the company works closely with a worldwide network of channel partners supporting virtually every industry with its world-class solutions: Visualize™, Vision Suite®, ORION™ and ORION Integrator. Vision Solutions is an IBM Premier Business Partner and an IBM High Availability Business Partner. Vision Solutions is a member of the publicly traded IDION group of companies (JSE: IDI). For more information on Vision Solutions, please visit the company's website at www.visionsolutions.com

About OS Solutions
OS Solutions, based in the United Kingdom, is a leader in Remote Journaling High Availability and advanced Systems and Data Management tools and utilities for the IBM eServer iSeries providing sophisticated software, services and support across industry segments and applications. The Company has more than 370 customers worldwide using its industry leading, highly integrated family of products including OS Director, a systems optimization and data management solution; OSD-Data Manager, an advanced archiving and data management solution and OSD-High Availability, a state of the art, pure remote journaling based solution for iSeries high availability.

OS Solutions is an IBM Business Partner and IBM Partner in Development.

Editor: Alex Woodie
Managing Editor: Shannon Pastore
Contributing Editors: Dan Burger, Joe Hertvik, Shannon O'Donnell,
Timothy Prickett Morgan, Victor Rozek, Kevin Vandever, Hesh Wiener
Publisher and Advertising Director: Jenny Thomas
Advertising Sales Representative: Kim Reed
Contact the Editors: To contact anyone on the IT Jungle Team
Go to our contacts page and send us a message.

THIS ISSUE
SPONSORED BY:

Vision Solutions
Micro Focus
Thawte Consulting
Stalker Software
Hewlett-Packard


BACK ISSUES

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Microsoft Gets Into the Collaboration Groove with Acquisition

Desktops to Have First Crack at Dual-Core Intel Chips

NEC Shows Off SAP Performance on Windows-Itanium Combo

Open Source Servers

But Wait, There's More


The Four Hundred
Re-Energizing ISVs Is a Tough Chore for IBM

Book Excerpt: The All-Everything Machine

iSeries ISVs Elated as IBM Opens Roadmap and Wallet

IBM's Chiphopper Tools to Help Build iSeries Apps

The Linux Beacon
Novell Delivers Open Enterprise Server, Preps SUSE Professional 9.3

IBM Opens Blue Gene/L Utility Center in Minnesota

Future "Cell" Power Processors to Spotlight Linux

IDC Says Linux Server Market Grew 36 Percent in Q4 2004

The Unix Guardian
Sun Modifies Its Packaging of Trusted Solaris

IDC Says Unix Server Sales Rebounded in Q4 2004

Gartner Gives 2004 Server Report Cards

As I See It: To Tell or Not to Tell


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