IBM is Connecting More than Computers with Workplace
IBM has announced a number of new offerings within its
Workplace portfolio which they hope will help capture a larger share of the
desktop productivity market. Workplace delivers applications or documents to
desktops running Windows or Linux, delivering the information within a Web
browser or another desktop client. IBM announced that it will be delivering IBM
Workplace Services Express 2.0, targeted at small and medium enterprises. The
company also announced the near-term availability of WebSphere Portal 5.1 as
well as IBM’s Lotus Web Conferencing Service, an offering that can either be
purchased as a subscription service from IBM or installed locally on a
company’s infrastructure. In addition, IBM announced seventeen new Workplace
offerings for specific industries including retail, automotive, finance,
telecommunications, government, life sciences, and Healthcare, among others.
It’s good to see IBM continue to leverage the $4 billion
Lotus acquisition that seemed, at the time, to be a significantly large square
peg being forced in to a relatively small round hole. But despite our initial
skepticism, it appears that IBM is making something worthwhile come from the
acquisition. We are inclined to believe that Workplace has a number of possible
sweet spots in the market, and one of those in our minds would be in the SMB
space. For what it is worth, we were pleased to see IBM highlight the
SMB-specific offerings within the Workplace portfolio announcement, as in our
mind the SMB market is often under-represented in these announcements and only
gets attention after the fact, losing the potential benefits of the bigger
spotlight.
But what really seals the deal on the SMB value proposition is IBM’s emphasis on human beings and their interaction with fellow employees, customers, and finally, data. IBM believes that Workplace creates an opportunity to speed up the human business processes by allowing people to take advantage of improved data business processes. We believe that the focus on the human interface with IT, and the behavioral changes and opportunities that it represents, could be the most important value proposition that products like Workplace offer. While managing the back end plumbing and data streams is still a core attribute of a well deployed IT environment, the fact remains that at some point or another, the data will have to come face to face, or maybe face to finger, with a human being. Making that encounter more intuitive, efficient, and responsive to customers, partners, and fellow employees is a powerful way for IBM to change the conversation from the packaged products that form the basis of virtually every desktop in the world, regardless of their intended use, to one of real user experience and value to enterprise.
IBM has announced the first product evolved from its Blue
Gene supercomputing project with a base price of $1.5 million for the most
stripped-down version of the machine based on a specialized version of the
company’s Power chip. The new machine runs on sub-GHz processors which reduces
power needs and heat output and the size of the supercomputer. Despite the use
of the slower chips, Blue Gene is capable of producing 70.7 teraflops per
second, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. The basic Blue Gene
system will fit into a space three feet by three feet by six feet. The company
said it will sell various configurations of the Blue Gene product, ranging from
one to sixty-four racks of servers with each rack holding 1,024 CPUs capable of
cranking out 5.7 teraflops.
IBM noted that versions of the Blue Gene supercomputer
have already been snapped up by research institutions and national
laboratories. As one would suspect, modeling complex weather systems, nuclear
reactions, DNA, or molecular structures along with cryptographic applications
are all likely applications of such high-speed computing environments. We
suspect that offering a relatively low-cost and compact supercomputing product
will have a salutatory effect on research and development in these and many
other areas.
But what is more intriguing is the new availability of such computing power to a much broader market. Even though a typically configured machine will cost more than the base price of $1.5 million, offering supercomputing power at double or triple the price seems to quite a bargain indeed. While few private enterprise environments — beyond those mentioned above — may feel the need for such horsepower today, we suspect that such needs will slowly but surely increase over time as the demands of real-time computing shrink acceptable lag times to smaller and smaller increments. As such, it would appear that the rate of technology trickle-down continues to accelerate, with the time gaps between specialized computing project and market-ready products shrinking to years from decades. We believe such acceleration is not only healthy, but necessary to an IT market that is creating, amassing, and managing ever-larger amounts of information in an ever more demanding value chain environment. The day of supercomputing benchmarks as merely prizes for white-coated engineers is giving way to market applications and requirements. And in our mind, that’s just super.
StorageTek Uses Back Doors to Build a Better Mousetrap
StorageTek has announced Open System Managed Storage (OpenSMS), an open source software framework for driving
automated information management mechanisms into the open systems market. StorageTek
believes that much of the automated capability of mainframes should be brought
to the open systems environment and is taking its first steps to enable it. The OpenSMS software
architecture exports interfaces upon which you can hang policy engines and
execution engines. There are also hierarchical storage management (HSM)
components for moving and retrieving data between on-line storage and secondary
storage. Tape is handled through the OpenTMS (Open Tape Management System), which uses code from
StorageTek’s ReelLibrarian software to enable automation of access to removable-media
data sets. The base comes with several standard policy engines, but
customization is possible.
This announcement is the result of a skunk works project
at StorageTek that just goes to show what happens when engineering types talk
to customers and start to think about building better mousetraps. The guys at
StorageTek started with the data management API (DMAPI), which gives one an
interesting opportunity for storage management through a back door into the
file system. At the same time two vendors, SGI and IBM, had recently announced
that they were making their respective XFS file system and journaling file
system available through open source. Some folks at StorageTek then took the
code form the defunct ReelLibrarian and using the DMAPI standard created a
framework for managing storage similar to system managed storage in a mainframe
environment. Most importantly, the framework allows users to treat tape storage
as equal to tier one storage, rather than having it hidden
behind the file system as is usually the case. StorageTek believed that by
putting the framework in open source, customers could adapt it to their
environments, and expertise in storage management could grow and create
effective products for the open systems space.
This project remains in development stage, as the next goal is to make it early-adopter friendly. It was brought out at the SuperComputer event, SC2004, so the right types of ubergeeks were able to check out this debutante as a possible dance card option. As a skunk works project, this won’t be driving StorageTek’s business in the near future, nor turning it into a leader in SRM in the next quarter. At the same time, the funny thing about these projects is that they are often the parts of the plumbing that are critical for a system to function, but like all plumbing, it’s not attractive to look at from the outside. This isn’t the sort of idea that’s going to garner a lot of marketing attention up front, but it is the sort of thing that can leak into the open source movement, get people motivated to develop and experiment, and if successful, lead to the sorts of things that make companies look brilliant in retrospect. We’ll stay tuned to see where this leads and who takes advantage of the opportunity.
Microsoft Further Clears the Legal Deck with Settlement of Novell Antitrust Case
Microsoft announced this week it has reached a $536
million antitrust settlement with Novell and an agreement with the Computer and
Communication Industry Trade Association (CCITA), an advocate of antitrust
action against the company in the U.S. and Europe. As a condition of the
settlement Microsoft will become a member of CCITA and CCITA will drop the
request for United States Supreme Court review of the Bush administration’s
consent decree with Microsoft (in effect closing the U.S. antitrust case). The
trade association will withdraw its European complaint charging that integrating
media player features with the Windows operating system stifled competition. As
a result, RealNetworks will be the only party to continue support for the
European Commission’s case concerning the media player issue. Last year the
European Commission ruled that Microsoft had violated antitrust law and ordered
the company to furnish competitors technical information and provide the
Windows operating system without media player, and fined Microsoft 497 million
euros. Microsoft appealed the Commission’s order and filed for a stay of the
order pending appeal. The European Appeals Court is expected to rule on the
stay in the next few months, and the decision will provide an indication of the
court’s view on the validity of the commission’s ruling.
CCITA, AOL-Time Warner, Sun, Novell, and RealNetworks:
This all began with a who’s-who list of technology companies lined up and
promoting antitrust actions against Microsoft. Prior to these latest
agreements, Microsoft settled antitrust disputes with AOL-Time Warner for $750
million, and Sun for $700 million. Microsoft’s actions have sent a clear
message to the industry, and the U.S. and European legal systems — it is now
willing to work constructively with parties to resolve antitrust claims, even
if that means writing a large check. This purchased support could help
Microsoft’s case in front of the EC as it ponders future antitrust enforcement
actions. After all, if the companies that claimed Microsoft was harming them no
longer believe that is true, the EC may back off as well. But it is important
to remember that Microsoft has incurred a total of approximately $2 billion in
direct settlement costs and clearing the remaining legal hurdles will add to
this tab. Of course, this tab will have little impact on a company that has
more than $60 billion in cash in its corporate accounts.
We believe Microsoft is smart to clear the “legal deck” so that it can focus on the future with less aerodynamic drag. The company’s traditional business is clearly facing significant threats from various open source and Linux initiatives and is not making the headway it anticipated with its MSN and other new lines of business. While its operating system and productivity suite businesses continue to drive substantial revenue, the company has to find and exploit new opportunities in both the enterprise and consumer space. Clearly, the latter will be much easier than the former, as Microsoft has to do battle with the likes of IBM, Oracle, Sun, HP, EMC, and a host of other well entrenched and viable enterprise vendors who have the advantage of bringing enterprise class products down to the mid-tier market that Microsoft is trying to move upwards into. In essence, by cutting large checks, Microsoft is hoping to drop ballast and rise within the IT atmosphere.