But Wait, There's More

Microsoft's Top Lawyer Calls for Patent Law Changes

Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, made a visit to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., to outline a set of changes to the U.S. patent system that the company would like to see implemented to protect itself and other players in the software business. Smith said Microsoft spends $7 billion a year on research and development and cranks out around 3,000 software patents a year, but is typically defending itself against anywhere from 35 to 40 patent lawsuits at any given time. (In fact, the day after Smith's speech last week, Microsoft paid $60 million to settle a 2-year-old lawsuit with Burst.com, which asserted that Microsoft was violating Burst's video streaming patents in its software.)

So it comes as no surprise at all that Microsoft is in favor of pumping up funding for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which has seen patent applications triple to 350,000 a year in the past two decades, and setting up a special federal court with deep expertise in patent law to deal with patent lawsuits, which have nearly tripled to 2,500 a year in the United States. Both of these recommendations are perfectly sensible. Microsoft would also like to see a "harmonization" of patent laws from around the globe, which will be somewhat difficult considering that Europe is still fighting with itself about whether or not to grant software patents and many emerging markets, like China, do not respect patents from other countries.

You can read Smith's full comments on patent reform, which are interesting, on Microsoft's site by clicking here.

MBS Unit Buys Analytics Tool to Beef Up Great Plains

Microsoft this week said that it had acquired business analytics software from Australian partner Professional Advantage to bolster the Great Plains ERP suite put out by the Microsoft Business Solutions group. The financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed, and Microsoft has not acquired PA.

What Microsoft has acquired is all of the intellectual property rights and global distribution rights to the components of PA's Webhouse Server that it sold to interface with the Great Plains financial and distribution modules. Webhouse Server provided hooks from Great Plains into OLAP servers to help business managers do complex, ad hoc queries against their transactional data to help them better run their businesses.

PA says it will continue to provide support Great Plains project accounting, Microsoft retail management, and personnel agency management modules, and will continue to sell its Webhouse Desktop tool, which is based on code it in turn licenses from ProClarity. Microsoft plans to sell the PA tools as Analysis Cubes for Great Plains and Excel, and they will interface with Great Plains 8.0 Professional Edition.

Microsoft Prescribes .NET for Big Pharma

Oracle Tops Relational Database Market in 2004, says IDC

According to statistics compiled by IDC, Oracle has once again been crowned king of the relational database market in terms of the money it rakes in. IDC reckons that Oracle took 43.1 percent of the $14.9 billion worldwide relational database market, giving it a big lead over IBM and Microsoft.

As in other IDC sectors where U.S.-based companies dominate, the 11.6 percent growth that the relational database market posted in 2004 is somewhat suspect, since a large portion of this growth is due to the weakened dollar. The weak dollar has the effect of inflating the reported sales of U.S. companies like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and NCR, the top five relational database vendors in 2003 and 2004. In 2004, IBM accounted for 30.6 percent of the relational database market (including sales of the DB2/400 embedded database inside OS/400 on its iSeries line as well DB2 for the mainframe, DB2 for Windows, Unix, and Linux, and Informix for Unix). IBM also has a reasonably large business selling the IMS flat-file database management system, but IDC was not counting such programs in its stats. Microsoft had a 13.4 percent share of the market, with Sybase and NCR (whose integrated database is used in its Teradata data warehousing servers) each getting 3.1 percent. IDC said that IBM and Sybase grew slower than the overall market, while Microsoft had the largest growth. Oracle had smaller growth than Microsoft, but took in an incrementally larger pile of dough selling relational databases last year.

HP Commits to SAS Drives for Servers, Licenses RAID 6 Technology

Hewlett-Packard said this week that it will commit to bringing Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors across its ProLiant server and StorageWorks storage arrays as it refreshes those product lines in 2005. Additionally, the company said that it would soon begin licensing its Advanced Data Guarding (ADG) technology as a variant of RAID 6 data protection for other RAID array vendors to make use of.

On the disk front, HP will create universal, hot-plug SAS drives that will be plugged into into ProLiant servers, as well as storage arrays; the company has already committed to doing the same for Serial ATA (SATA) IDE disk drives, and said that it would also expand its support in that area to include 2.5-inch SATA drives. The idea, says Paul Perez, vice president of storage, networking, and infrastructure for the ProLiant line, is to give customers the ability to get the higher bandwidth and smaller form factors of the new SAS drives into their systems while also allowing those customers who want to use the less-expensive SATA drives to do so as well. Obviously, HP will have to sell different SAS and SATA models of its ProLiant machines, since they use different electronics to connect to servers. Perez says that HP expects the transition from 3.5-inch Ultra320 SCSI to 2.5-inch SAS drives and controllers to take some time, and that is why HP is talking about its roadmap now. Future rack-mounted ProLiant servers launched in the spring will used 2.5-inch SAS units, while tower servers will use 3.5-inch SAS drives (since density is not a big issue there); Modular Storage Arrays will use a mix of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SAS drives, depending on the density that customers require. Expansion towers for ProLiant servers will also have a mix of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch units. HP hopes to have SAS drives across its ProLiant and MSA lines by next spring, says Perez.

HP also said that within a few weeks it would announce that it has licensed its ADG disk array technology to a third party (probably a disk controller maker and probably not a rival server maker) and would propose ADG as a variant standard for RAID 6. ADG allows a customer to add a spare parity drive to a RAID 5 array so the array can sustain a failure of two disks. Normal RAID 5 stripes data and parity across all drives and allows recovery from one disk failure. But ADG, which HP wants to rebrand as RAID 6, stripes two independent parity data sets across the disk drives in the array, which allows two disks to fail and still allow the real data to be recreated from the parity information. ADG is now available in ProLiant servers that have four or more disk drives, and with the move to smaller form factor disks, smaller ProLiant servers will not only be able to hold more physical disks, but also support the ADG variant of RAID 6 data protection. HP has been shipping ADG since 2001.

Bernstein Analyst Calls for Sun-Dell Partnership

One of the fun things about the computer business is thinking about the possibilities, and that is exactly what Toni Sacconaghi, the main IT analyst at Sanford Bernstein, has done in a recent research report. To amuse himself and Sanford's investment customers--and to get a little PR like this piece in this newsletter--Sacconaghi is proposing that we ponder "the unthinkable." That would be a partnership between Sun Microsystems and Dell.

When you stop laughing or shaking your head, read on.

Sacconaghi says that he has no reason to believe that any partnership talks are underway, but he says that some kind of deal akin to the one that Dell has with disk array maker EMC might be beneficial to both Sun and Dell. This might sound crazy, but Sacconaghi makes a good point when he says that Dell is losing market share in the high-end of the server market, where servers cost more and have more processors. With the soon-to-be-announced Opteron-based "Galaxy" servers from Sun, Dell could, says Sacconaghi, flesh out a unique high-end server offering that can run Windows, Linux, or Solaris. Considering that Dell's top brass has just nixed the idea of using Opterons in the PowerEdge server line after mulling it over, the idea of Dell selling Galaxy Opteron boxes seems pretty remote.

Many people were calling for a Sun-Fujitsu-Siemens triple-play partnership on Sparc iron for many years, and Sun finally threw in the towel on its "Millennium" UltraSparc-V designs and went with tweaked future PrimePower servers based on Fujitsu's Sparc64 clone of the Sparc chips for big SMP boxes for running monolithic workloads; Sun is still developing its "Niagara" and "Rock" multithreaded chips, and will eventually try to convince customers that these are even better than the Sparc64 boxes it will sell for the next few years as a stopgap. This deal took years to hammer out, and that was between three partners (well, in many respects, it is really between two partners, Sun and Fujitsu.) Sun and Dell are enemies, and there are not enough years left in the 21st century for them to come to a deal, unless something really bad happens to either company. Sun might consider having a big distribution partner for its Galaxy machines, but what Sacconaghi doesn't understand deeply enough (or ignored for the sake of some PR) is that Sun doesn't want to partner with Dell to push Galaxy, but rather that it wants to use Galaxy running Solaris 10 to hurt Dell, and hurt it badly as Dell tries to push Linux and Windows on what will arguably be inferior X86 iron.

What Sun and Dell should do is partner to make sure that Solaris 10 is an option on the PowerEdge machines, but considering that Sun will try to compete against Dell with the mildly superior performance and technical characteristics of Solaris 10 compared to Linux 2.6, this seems very unlikely. Dell will surely install Solaris 10 on any PowerEdge server that customers want--and it will do it today. But Dell is not going to go out of its way to help Solaris 10 on X86 get more traction, not when it is trying to promote either Windows or Linux as the answer to everyone's data center problems. If Sun was heading toward bankruptcy, Dell might acquire it or Sun might concede to partner with Dell in the manner that EMC has. Other than that, these two will remain bitter rivals.

Jedox Open Source Multidimensional OLAP Server Coming in May

German software company Jedox is getting ready to turn the online analytical processing (OLAP) server market on its ear by rolling out an open source variant of its multidimensional OLAP (or MOLAP) server. Jedox currently sells a tool for the Windows environment called Worksheet-Server, which creates multidimensional models that are stored in Excel format. (As such, MOLAP servers do not require relational databases, but can interface with them.) The open source variant of this program, which is being hosted at Open Source OLAP, will be built from Linux, Apache, and PHP. It is expected to be launched in May of this year.