But Wait, There's More

IDC Says IT Recovery in U.S. Is Starting in the West

IT spending is starting to pick up in the western part of the United States, according to research from IDC. IDC reckons that IT spending in California was $37.9 billion in 2003 and that it will grow by 5 percent this year. The company suggests that growth will be good in other western states, too. However, IDC says that IT spending in the manufacturing areas of the Midwest and the South will not pick up as quickly, particularly in Missouri, Kansas, and South Carolina. IDC says that the Northeast is a volatile region and that financial and banking institutions, which are the economic pillars of this region, will lead IT spending growth. IDC is projecting that the U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product, will grow by 4.6 percent in 2004 and that IT spending in the United States will nearly match it, with 4.7 percent growth. During the boom years of the late 1990s, IT spending growth was typically double that of GDP growth.

Microsoft Launches Speech Server 2004

It was a busy week for Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates as he ran to various shows up and down the California coast to talk about his vision of future computing and to announce Speech Server 2004, the company's first industrial-strength speech recognition middleware.

Speech Server 2004 is a speech recognition and speech rendering engine that can be integrated for all kinds of applications, but which will find its initial use in automated call centers that are commonly used in government agencies, financial services institutions, telecom companies, and product support for all kinds of manufactured materials. Speech Server 2004 rides on top of Windows Server 2003 and comes in a standard edition that costs $7,999 per processor and an enterprise edition that costs $17,999 per processor. The program currently supports only English, and it is unclear if Microsoft will rely on partners to supply foreign language engines. Microsoft has developed its own speech recognition engine so the server can understand spoken English, but has partnered with ScanSoft for its Speechify engine to create a male and female voice for Speech Server 2004 so applications can grab text and convert it to audio that sounds like American English. (These are actually called Speechify Jack and Speechify Jill.) The Speechify OpenSpeech Recognizer from ScanSoft is available only as an option on Speech Server 2004 Enterprise Edition. Both editions of Speech Server 2004 have hooks so the Visual Studio .NET 2003 tool can integrate text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities into applications.

Microsoft Releases Preview of Visual Studio 2005, VS Community Efforts

Developers got a look at the alpha release of Whidbey through a new community technology preview initiative, which will formalize this alpha review process for Visual Studio going forward. Microsoft wants more frequent and detailed feedback from developers as it creates the tools it hopes they will one day use. In this way, suggestions and improvements can be worked into the code before it gets launched. The attendees at the VSLive 2004 show in San Franciso got this alpha of Whidbey for attending the show and so did Microsoft Developer Network universal subscribers. Microsoft also announced the Visual Studio Extensibility Center, a place where Visual Studio hackers can get tips, tricks, macros, add-ins, and wizards to speed up their development efforts.

VIA Debuts Tiny C3-Based Nano-ITX System Boards

After months of rumors among the Mini-ITX subculture, Taiwanese X86 chip, chipset, and motherboard maker VIA Technologies has announced yet a smaller form factor system board called the Nano-ITX, which includes all of the major system components needed for a media PC or embedded server--all crammed into a square board that is only 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) on a side.

The Mini-ITX form factor, which is based on a square system board that measures 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) on a side, has caught on among tinkerers in the PC market because it is based on the low-power line of C3 and Eden processors that VIA Technologies obtained through its acquisition of chipmaker Cyrix from National Semiconductor in September 1999. National Semiconductor bought Cyrix to try to foster the entry PC market (specifically, sub-$1,000 PCs with dreams of the sub-$500 PC), but it gave up on the business after owning Cyrix for only two years. Here it is, five years later, and reasonably powerful Mini-ITX boards are so inexpensive that people are building their own baby servers and putting PCs inside cigar boxes, lunch boxes, and other weird places. The speed of C3 processors ranges from 600 MHz to 1 GHz, but they consume very little power and generate very little heat, which means they can run fanless or with very small fans that are nearly silent. The Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX boards have built-in serial, parallel, LAN, and other ports that a modern PC and server has. Some variants that VIA Technologies makes have dual LAN ports; others have video outputs, CardBus, and flash slots. And while the boards have only one 33-MHz PCI slot, which limits their expandability, they include an on-board floppy controller and a dual-port IDE controller. When equipped with one or two disk drives designed for laptops and a low profile floppy, CD, and SDRAM, the resulting machine is ludicrously small: about the size of a hardcover book. And you can build a complete machine for under $500. We know this because we just put a Mini-ITX server running FreeBSD Unix in production as one of our Web servers here at Guild Companies. We're going to test Windows 2003 next, and we could also run Windows 2000 or Windows XP on the machine.

The Nano-ITX board uses the new Eden-N fanless processor, which runs from 533 MHz to 1 GHz. This processor is just 225 square millimeters in size (think pinky nail) and only consumes 2.5 watts running at 533 MHz. The chip is based on a clone X86 instruction set that is roughly analogous to a Pentium 4. And while there have been some issues for programs that have been compiled very tightly to Intel X86 chips for the absolutely highest performance tuning when they try to run on the C3 chips, the rumor is that VIA Technologies has worked with platform providers to fix this. (Commercial Linux distributor SuSE, for instance, did not support the C3 chips.) The Nano-ITX board's CN400 chipset supports Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, USB 2.0, and includes a RAID 0 mirroring and RAID 1 striping algorithm. The board also supports up to 8 GB of DDR400 main memory, up from the 2 GB maximum main memory of the Mini-ITX board. And because the ITX boards are aimed at the entry PC market, the CN400 chipset includes pretty decent on-board graphics controllers. The frontside bus on the Eden-N processor used in the Nano-ITX board is 50 percent faster than on the Eden processors used in the Mini-ITX boards, and the links between the I/O and processor is four times as fast. The new board also has sophisticated TV, HDTV, and audio capabilities, and the Eden-N processor has a built-in encryption engine that can crunch the AES algorithm and transmit at 12.5 gigabits per second running at 1 GHz.

VIA Technologies did not provide pricing on the Eden-N chips or the Nano-ITX system boards, but it did say that the both would be available in the second quarter, through its distribution channel. All you need to make a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX machine is a power supply, a case, a hard drive, a CD-ROM, and a memory stick. Everything else is integrated into the system board.

PeopleSoft Adds RFID Capabilities to EnterpriseOne

PeopleSoft will begin shipping EnterpriseOne 8.10, a major new release of its ERP system for Windows, Unix, and OS/400 operating systems, in May. One of the areas in which PeopleSoft has responded to customer demands with EnterpriseOne 8.10 is in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This release of the ERP system will support RFID mandates for outbound shipments, including support for Electronic Product Code (EPC) and Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN) standards. Other enhancements include a new customer self-service portal for collaborative forecasting; demand scheduling execution for greater visibility into high-volume supply chains such as the automotive supply chain; a new buyer workspace for streamlining inbound shipments; a new supplier self-service portal that supports Kanban procurement methodologies; and a new supplier release scheduling product. PeopleSoft's update also included new cost analysis, budgeting, job posting, and regulatory compliance capabilities.

Is CRM Software Worth It? IDC Says Yes

The analysts at IDC have just completed a study of CRM implementations to try to get a handle on whether CRM pays. That study, called "The Financial Impact of CRM," shows that the return on investment for CRM projects varies, depending on the company and the situation. The study also discusses why anyone would want bother with CRM in the first place.

"Companies are seeking to create a transparency that masks internal divisions and complexities, enabling their customers to feel that they are dealing with one organization," said Mary Wardley, vice president of IDC's CRM applications research team in a statement accompanying the announcement of the report. "The road to transparency begins by attending to the data infrastructure--the rationalizing and centralizing of customer information for use throughout an organization--and extends to integrated customer processes."

The further you are from the best practices created by the leaders in any market, the more you have to gain by adopting a new technology and the more pain and cost you have to go through as you try to catch up. This is, I believe, one of the major reasons why the return on investment of CRM projects ranged from a low of 16 percent to a high of 1,000 percent in IDC study.

But analyzing the value of CRM software is more complex. "The net impact on an organization can at times be subtle and distributed throughout the enterprise," said Wardley. "Cost savings and productivity enhancements can be evidenced in saving a sales person 20 minutes per week in writing activity reports or answering four times the volume of Web-based services requests in the same amount of time." It is not a simple case of saving money on IT by having an integrated database for customer-facing users and back-end systems. IDC found that technology-related savings that can be realized through integrating databases and their supporting systems have an average return of only about 7 percent. In the study, IDC found that the rate of return on increases in productivity and business process enhancements was 51 percent and 42 percent.

The data IDC is using is somewhat thin, but this stands to reason, given the nature of the in-depth analysis involved, and what IDC can charge for such studies. IDC says that interviews with more than 30 companies in North America and Europe were the basis for its CRM analysis. The median up-front investments for CRM applications among those surveyed was $426,000, including all costs associated with installing the software (presumably meaning extra server and storage capacity and such). The median total cost of CRM installations was $1.2 million over five years. This would imply that IDC only talked to big midrange and large enterprises. But don't despair. The numbers are still useful. Midrange shops will probably have about the same ratio between initial costs and costs over a long haul for CRM implementations.

The payback for CRM software is more than numbers, to be sure, but IT managers need numbers to justify CRM projects. Everything these days is contingent on the analysis of return on investment, no matter how speculative the assessment. So, without further ado, here are some numbers. IDC says that 19 percent of those companies who took part in the survey had a return of 50 percent or less, 52 percent had between 51 and 500 percent, and 30 percent had a return in excess of 501 percent. This implies that companies, in general, have a tough time treating their customers well with their existing systems and software. About 58 percent of companies surveyed had a payback on their projects in a year or less, with 35 percent getting payback in one to three years and 8 percent taking more than three years to get their payback.