But Wait, There's More

Microsoft, Minnesota Settle Class-Action Antitrust Suit

It now seems apparent that Microsoft does indeed have a strategy for its cash hoard: Use as little of it as possible to settle all outstanding lawsuits against the company so it can get on with business. Microsoft and the state of Minnesota announced this week that the two parties, which have been embroiled in an class-action antitrust lawsuit filed by the state on behalf of Minnesota citizens, have settled that suit. Neither Microsoft nor Minnesota announced the terms of the settlement, but said that they had reached a preliminary agreement that they will present to the court in "early summer" and that once the issues are hammered out, the terms of the deal will be made public.

IBM Ships Delayed Four-Way Blade Server

It may be two months later then expected, but IBM will this week start shipping its BladeCenter HS40 four-way blade server. The HS40, which was developed in conjunction with blade partner Intel, was announced in early January and was expected to start shipping on February 13. IBM formally announced the HS40 blade this week, and now says that it will be generally available on April 23.

The HS40 blades will run either 32-bit Windows or 32-bit Linux. IBM had promised to support "Gallatin" Xeon MP processors running at 2 GHz, 2.5 GHz, and 2.8 GHz in the HS40s, but according to its announcement is only shipping the 2 GHz processors. The delays and the ratcheting back on Gallatin performance are probably due to thermal issues related to trying to pack seven four-way blades into a 7U chassis. But it could be a different issue, of course.

The HS40 blade comes with a single, 2 GHz, 1 MB cache Gallatin chip (expandable to four on the board) and 1 GB of ECC main memory (expandable to 16 GB). The blade has four Gigabit Ethernet links and uses the Broadcom ServerWorks GC-LE chipset. The base HS40 with a single Gallatin chip and 1 GB of main memory costs $6,399. Each additional Gallatin costs $1,429.

Altiris Says Asset Management Important to Single Platform Goal

How do you stay on top of the costs associated with owning and supporting IT assets? Because the management of IT hardware, software, and services is something like fighting a three-headed dragon, there are companies like Altiris making products like its Asset Management Suite.

Most organizations have a jumble of platforms, software vendors, and service providers. Not only do they need help managing the systems, but most need help understanding the costs of that support. Contracts, lease agreements, and software licenses all require organization. By getting a handle on these things, Altiris says, companies can make better decisions about how to optimize their IT assets, take advantage of volume discounts with certain vendors, consolidate resources, and in some cases dump unnecessary equipment and services.

"Customers have an array of environments and platforms," says Matt French, segment manager for the Asset Management Suite. "We suggest to customers that they standardize their hardware and software. It increases the supportability of the system and increases focus for the IT organization. We have seen a transition toward managing servers independently. Our server management suite comes into play when different types of servers need managed. When a company goes through major corporate acquisitions or reductions in staff, companies want to consolidate. They want to get to that single platform."

With this latest release, Asset Management Suite 6.0, Altiris provides the capability for operating system upgrades, application patches, remote diagnostics, and backup--all of which should diminish downtime. Inventory and application-metering capabilities have been enhanced, and a help desk is also part of the extensive feature list.

Architecturally, the new suite was reworked around Microsoft .NET this time. It continues to operate on Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 7 or SQL Server 2000. On the client side, it manages Windows 95 and later, Linux, Pocket PC, and Apple Macintosh. On the server side, it manages servers runnning AIX, HP-UX, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3.0 and Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.

Altiris has more than 10,000 customers according to company statistics. It also has on-going relationships with Dell and Hewlett-Packard involving the co-development of enterprise-level PCs and servers with Altiris software designed for system management. (Altiris programs are at the core of HP's Insight Manager tools for ProLiant servers.) The company was just named to the Forbes "25 fastest growing technology stars" list of exceptional technology firms, and for calendar year 2003, it reported revenue of $99.3 million, a 58 percent increase over revenue reported in calendar year 2002.

MySQL Supports Clustered Databases

Open source database developer MySQL announced last week that it has delivered a preview of the promised clustering extensions to its eponymous database. The final product is expected to be delivered in the third quarter of this year.

The MySQL database and the cluster extensions are offered under a dual-license model whereby the programs are available under an open source GPL license for free and under a commercial software license (including support) from MySQL and its partners that costs money. The MySQL Pro license costs $495, with support ranging from $1,500 to $48,000 a year. Pricing for the clustering extensions is not yet known.

Both the MySQL database and the MySQL Cluster extensions are available on Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS platforms. MySQL has not said how far the database clustering will scale yet, but says that it can offer five nines availability and sub-second failover across nodes in a cluster. The company also said that on a four-node cluster two X86 processors per node (presumably Xeons), the cluster was able to provide 5 to 10 millisecond response time on replicated database transactions and deliver a throughput of 100,000 transactions per minute.

Currency Helps Pump Up IBM's First Quarter

IBM reported its financial results for the first quarter last week, and like many vendors based in the United States that do a lot of business overseas, the crashing dollar is helping Big Blue to report decent revenue growth and reasonable profits for the quarter. On an as-reported basis, IBM booked $22.2 billion in sales, up 11 percent. If IBM booked sales in local currencies around the world, revenues would have been up by only 3 percent.

John Joyce, IBM's chief financial officer, said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week that pretax profits in the quarter were up 16 percent, to $2.3 billion, but he admitted that profits were under pressure because intellectual property sales were down, pension and healthcare costs went up, and workforce reductions ate money. IBM's intellectual property sales amounted to only $180 million (down $102 million from the first quarter of 2003). The company had to kick in $187 million more for healthcare and pension costs, compared with a year ago. And workforce "rebalancing" (IBMese for layoffs) cost $163 million, up $85 million from this time last year. After taxes, IBM had net income of $1.6 billion, up 16 percent, and earnings of $0.95 a share, up 18.8 percent. (Those stock buy-backs are still helping Big Blue pull off the growth in earnings per share.)

IBM's hardware business did well in the first quarter, for a change. Lumping all hardware together, IBM sold $6.7 billion in gear, up 16 percent as reported and up 10 percent at constant currency. Companies and consumers in every geography are buying computers. "Customers have worked off the excess capacity of the late 1990s and are buying again," explained Joyce. "Customers' infrastructures are getting old, and they need to upgrade." He added that so much of that old iron has been depreciated, that it is effectively off the books, which means companies can better afford to put new capital expenditures on the books, especially now that they have some prospects of real profits to offset the depreciation costs.

IBM recently merged its Systems Group and its Technology Group into a single Systems & Technology Group, and that group accounted for $3.8 billion of hardware sales, up 14 percent. Joyce said that overall server sales were up by 19 percent in the quarter. Sales of X86-based xSeries servers, which include a huge number of Intel Pentium 4 and Xeon machines and a smattering of Intel Itanium and Advanced Micro Devices Opteron machines, were up 28 percent in the quarter. Sales of the zSeries mainframe line were up 34 percent, with nearly 100 percent MIPS growth. New workloads, Linux partitions, and growth of existing mainframe applications were the three drivers behind this big bump in mainframe sales.

On the Power-based iSeries server front, sales were down 7 percent as customers are anticipating new machines. Sales of Power-based pSeries Unix servers were up 15 percent, with decent sales in the entry and high-end markets. These pSeries machines seem to be more immune to product transitions, but that could be simply because OS/400 V5R3 (which is required for the Power5 machines) has been ready for months and AIX 5L 5.3 (which will also be required on Power5s) is not expected to be ready until the end of September or early October. He said that when IDC put out its first quarter market share analysis, it would show that IBM had market share gains for the seventh quarter in a row. Storage revenues were up 16 percent in the aggregate, with midrange disk arrays and tapes doing well. (Disk arrays were up 11 percent, while tape products were up 25 percent.) IBM's Personal Systems unit booked $2.8 billion in sales, up 18 percent, thanks to increasing demand for laptops and notebooks, which carry premiums, compared with desktops.

On the software front, sales were up 11 percent as reported, to $3.5 billion, but at constant currency, this is only 3 percent growth. Sales of Rational development tools increased by 88 percent, and WebSphere-branded sales were up 25 percent (with the WebSphere Application Server up 33 percent, and probably driven in large measure by booming mainframe sales). Domino and related middleware products were up 15 percent, compared with the first quarter of 2003, and Tivoli showed better signs, with 18 percent growth against a weak compare. Perhaps most significant, gross profit margins in the Software Group were 86 percent, up 1.4 percent compared with last year. IBM really loves those MVS-z/OS and OS/400 mini-monopolies, since they are still the profit engines of the company.

IDC Says Positive Business Outlook Will Lead to Increased IT Spending in 2004

While we're in little danger of experiencing the type of euphoric business growth that manifested during the go-go days of the late 1990s and in early 2000, it does appear that the economic footings of many companies are improving, and business spending is pulling solidly out of the slump of the last three years. The latest indicator comes from IDC, which recently conducted a survey of 1,341 North American decision-makers. The survey's results show a 15 percent jump in the number of decision-makers reporting their business prospects as "positive" or "very positive," IDC says, while about 43 percent of respondents said their organizations intend to boost their total IT budget in 2004, a significant improvement over the 31 percent level recorded in 2003. IDC says the biggest budget increases are being seen in the banking industry, as well as in the business and legal services industry. Furthermore, the group found that companies in the banking, telecommunications, and resources industries are shifting IT budget dollars from internal to external spending for 2004, which indicates that outsourcing is more prevalent in these industries than in other verticals.