But Wait, There's More

BEA to Link .NET and Java with 'Liquid Assets' Strategy and COLA Products

BEA Systems last week took a step closer to Microsoft, with whom it has co-written so many Web services specs in the last few years, when it unveiled its new Enterprise Liquid Assets strategy to bring the worlds of Enterprise Java and .NET together, in a services oriented architecture (SOA). The new Enterprise Liquid Assets strategy includes a new group of AquaLogic products and tools that will enable Web services to be composed once and leveraged anywhere (COLA), across both .Net and Java platforms. (Hey, at least the acronym sounds more appetizing than the one that refers to tapes that you can only write to once, but read many over and over.) "The days of business silos and software smokestacks are coming to an end," declared Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive officer of BEA. "We envision a world where each one of us will have our own personal 'service networks' to help us maximize our productivity, without needing to cobble together scraps of information gathered through dozens of phone calls, requests from corporate databases, and hours of spreadsheet work." The products include the AquaLogic Service Bus (formerly code named Quicksilver), the AquaLogic Service Registry, the AquaLogic Data Services Platform (formerly called Liquid Data), and the AquaLogic Enterprise Security products (formerly called WebLogic Enterprise Security). In the future, the Silicon Valley company plans to deliver AquaLogic Process, AquaLogic Portal, and the AquaLogic Composer. BEA's flagship product, the WebLogic application server, doesn't get a name change.

Windows Server Chief Calls for IPv6 Adoption

Internet Protocol version 6.0 received some much-needed backing last week when Microsoft server chief Bob Muglia said it was "critical" that people adopt the standard, which will tremendously widen the available pool of Internet addresses. "Next, there is the issue of addressability," Muglia said in a Microsoft PressPass Q&A. "There already are billions of devices, and there will be many more. Four billion IP addresses are not enough to address all this, and thus Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a critical component." Despite the success of the Internet, interest in the Net's latest iteration is seriously lagging. A recent study by network equipment vendor Juniper Networks found that less than 7 percent of respondents consider IPv6 "very important to achieving their IT goals," and that Federal governmental agencies are the most likely to be indifferent to IPv6, which was ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1995.

FalconStor Supports Windows Server 2003 with Backup Software

Last week at the TechEd conference, FalconStor announced it has delivered expanded Windows support for its iSCSI Storage Server backup software. The software, which provides continuous replication of Windows, Exchange, and SQL Server data, was previously only supported on Windows Storage Server 2003. With last week's announcement, the software is now supported across all Windows Server 2003 operating systems. In April, the Melville, New York, company announced support for the latest X64 processors from Intel and AMD. Supporting those 64-bit chips greatly increased the storage throughput of that product, the company said, and enabled it to "achieve the speed of wire, equivalent to a hardware-based host bus adapter."

PatchLink to Bundle Patch Management Software with SQL Server 2000

PatchLink has received permission from Microsoft to market its Patchlink Update patch management software with SQL Server 2000, the Scottsdale, Arizona, company announced at TechEd last week. Patchlink Update sits atop SQL Server and helps system administrators to procure, install, and configure patches on various systems, including Windows, Unix, Linux, NetWare, and Mac OSX, while helping companies maintain compliance with regulations. PatchLink CEO Sean Moshir says integrating SQL Server 2000 with Patchlink Update will make it much easier on users "With the availability of this new offering, the speed at which an organization will be able to implement a security patch, vulnerability and compliancy management program dramatically increases," Moshir says.

HP, IBM Jockey for the Lead in the Tape Market

Tape technology has been around in commercial data centers for six decades, and it is not about to go away in the seventh. Vendors are still fighting over control of the prolific, if only moderately profitable, market for tape drives and tape libraries. IDC recently issued market-share report cards for the tape market, and IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the top of the class. IDC says HP had a 29 percent share of both shipments and revenues for tape drives bearing its label in 2004; IBM had only 17 percent of tape drive shipments in 2004, but because it tends to sell more expensive drives (particularly for mainframe and iSeries customers), actually raked in 33 percent of revenues. Dell and Certance (the former tape drive unit of disk maker Seagate Technology and, with IBM and HP, one of the three key developers behind the LTO tape standard) were cited as dominant tape drive sellers in 2004. If you don't think that adding the Compaq server line to the HP tape business hasn't been helpful to HP, you're wrong. In the tape library market, HP accounted for 26 percent of shipments and 23 percent of revenue for automated tape loaders and full tape libraries. IBM also had 23 percent of revenues in this segment, but only had 22 percent of shipments--again, IBM sells bigger boxes to its bigger customers. StorageTek, which has just been eaten by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion, and ADIC were cited as the other dominant tape library suppliers in the IDC report.

DataMirror Unveils Operation Data Store Offering

DataMirror this month announced a new offering and sales campaign to help its customers create Operational Data Stores (ODS) without impacting production systems. DataMirror's new ODS solution brings the capability to capture changes made to the database of a production system in real-time, without slowing the production system or causing any downtime, a feature DataMirror calls Change Data Capture (CDC). An ODS is a separate database that mirrors a production database, and is used for business intelligence, business activity monitoring (BAM), application testing, and other uses. DataMirror says it can capture data from a database running on practically any system, from mainframes to mobile devices, for loading into an ODS.

Gartner Says Database Market Continued Its Recovery in 2004

Analyst group Gartner recently unveiled its database sales figures for 2004, and it reckons that all vendors raked in $7.8 billion in sales, an increase of 10.3 percent. While the continued expansion of database sales is good news, sales levels are nonetheless far below the levels that Gartner was forecasting back in 2000. Colleen Graham, the principal analyst at Gartner who did this year's database report, said in a statement accompanying the sales and market share stats that there was only $30 million in sales separating IBM and Oracle, who have been jockeying for the top spot in the relational database market since 2001. So it is a statistical dead heat in 2004 in terms of who is number one. Graham said relational database sales on the Windows platform increased by 10 percent in 2004, about the same as the market at large, to reach $3.1 billion. That gives the Windows platform a 40 percent share of relational database sales, and Microsoft, with $1.56 billion in sales, managed to hit 50 percent penetration on the Windows platform, up from 47 percent of the Windows-related RDBMS sales in 2003. Microsoft accomplished this feat by growing at 18 percent, nearly twice the rate of the Windows database market and the market at large. Industry analysts--not from Gartner, but at OLAP Report--have said in recent reports that about a third of Microsoft's SQL Server sales are for the OLAP features that come bundled in SQL Server.

Sales of relational databases on Unix platforms decreased by 0.7 percent to $2.32 billion, but after a sales decrease of 5.9 percent in 2003, that tiny decrease must come as a relief to Oracle, Sybase, NCR, and yes, IBM, which all have substantial Unix-related database sales. IBM's Informix purchase did not help much in 2004, with sales dropping 17.6 percent to $110.9 million. IBM may just barely get its bait back on that $1 billion it paid for Informix in early 2001 in another few years, if sales don't stop altogether. Oracle held most of its market share in the Unix database market, with 55.9 percent share, down from 57.4 percent of the market last year. Notable in the Gartner numbers is the fact that NCR's Teradata data warehousing unit saw sales climb by 17.2 percent in 2004, giving the company $230 million in sales. Also, Sybase, which used to be a strong partner with Microsoft and which gave Microsoft the technical platform on which to launch its SQL Server platform, was able to keep sales on an even keel at $178 million, up 0.5 percent from 2003. Both of these vendors are strong players in the Unix market--NCR among retailers and financial institutions, and Sybase among financial and telecommunications institutions. On the Linux front, Gartner said that relational database sales hit $654.8 million, growing by 118.4 percent from 2003's sales levels of $299.8 million. While IBM was initially the big winner in a very small Linux database market two years ago with DB2, Oracle is now the big winner, with 80.5 percent of the Linux database market, with its sales in this segment up 154.8 percent in 2004. Oracle's Linux sales quadrupled in 2003, giving it a 69.1 percent share that year.