But Wait, There's More

Microsoft Issues Two Security Updates on Patch Tuesday

Yesterday, Patch Tuesday netted two security patches from Microsoft to prevent its software from allowing code to be executed on affected computers. The first patch, described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-028, fixes a "critical" buffer overrun vulnerability in the GDI+ processing device for JPEGs, used in many of Microsoft's operating systems and programs. The second patch, described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-027, fixes an "important" problem that could allow the remote execution of code when converting WordPerfect documents to Microsoft format.

Siemens Opts for Safety Net During Migration to Exchange 2003

The move from Microsoft Exchange Version 5 to Exchange 2003 has been a difficult one for many customers. For electronics giant Siemens, one of the largest Windows shops and an employer of more than 400,000 people, the migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 was too complex for Microsoft's migration tools, so it turned to the Exchange Migration Wizard, from Quest Software, instead. "We did a pilot migration, using the native tools provided with Exchange 2003, and quickly found that they would not be sufficient for our needs in conducting this very large and complex migration," said Siemens' chief information officer, Dieter Reinersmann. The Exchange Migration Wizard supports the coexistence of both versions of Exchange during the migration, which will allow Siemens to roll back to Exchange 5.5 at any time, if it needs to. Quest obtained the Exchange Migration Wizard in its acquisition of Aelita Software, in March.

South African ERP Developer SYSPRO Named Microsoft ISV of the Year

ERP software developer SYSPRO was named Microsoft's ISV of the year yesterday. The company, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, develops a suite of ERP, CRM, business intelligence, and e-commerce applications that run on Windows as well as Linux, Unix, and Netware operating systems. SYSPRO was founded in 1978 by SYSPRO chief executive Phil Duff and his brother when they acquired the rights to a multi-user financial package and built a manufacturing module on top of it. Most recently, the company has released SYSPRO 6.0, a collection of more than 150 customizable "business objects" built with XML on a Microsoft .NET component-based architecture. "SYSPRO is focused on delivering the best suite of integrated enterprise applications," Duff says. "The use of emerging and current technologies assists us in achieving these goals."

Merrill Lynch Calls for HP Breakup--Again

Hewlett-Packard did its Digital Experience Launch of 200 new products recently, and analysts at Merrill Lynch took the occasion to once again advise HP's upper management to hire a chief operating officer and to seriously consider splitting up the company into pieces. Steve Milunovich, the top IT analyst at the brokerage firm, has been saying for months that HP can be sensibly split into a consumer company and a commercial company, or can be divided into digital imaging and computing halves. But the argument that all profitable divisions should be set free, while making financial sense in the short term, is not necessarily a good strategy in the long term. If IBM had believed the nay-sayers more than a decade ago, there would have been five Baby Blues that would be tearing one another to shreds today in a way that may not have yielded profits for these individual companies or decent products for consumers, because of the relentless cost cutting and competition. Competition can go too far, just as spinouts and mergers can.

CEOs Who Outsource Seem to Be Profiting Nicely

Newisys Readies Chipset for Big Opteron Iron

While formerly independent Opteron server maker Newisys became a unit of contract hardware manufacturer Sanmina-SCI in July 2003, it has not stopped innovating and is making good on its promise to deliver more scalable Opteron servers than its initial two-way and four-way Opteron machines. At the Hot Chips show recently at Stanford University, Newisys showed off a new chipset code-named "Horus" that will allow it to create the big iron systems that it was hinting it could deliver when it burst onto the scene in January 2003. Newisys may not be a household name, but Sun Microsystems is reselling its machines as the Sun Fire V20z and V40z and Verari Systems (formerly known as RackSaver) is also peddling its designs. Hewlett-Packard and IBM have opted for their own Opteron server designs--so far, at least. The latter is somewhat mysterious given that the founders of Newisys back in August 2000 were Phil Hester and Clay Cipione, who were key designers of IBM's RISC and Intel workstation products, and that Rich Oehler, the chief technology officer at Newisys, was the lead architect for IBM's RISC and then PowerPC processors in the 1980s and 1990s.

You might be thinking that the advent of truly powerful Opteron servers from Newisys that scale from 4 to 32 processors might encourage IBM and HP to more fully embrace Opteron and just adopt the future Horus designs from Newisys. But with their own Power-Squadron and Itanium-Integrity server lines to protect, IBM and HP will put off adopting and endorsing these Horus machines. According to Oehler, who gave the presentation at Hot Chips this week, Newisys has been working on the ASIC that comprises the Horus chipset for almost three years. He says that while Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron architecture, with its integrated memory controller and HyperTransport interconnect, can "gluelessly" scale (meaning it doesn't need a sophisticated chipset, like the Horus chipset Newisys created) from 2 to 8 processors in a single system image, the ring architecture of the resulting systems does not scale linearly as processors are added to the machine.

Yankee: Linux Will Grow, But Windows and Unix Will Persist

According to a report comparing the total cost of ownership of Linux with Unix and Windows by consultancy Yankee Group, Linux on the server is going to experience double-digit growth in the coming years, but that does not necessarily mean that Windows and Unix are going to fade away. As is the case in much of the IT industry, Yankee Group's study of IT buyers seems to indicate that platform inertia will keep Unix and Windows in dominant use for years to come. Yankee Group and Windows system software supplier Sunbelt Software surveyed 1,150 IT administrators and C-level executives worldwide in early 2004 to get a sense of what they thought about Linux in relation to the Unix and Windows platforms that most of the world still uses to do data processing.

The Yankee Group report, echoing similar findings from other consultancies and anecdotal evidence from server makers around the world, identifies that Linux is particularly useful in "green field" installations where a whole new application is being installed and is particularly attractive to Unix shops who are tired of paying high prices for RISC/Unix iron. Not surprisingly, the Yankee Group study indicated that large companies with complex IT infrastructures are hesitant to jump to Linux for the sake of Linux--as they well should be. "Despite the hype, Linux is not superior to Unix and Windows Server 2003," writes Laura DiDio, Yankee Group's application infrastructure and software platforms senior analyst. "Linux is the technical equivalent of Unix and Windows Server 2003. In large enterprises, a significant Linux deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four time more expensive and take three times as long to deploy as an upgrade from one version of Windows to newer Windows releases." This assessment was backed up by 90 percent of the 300 large organizations surveyed by Yankee Group and Sunbelt, who agreed that such a switch would be "prohibitively expensive, extremely complex and time-consuming, and would not provide any tangible business gains for the organization."