But Wait, There's More

HP Tweaks Smart Office SMB Initiative

Hewlett-Packard yesterday tweaked its Smart Office bundling of products and services aimed at small and midsized businesses. In September 2003, HP announced the Smart Office initiative to attack the 79-million-strong SMBs worldwide, in conjunction with its partners. This week, HP announced a whole bunch of different tweaks to its entry products to make them more appealing to SMBs.

John Brennan, senior vice president of the cross-unit and cross-platform SMB segment at HP, clarified at the company's annual conference for partners in Los Angeles this week, where over 1,000 partners showed up, what it is really trying to accomplish with Smart Office. HP reckons that there are 21 million SMBs in the Americas and 79 million globally, and that the aggregate budget of these SMBs spent $531 billion in 2003, and their spending will grow at 12 percent compounded annually to $744 billion by 2007. The midsized part of the SMB market is comprised of 500,000 to 600,000 companies that have between 100 and 1,000 employees. As a group, when adjusted for headcount, SMBs spend more money than larger enterprises on IT, and they generally do not have sophisticated chief information officers. What HP wants is to lower the cost of IT at SMBs and to take on, with its partners, the role of CIO. This is why HP last year said it would plow $750 million into SMB initiatives as part of the Smart Office program. HP wants to energize the 210,000 partners it has and figure out some way to compete in the SMB space that is more effective--in terms of winning business and profits--than just trying to sell desktops, laptops, servers, and printers to SMBs.

That said, inexpensive, easy-to-use hardware is the first step in winning a deal at SMBs, and that is why HP will be pushing its new nx5000 notebooks, dx2000 micro tower PCs, ProLiant ML110 servers, and ProCurve 700wl switches into SMB sites. By and large, SMBs run Windows on their desktops and servers, so any SMB push has a big Windows push. HP also announced that it will also create a version of its StorageWorks Modular Smart Array disk arrays with inexpensive Serial ATA disk drives. (HP has not said specifically when SATA drives, which are a lot less expensive than the SCSI disks used in its arrays, will be available.) HP is also rolling out Fibre Channel SAN switches from Brocade Communications and a new DAT tape drive with an autoloader and one-button backup/restore software. The all-in-one OfficeJet and LaserJet products, which include capabilities to scan, print, fax, and e-mail documents also play a part.

But HP is now going to start focusing on solutions that ride on this hardware. Specifically, SAP and HP have partnered to move SAP's Business One and mySAP into the SMB base on HP's servers. HP and SAP have been partnering to deliver trimmed down mySAP throughout Europe for two years, and now the program is being extended to worldwide.

Additionally, HP and Intuit, the provider of the QuickBooks accounting software, have announced a server-implementation of QuickBooks that will come bundled on ProLiant machines. Intuit says that the customers at the high-end of its installed base--companies with 25 to 250 employees--have needs that cannot be addressed by running QuickBooks on a PC. The server implementation will have the ability to support more concurrent users and will include more rigorous security and data protection. The pricing and launch date of this latter bundle was not yet announced, and Intuit is not signing an exclusive deal with HP for the server version of QuickBooks, which is called QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. HP is not getting it first, since the product has been available for 18 months. But it is the first server vendor that is going to be able to prebundle it on its servers. You can bet that IBM and Dell Inc will be trying to get a similar deal.

In addition to the new hardware and software, HP is offering an online help desk called the IT Professional Help Desk (which supplies level two and level three support for customers), a service for training SMB customers to use new technology called Learning Curve, and an interesting service called ProLiant System Minder, which is a remote system administration service that HP offers to customers who do not have an administrator on site. HP also rolled out a program to protect damaged, destroyed, or stolen IT equipment called Advantage Protection Plus and a 0% lease rate extension leasing program called Smart Finance. Smart Finance was announced back in September and has been extended into 2004.

None of these announcements are earth shattering, of course, but together the represent an approach that HP can take to market with partners to get into SMB accounts. This is similar to the approach taken by rival IBM to get into SMB accounts. Neither company can affordably attack the SMB market without partners, who have a closer relationship with SMB shops than the vendors.

Microsoft Sets Schedule for Future Business Apps

Microsoft is hosting its Convergence 2004 customer conference in New Orleans this week, and has taken the opportunity to provide the 4,500 customers and partners in attendance what the schedule is its next releases of its business applications. Specifically, Microsoft says that the Great Plains 8.0 midrange ERP suite will roll out in July 2004 in North America, and will feature a look-and-feel interface that very closely resembles Microsoft's Office software and will, in fact, feature deep integration with Office. Microsoft's Business Portal 2.5 is also due in July 2005, and it will feature electronic document delivery, enhancements to human resources self-service, and integration with Microsoft's Office Solution Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. This portal is a front end for the Microsoft's Great Plains and Solomon software suites. The Solomon suite, which is focused on service and distribution businesses, will be put out with a 6.0 update in July 2004 as well and will feature integration with Microsoft's homegrown CRM suite, which is called Microsoft CRM. Navision 4.0 is due in October 2004, and it is also focused on midrange customers. Microsoft is very vague about the enhancements going into Navision 4.0. Microsoft also announced that the Axapta ERP suite for manufacturers, which it got through the acquisition of Navision, will be extended with a "lean manufacturing" capability through Microsoft partner en'tegrate, a Copenhagen, Denmark company that hails from the same area of the globe where Axapta was created and which is also one of the largest implementers of the Axapta suite for end user customers.

Dell Launches PowerVault 745N Network Storage

Server and storage maker Dell announced this week a new network-attached storage (NAS) server aimed at SMB customers. The PowerVault 745N is based on a 1U server chassis that can be equipped with a 2.4 GHz/128 KB Celeron, 2.8 GHz/1 MB Pentium 4, and 3.2 GHz 512 KB Pentium 4 processor, up to 4 GB of main memory that is implemented as cache for the disks in the unit, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for linking to servers. The PowerVault 745N runs the trimmed down Windows Storage Server 2003 variant of Microsoft's operating system and can be equipped with up to four Serial ATA IDE disk drives with a total capacity of between 160 GB to 1 TB of capacity. Server running Windows, Mac OS, Unix, Linux, and NetWare operating systems can store data on this NAS device; the Unix-alike operating systems are supported through Microsoft's Services for Unix extensions. With a Celeron processor, 512 MB of cache memory, an unspecified RAID controller, and four 40 GB disks costs $2,332. Machines that implement RAID algorithms in the Windows software instead of in hardware cost $1,803.

IBM Releases Beta of "Stinger" DB2 for Windows

Two months ago, at LinuxWorld, IBM was talking up the future version of DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment for the Power platform running Linux, which was code-named "Stinger." Back then, IBM said that DB2 ICE, a clustered and grid-aware version of DB2 that competes with Oracle's current Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and future Oracle10g databases, would be commercialized on the Power platform within six to nine months. What IBM hasn't said quite so loudly is that Stinger will also run on Windows and the technology preview of Stinger--that's IBM speak for beta--also includes Windows support as well as Linux on Power. Incidentally, DB2 Stinger has what IBM is calling "deeper integration" for Microsoft's .NET Web services framework as well as the J2EE framework IBM has created in its WebSphere middleware.

The kinds of clusters that Oracle9i RAC and DB2 ICE implement allow a database to be distributed over many machines and to actually share work, not just cover each other in the event of a failed server node. Oddly enough, OS/400, the operating system created for the AS/400 minicomputer, and its own internal DB2/400 variant have had this capability since DB2 Multisystem was rolled out with OS/400 V3R7 in late 1995. This is only new technology to the Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms. You can sign up for the beta program at www.ibm.com/db2/stinger. Stinger also will be available on Unix platforms and on X86-based Lintel machines. Microsoft has not said when it will deliver similar clustering capabilities with SQL Server, but it could be a feature of the future "Yukon" release that was just recently delayed until sometime in the first half of 2005.

Lilly Software Offers Money-Back Guarantee on Lean Manufacturing Suite

If you are in the manufacturing business, you might want to ponder a new offer from Lilly Software Associates. The company, which sells midrange ERP systems aimed at manufacturers on Windows, Linux, Unix, and OS/400, and other proprietary platforms, has been pushing a set of add-ons to its Visual ERP suite, called Visual Easy Lean. These add on modules implement so-called "lean manufacturing" techniques, which is like just-in-time manufacturing on steroids and speed. Lilly Software is so confident that companies that implement Visual Easy Lean will see such good benefits that it is providing a money-back guarantee on the software license fees to installations of the program that do not meet the business-defined criteria within the first 180 days of implementation. Lilly says that customers can increase sales by an average of 10 percent, decrease lead times by as much as 90 percent, shrink inventories by 50 percent, and deliver products on time 90 percent of the time by using the lean manufacturing approach.

You can find out more about the "president's challenge" guarantee at lillysoftware.com/challenge.asp.

IBM Leads in Content Management Software

According to an analysis of the content management software market performed by WinterGreen Research, IBM is the market leader in terms of sales in the content management software market, with a 20 percent share of the market through the first three quarters of 2003. WinterGreen estimates that for the full year, content management software will account for a total of $1 billion in sales across all vendors, and forecasts that this market will grow to $2.1 billion by 2009. WinterGreen reckons that Documentum, acquired late last year by disk array maker EMC, was the number-two vendor in the content management software space, with 14 percent of the market in the first nine months of 2003, followed by Open Text with a 9 percent share. With no one vendor having a dominant position, it is still possible for a newcomer to enter the market, but both IBM and EMC have invested heavily in this space and intend to gain market share in the area. Microsoft certainly has aspirations in the CMS market, too, and has embraced the XML lingua franca that all of the other CMS players have adopted.

By the way, CMS software does more than manage HTML documents on a Web site, or at least enterprise-class CMS systems do. Increasingly, CMS programs have to manage XML documents, PDF documents, and various kinds of structured and unstructured data. One of the big drivers behind this market is having to comply with government reporting regulations, which force companies to archive information and communication over a long term.

Parasoft's SOAPTest Checks Web Services Against WS-I Standard

Web services developers gained new software last week to test their Web services against Web Services Interoperability Organization standards. Parasoft last week announced that its SOAPtest 2.5 testing software can be used to make sure that Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) traffic are up to par, as far as the WS-I's Basic Profile 1.0 standard goes. SOAPtest, a comprehensive tool for testing various aspects of a Web service, everything from WSDL validation to performance testing, uses the WS-I's own Testing Tools 1.0 for the new SOAP and WSDL checking. SOAPtest 2.5 costs $3,995 and runs on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.