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Microsoft Buys Alacris for Identity Management

Microsoft this week snapped up identity management software provider Alacris for an undisclosed sum. The buy is expected to bolster Microsoft's capability to help large customers roll-out and manage highly tailored identity management systems that incorporate digital certificates and smart card authentication. Microsoft sounds most interested in the policy management and workflow components of Alacris' idNexus suite of software, especially the capability for users to complete common tasks themselves over the Web, instead of requiring administrators to do it for them. "We are thrilled that our technology will become part of Microsoft's security product offerings and that it will be delivered to a larger group of customers," says Ron Mac Donell, president and chief executive officer of Alacris, which is based in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Microsoft did not detail exactly how it intends to use idNexus, or explain what Microsoft products it will be incorporated into, except to say it plans to announce sometime in the future when a beta version of Alacris technologies will become available. Alacris shipped idNexus 3.0 in July. The software only supports Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft Submits WS-Management Spec with 11 Other Vendors

A new Web services specification designed to help IT managers remotely access and manage devices regardless of their state was submitted by Microsoft and other vendors to the Distributed Management Task Force last week. Web Services for Management (WS-Management) provides a common manageability protocol that allows interoperability across heterogeneous hardware and operating system environments, regardless of whether the systems are just out of the box, powered down, or otherwise unavailable, according to Microsoft, which was one of a dozen vendors that developed the spec, including AMD, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Intel, NEC, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, and WBEM Solutions. Microsoft supports WS-Management in Windows Server 2003 R2 and in the next release of Microsoft Operations Manager. Intel also supports WS-Management (which was originally called WMX) in its Intel Active Management Technology architecture specification, and will implement WS-Management support in hardware in 2006.

Jack Wolfskin Achieves an IT Makeover Using Microsoft Technology

Microsoft is participating the latest marketing craze--"extreme" makeovers--and applying it to those it deems most needy of technology overhauls: mid size businesses. One of the mid size businesses featured in Microsoft's "Makeover" program is Jack Wolfskin, a German manufacturer of outdoor clothing and equipment that gradually added sophistication to its Windows-based B2B and B2C applications over the course of several years, beginning in 2000. The makeover started in 1999, when it moved from the Unix-based version of the Navision ERP software to one based on Windows and SQL Server. In 2001, Jack Wolfskin overhauled its e-commerce Web site, followed by an electronic B2B initiative (codenamed "eWolf") to open up parts of its Navision system using ASP.NET to partners in 2002. The launch of eWolf quickly grew to encompass 50 to 60 percent of its order flow, and enabled the company to cut delivery times from about 40 hours to 20 hours while avoiding the need to hire an additional 12 employees to manage growth, Microsoft says. In 2003, the company paved the way to new store openings by streamlining store-to-headquarter communication. This was accomplished using BizTalk Server 2002 and Microsoft's point of sale (POS) solution, Retail Management System, which lowered store-opening time to six weeks, thereby enabling the company initiate a plan calling for 30 store openings by the end of 2006, according to Microsoft. In 2004, the company started its "WolfTalk" plan to replace its paper-based replenishment program with electronic processes. That portion of the plan took three months to implement with BizTalk Server, Microsoft says. Today, it's looking to implement SharePoint Services to enhance communication among the company's employees. "We're enjoying double-digit growth, and I don't think we would be doing that if we had stayed with our previous solution," says Severin Canisius, IT manager at Jack Wolfskin.

Microsoft Delights PDC Crowd with Napoleon Dynamite-Bill Gates Video

One of the things that Microsoft is very good at (and let's not deny it--Microsoft is very good at many things) generating a buzz through innovative marketing. We caught our first glimpse of it with the tremendous hoopla of Windows 95 and were subjected to it with .NET in the 2000 timeframe (when .NET was still an amorphous marketing blob). Microsoft did it again last week at the 2005 Professional Developer's Conference, where it aired a 5-minute video starring chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates and the 2004 big-screen phenom, Napoleon Dynamite. The video depicts a series of dream sequences where Gates is a career counselor and Dynamite is his counselee. Somebody in the PDC audience had a video camera, and the bootleg copy has been posted to various Web sites, including this one. If you're a "Dynamite" fan, you'll probably find the skit almost as hilarious as the movie itself.

Lew Platt, Former HP Chairman and CEO, Dies

Lew Platt, who died last week at the age of 64, grew up in Johnson City, New York, one of the oldest towns in America, located in the rural northern tier of that state, northwest of Albany on the outskirts of the Adirondaks, and he learned mechanical engineering at nearby Cornell University before taking a job in 1966 at Hewlett Packard--a company that he would eventually run for more than seven years. Platt's first job was as an engineer in HP's medical products division, but it is no accident of timing that the same year Platt came on board, HP launched its first computer, the HP 2116A, an air-cooled behemoth that was installed on a research ship used by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. This was also the same year that HP Laboratories was founded, an organization that would do fundamental and important research on solid state electronics that would culminate in its PA-RISC processors and its Unix server products more than three decades later. Platt had a hand in making HP a powerhouse of the server business and one of the two pillars, in the 1980s and 1990s, of the RISC/Unix business that made it a credible enterprise IT supplier long before HP acquired Compaq just a little more than a year after Platt retired in July 1999. In many ways, the years that Platt was at HP were its golden ones, where profits were easier to come by because of general growth in the IT business, but also because new markets were being created and HP was good at getting in on the action. HP was an innovator in test equipment, calculators, Laser and Inkjet printers, and then proprietary and Unix minicomputers.

Lew Platt was an HP lifer who remained as chairman until Carly Fiorina took over that position a year after Platt retired. Platt was a smart executive, and not just because he had an MBA from the Wharton School. In fact, his true smarts may have developed despite it, if you don't put much stock in MBA thinking. He made big bets. One of his biggest came after he had risen through the ranks in HP's Computer Systems Organization in the 1980s, eventually becoming executive vice president overseeing HP's Computer Products Sector in 1988 and named head of the CSO in 1990. This was when HP made its big bet on RISC/Unix, a bet that brought the company many tens of billions of dollars in revenues and probably tens of billions in profits. As company founder David Packard was moving to retirement, Platt was elected president and CEO in 1992 and became chairman in September 1993 as Packard retired. (Bill Hewlett, the company's other founder, had retired in 1987.) It was Platt who steered HP through the roaring 1990s, and luckily or cannily he decided to step down from his leadership positions at HP in 1999 and picked Fiorina, a smart, young outsider, to be HP's CEO and to succeed him as chairman within a year. He remained chairman until the summer of 2000, which was when HP must have started working on the Compaq acquisition.

When Platt left HP, the company's stock price was puttering along with modest growth after growing very fast--more than 20 percent a year of growth for both sales and profits through the 1990s, which is just stunning. This is Microsoft performance. This is Intel performance. This is Dell performance. This is IBM in the late 1960s and early 1970s performance. And it is one of the legacies that Lew Platt leaves behind. Mark Hurd, HP's current president and CEO, has three pairs of shoes to fill: Bill's, Dave's and Lew's. It's a tough job, but each leader in turn has done it, and even the controversial Fiorina did exactly what Platt wanted her to do: shake up HP and get it to find a strategy for growth for the next 10 years in a rapidly maturing IT market.

Hester Leaves Newisys, Joins AMD as Weber Leaves

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices has completed a hat trick of hirings of former IBM chip and systems gurus as it has convinced Phil Hester, the CEO of Opteron server maker Newisys and formerly the lead designer of Big Blue's RS/6000 Unix workstations and its chief technology officer for its former PC line, to become the chief technology officer at AMD. Hester's appointment as CTO at AMD comes as Fred Weber, the CTO who brought the X86-64 instruction set and the HyperTransport Direct Connect Architecture (DCA) from the drawing board to the market over the past six year, has decided to leave AMD to go put money and effort into technology startups. He was not more precise about his plans. Before founding Newisys several years ago as the first Opteron server vendor, Hester spent 23 years at IBM; his Newisys team eventually sold the company to electronics maker Sanmina-SCI in 2003, before any of the tier one server makers backed Opteron or agreed to resell the Newisys machines.

Hester's appointment as CTO at AMD follows fast on the heels of another former IBMer's appointment to a top development position. Only three weeks ago, Jeff Verhuel, a 25-year IBM veteran who had established IBM Microelectronics' engineering and technology outsourcing business, was tapped to be AMD's vice president of silicon design. Back in the late 1990s, when IBM was working on the "Regatta" pSeries Unix server platform and the Power4 chip, the first dual-core processor brought to market, VerHeul was vice president of server and workstation development at IBM's Server Group. VerHeul and Hester are apparently tag teaming to replace Weber. And that have some help from another IBM colleague. In April of this year, AMD had already hired away Rich Oehler, the creator of the Newisys "Horus" chipset for high-end Opteron machines scaling up to 32 processors, to work on future Opteron system designs. Oehler was the lead designer for IBM's Power family of chips for many years and was also one of the key designers of the "Summit" family of chipsets Big Blue created to make scalable, SMP-NUMA hybrid servers based on Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors.