But Wait, There's More

Paul Otellini Takes Over CEO Post at Intel Today

Intel will get a new chief executive officer today during its annual shareholders meeting. Paul Otellini, currently Intel's president and chief operating officer, will take the position from Craig Barrett, who becomes Intel's chairman. As the chipmaker's fifth top boss, Otellini will be charged with steering a new course for the company and putting the missteps of the last year behind it. In particular, Otellini will be expected to close the gap with rival AMD, which has beat the legendary chipmaker to market with two key technologies in recent years, including 64-bit extensions to the basic X86 architecture, and dual-core processors. Otellini is no newcomer to Intel, having been with the company for more than 30 years. He is, however, the first non-engineer to take the chief executive role.

MBS Having Success Versus SAP at Divisional Offices

Microsoft's Business Solutions is talking up recent customer wins that it has had against SAP, which is both a partner and a rival in the ERP business. "Although our company headquarters was using SAP, the Nordic [divisions] chose Microsoft Business Solutions--Axapta with a common setup and common server," says Jens Nielsen, CFO of the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim Denmark. "The cost of the Microsoft solution was also less than half the cost of alternative solutions, and the implementation of Microsoft Axapta in Finland took only 21 days." Similarly, a German electric power tool manufacturer named Metabo picked an MBS ERP suite to replace an aging collection of self-written applications at its international subsidiaries. The main requirement for the new system was that it had to integrate with the SAP ERP application used at Metabo's home office, said Thomas Raith, the company's vice president of IT and processes. The company picked Navision, another MBS product suite. "This solution has integrated well with SAP, and helped us provide transparency across our organization and share best practices."

IBM Adopts Firefox for Internal Use

IBM, one of the strongest backers of open-source software, is now encouraging its employees to use Mozilla's Firefox Web browser. About 10 percent of the company's 300,000 workers are now reportedly using Firefox, which has emerged as a worthwhile competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, which hasn't seen a major update in years. Although another 30,000 downloads of Firefox won't make a huge difference in IE's 95 percent-plus market penetration, observers say IBM's use internally gives Firefox more credibility and could spur others to give the open-source browser a shot. IBM executives say the move could save the company money by lessening dependence on proprietary software. Although IBM is still the largest purveyor of proprietary software the world has ever known, it has also been a generous donor of money and expertise to the development and maintenance of the Linux operating system, which, along with Microsoft's Windows, is slowly chipping away at the installed base of Unix servers and IBM midrange and mainframe servers.

Is Big Blue the Green Haired Punk of Outsourcing?

Now that Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have kissed and made up, the IT world won't get to enjoy the sometimes humorous (and oftentimes rancorous) give-and-take between the Stanford alum and Redmond's billionaires. Lucky for us, Sun and Microsoft have united against a common Big Blue enemy. Last week at a press conference to show how Microsoft and Sun are working so well together, Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy took a swipe at IBM, likening one of IT's most prim and proper players to a boy you wouldn't want your daughter to go out with. "You know how you go to the restaurant at night and you hand your keys to your brand new car to somebody with green spiked hair and some body piercings, and they do a neutral slam and smoke around the corner with your new car?" McNealy asked. "I'm sure when you hand a PC to some folks you go, 'Uh-oh, there's going to be a problem,' or we hand the server over to somebody, a customer, like IBM Global Services, I get very nervous. I'd rather give it to anybody than IBM Global Services."

OLAP Report Says OLAP Market Grew 15.7 Percent in 2004

According to the analysts at British market researcher The OLAP Report, last year was the best one since 2000 for the online analytical processing (OLAP) subset of the data warehousing software market. OLAP Report reckons that companies engaged in this market segment had $4.3 billion in sales last year, up 15.7 percent. This was ahead of predictions, and well ahead of the single-digit growth the OLAP market had from 2001 through 2003. OLAP processing got off to an explosive boom in 1996, with $1 billion in sales, and hit above $2.5 billion in 1999. The company is projecting good growth, with sales approaching $6 billion by 2007. That growth will come even after several waves of consolidation and a lot of pricing pressure from Microsoft, which started embedding OLAP services in SQL Server in 1999, tweaked it in 2000, and has been using price to compete as other vendors add functionality.

The consolidation in the OLAP software industry is profound, with the top five vendors--Microsoft, Hyperion Solutions, Cognos, Business Objects, and MicroStrategy accounting for 76.5 percent of worldwide sales in 2004; the top 10 vendors account for about 95 percent. OLAP Report reckons that about a third of Microsoft's SQL Server sales should really be attributed to OLAP and extract-transform-load (ETL) tools. Hyperion's products, which have been ported to the iSeries, are holding their own against Microsoft so far, but the company has seen a steady drain on revenue and market share since Microsoft entered the market.

Microsoft Forms Software Alliance with i2 Technologies

Microsoft last week announced a new strategic alliance with i2 Technologies, the once high-flying provider of supply chain planning software. As part of the deal, i2 customers will use the supply chain software through Microsoft interfaces, particularly Excel, and i2's software will be deployed using Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2003, and the Sharepoint Portal software. The first i2 solutions targeted for development with Microsoft technologies are Master Data Management and Demand Management, and these are expected to be delivered during the second half of 2005, the company says. During the dot-com boom, you will remember, i2 entered into a formidable partnership with two other technology providers, Ariba, a developer of trading community management software, and IBM. The trio was expected to bring ebusiness to a variety of industries, but after a highly publicized fall-out with one of its top customers, Nike, i2 never seemed to regain traction, and i2, along with many other high-flyers, lost billions of dollars in value.

Microsoft Recruits Top Grid Scientist from England

Microsoft successfully recruited some serious brainpower this week when it announced that Tony Hey, one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field of parallel computing, had been named Microsoft's new vice president in charge of technical computing. "We are excited to have a person of Tony's stature within the global computational science community joining the company," says Craig Mundie, Hey's new boss and Microsoft's chief technical officer and senior vice president of advanced strategies and policy. Hey, who graduated from Oxford University with an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics, will be in charge of coordinating Microsoft's collaboration efforts with the scientific community. Hey will come to Microsoft early this summer from his current job as director of the United Kingdom's e-Science Initiative.