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The Party's Over: Free NT 4.0 Support to End on New Year's Eve

Support for Windows NT 4.0 will end, as scheduled, on December 31, Microsoft announced last week. In a new Q&A with senior director of Windows Serviceability, Peter Houston, which is available on Microsoft's Web site, the company explains why NT 4.0 users should migrate "as soon as possible" to Windows Server 2003. In a performance comparison between Windows Server 2003 and Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft claims that Windows Server 2003 runs 160 percent faster as a file server and 345 percent faster as a domain server, and provides an average reduction in total cost of ownership of 20 to 30 percent. But all is not lost for the NT 4.0 faithful. For a fee, users can sign up for Microsoft's Custom Support Center offering, which will entitle them to security updates that Microsoft deems "important" or "critical." This offering will be good for two years.

Sage Growth Fueled by Acquisitions

Windows ERP developer Sage Group is looking to grow by acquisitions, following a successful year in which acquisitions helped to fuel its growth considerably. For the fiscal year ending September 30, organic growth of the English company's core products rose by only about 6 percent, but net income rose about 23 percent, to $243 million, on revenue that also grew by about 23 percent, to $1 billion. With several acquisitions under its belt, the company has high expectations for 2005, and expects to easily hit $1.4 billion in revenues. Unless it acquires more companies, that is--then its revenue figure could increase by even more.

Disk Array Market Is Up in the Third Quarter

Despite insane levels of competition, the rapid introduction of less-costly disk arrays and disk drives, and rampant discounting in the storage market, the aggregate storage industry posted its sixth consecutive quarter of revenue gains in the third quarter of 2004, according to a report from IDC. The growth rate has cooled a bit, however, with $3.4 billion in external disk array sales in the third quarter, up 3.5 percent. The overall disk market grew by only 2.1 percent, to $5 billion, which suggests that internal array sales continue to fall as companies embrace storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) arrays. Incredibly, IDC estimates that the aggregate amount of capacity sold in the third quarter was up 50.5 percent, to 310 petabytes (that's 310,000 terabytes), the highest growth in seven quarters and the most disk capacity ever sold in a quarter.

In the external disk market, EMC is the market leader, with $724 million in sales (21.2 percent of sales) and 17.4 percent revenue growth. Hewlett-Packard's external disk business has taken it on the chin in the past few quarters, and saw a 7.5 percent revenue decline, to $647 million, in the quarter, dropping from first place to second place, with 19 percent of external disk array sales for the quarter. (HP has been the number-one disk array seller since buying Compaq, more than two years ago.) IBM is a distant third, with $448 million (13.1 percent) of the external disk array pie in the third quarter of 2004, down six-tenths of a percent. Hitachi saw sales drop 2.3 percent, to $289 million (giving 8.5 percent of the pie), while Dell had 11.9 percent growth, pushing sales to $237 million (6.9 percent of the pie). The NAS array market grew by 14.3 percent, crested above $2 billion, a level it first attained in the second quarter of the year.

In the overall worldwide disk array market (external plus internal arrays), HP is still the market leader, with $1.2 billion in sales and 23.6 percent of the market; but the company lost more than two points of market share. IBM is number two, with just over $1 billion in sales and a smidgen of growth. EMC, Dell, and Hitachi are numbers three, four, and five in the market, respectively, and other vendors accounted for $1.4 billion in sales, 28.1 percent of the storage pie in the quarter.

IBM Rumored to Be Selling Its PC Business

At press time, The New York Times was reporting that IBM is trying to sell off its entire PC business (desktops, workstations, and laptops) for somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion. IBM may not have created the PC business (the company was dragged into it, kicking and screaming, by market forces that it did not understand), but by putting its seal of approval on the idea in 1981, with the launch of the IBM PC, the PC business as we know it, a relatively open box with third party components that can be easily cloned, was born.

The reason why IBM would sell its PC business for such a paltry sum is simple: there isn't really much there. IBM outsourced the manufacturing of all of its PCs nearly three years ago to Sanmina-SCI, which last year also got a contract to make all of IBM's X86 servers, except its BladeCenter blade servers and the "Summit" xSeries 44X high-end X86 servers. In effect, what IBM has left of its PC business, with about 6 percent of quarterly market share, are some brand names and intellectual property, and a revenue stream worth about $11 billion a year that is not profitable most of the time. According to the rumor mill, Chinese PC and server manufacturer Lenovo Group, formerly known as Legend, and one of the fastest-growing PC companies in the world, is the expected buyer.

ASNA Says It's Sold 750,000 Licenses for DataGate Product

Ten years ago, ASNA launched DataGate, a software product that provides Windows applications with high-speed access to the DB2/400 database. The San Antonio software developer announced last week that three quarters of a million licenses of DataGate have been sold worldwide since 1994. Today, thousands of businesses around the world are using various instances of DataGate to access the OS/400 database from a variety of Web and Windows applications built with Microsoft Visual Studio languages, as well as ASNA's own ASNA Visual RPG (AVR). In last week's announcement, noted iSeries consultant Robert Tipton had some kind words for the product. "Because DataGate provides a single 'data abstraction and program call' interface to Windows developers--be they C#, VB, or AVR--the power of iSeries applications and data can be leveraged across the IT infrastructure, quickly and powerfully." Anne Ferguson, president and cofounder of ASNA, says DataGate has been a "breakthrough product," and its success should rank it as one of the most successful products ever in the midrange systems market. "We appreciate the high degree of customer loyalty it has fostered, and we're looking forward to providing a second decade of customer satisfaction," she says.

IBM Completes Interoperability Testing on Brocade SAN Switch

IBM has completed qualification testing of Brocade Communications Systems' 4100 family of 4-Gigabit-per-second SilkWorm storage area network (SAN) switches with its iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers, and is now offering that switch as the IBM TotalStorage SAN32B-2, Brocade announced recently. The SilkWorm 4100 family supports the "pay as you grow" Ports On Demand capability, enabling the switch to support up to 32 ports. It is backward-compatible with thousands of older IBM and Brocade SANs in place today and can automatically sense data link speeds of 1, 2, or 4 Gbits per second. The switches feature redundant and hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans, hot-swappable SFP media, and hot code loading and activation, as well as fabric management and security software.

ACOM Launches New Printer Supply Web Site

ACOM Solutions, a developer of document management software for OS/400 and Windows systems, last week announced the launch of a new e-commerce Web site where it is selling printer supplies. The online store, www.orderprintersupplies.com, offers an array of MICR, laser, and color toner cartridges, fax and copier cartridges, cartridges of inkjet printers, printer maintenance kits, blank and pre-printed check stock, and pressure seal envelopes. More than 600 different products are available from the new Web site, including OEM products, as well as ACOM-branded printer products that can be as much as 50 percent cheaper than the premium brand-name versions. "They are high quality, high value products that are manufactured to our specifications and which test out as good as or better than any other compatible products in the market," says Gregg Church, the company's vice president of marketing and product management. Same-day shipping is available on most products, and orders of $75 or more are eligible for free shipping for a limited time. ACOM also sells laser printers.