The Sageza Group: Instant Insight 2001-2004

Security has been and continues to be an important area of computing for many companies today. Survey after survey ranks it high and indicates that companies are willing to dedicate the money and resources needed to increase it. The universal thorn in the side of enterprises and security vendors alike is that meaningful security is as much about policies and practices as it is about products. A secure product functioning in an insecure environment is no better than an insecure product that can render the most secure environment vulnerable. Until now, security products have mostly focused on detection and alerts rather than on responding to actual problems. The best they could offer was to block access or quarantine devices. IT managers could receive hundreds of pages of alerts and notices, but the burden of responding and understanding the impact on the business were left to the humans running the system. Additionally, most vendors thought in terms of their own architectures and product capabilities, while IT managers had to think in terms of global heterogeneous networks. The introduction of demand-driven computing architectures and methodologies, where more and more devices can interact and affect each other’s behavior, has exacerbated security concerns.

October 13, 2004

EMC Connects More ILM Dots

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

It is the nature of the ILM beast that induces vendors to deliver solutions as a hodge-podge of specific bit products and services. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to fully assess the impact of EMC’s announcement. While no one particular bit is earth-shattering in itself, the accumulation of capabilities truly is significant, sort of like ILM itself. ILM is not a single technology problem, but it is about business resource management and the technology necessary to support thinking about information in new and strategic ways. There will never be one vendor SKU that solves ILM, because it affects enterprises differently, depending on their structure, industry, and place in the business value chain.

October 12, 2004

Storage and Server Convergence: IBM Announces TotalStorage DS6000 and DS8000

By Clay Ryder

Throughout the history of IT, the Internet, and frankly anything electronic, there has always been a latent desire for manufacturers and users to lay claim to having the biggest, baddest, and fastest instantiation of any gizmo. While we saw much of this testosterone-driven envy throughout the golden daze of the Internet in the late1990s, this fascination with speeds and feeds came to an abrupt halt when the pools of easy money vanished and long lines at the unemployment office came into fashion. However, for some, the competitive drive for supremacy continued unabated in the disk-based storage market. Nevertheless, much of the recent progress made in the hardware-based storage space could be described as incremental in nature. This is not to say progress was insignificant, but rather that earth-shattering events were few and far between. Fortunately, all excitement was not lost in the storage marketplace as vendors, notably EMC and IBM, posited — rather correctly to our way of thinking — that new value aplenty can be found in storage solutions that carry a new emphasis on software.

September 13, 2004

IBM OpenPower Launches New Linux Opportunities

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell and Harry Fenik

With today’s announcement, IBM is putting the beef behind in its oft-stated intentions to propel Linux into the enterprise and to make Linux on Power a market standard. In the short-term it’s a stake in the ground that affirms IBM’s much touted Linux leadership position; and for the long term, it sets the ground rules for a much more serious game. It’s the next step in IBM’s grand scheme to drive its vision of On Demand computing beyond high-end applications and Global Services to all customers. More importantly it’s about changing customer perceptions of commodity technology and expectations of entry-level servers; rewriting the rules for the commodity server game rather than just continuing investments in me-too technologies.

September 10, 2004

Oracle: Muddying the Gene Pool

By Jim Balderston

Throughout the takeover drama, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has argued that his efforts to acquire PeopleSoft are part of a larger trend toward consolidation in the software market. On this point we agree with Ellison: the market will most certainly see a reduction of numbers in coming years as companies merge, are acquired, or simply shut down from lack of market interest. Such is the nature of any maturing industry: the number of participants shrinks over time as the remaining players grow in size. The history of the automotive industry is a perfect blueprint for what will continue to occur in the software ecosystem.

August 2, 2004

Two for Two: IBM Delivers Next Gen 64-bit eServer xSeries Solutions

By AJ Dennis

From product line management, to a value-add approach to implementation, to announcing at LinuxWorld, the annual show for today’s fastest growing OS, IBM has executed particularly well in this eServer xSeries renovation. The company’s goal in modeling and branding this approach is to highlight its industry standard platforms in a market of ever more standardized components and implementations. The two most compelling elements of IBM’s new xSeries package are how the company supports customers to advance their 64-bit computing ambitions in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary manner and how IBM differentiates its products and market strategy with its own secret sauce in the implementation model.

July 26, 2004

Getting from Here to ILM: EMC Documentum V2.1

By Charles King

Over the last year or so, ILM has become the rallying cry of virtually every enterprise storage vendor for reasons that are fairly simple. During the past decade, enhancements of data storage solutions have typically surpassed the stunning evolution of CPU technologies, with the end result that IT customers of every sort are gagging on a surfeit of mostly unstructured information. But what qualifies as simple indigestion for lowly consumers can translate to perforated gastric ulcers for information-reliant businesses. The concept of tiered storage, which offers a variety of solutions designed to meet the changing business value of information, is considered holy writ within many enterprises, but even the best tiered storage solutions can be seduced by the devilish details of how to migrate information efficiently and cost-effectively.

July 19, 2004

Better Living through Open Platforms: EMC Announces Centera Universal Access V2.1

By Charles King

While many regard industry-standard protocol support as arcane, at best, it is the sort of sweat-inducing work that tangibly improves the lives of enterprise end users and ISVs. It is also, not to put too fine a point on it, just the sort of effort that is required to help drive new or radically different IT architectures/solutions in order to extend their user and support base. EMC’s Centera is just such a solution. It is useful to remember that when EMC introduced Centera and CAS in April 2002, the notion of utilizing ATA disk drives for enterprise archiving applications was not well received by competitors who insisted that ATA technologies were not ready for business-critical prime time.

July 13, 2004

Upping the Ante for UNIX and Linux Servers: IBM Introduces the eServer p5

By Clay Ryder

Today’s announcement is remarkable for several reasons. First, the announcement of IBM’s eServer p5 along with the previously announced eServer i5 is the culmination of a three-year adventure IBM embarked upon when it set out to create the next generation of its venerable POWER microprocessor, the POWER 5. Second, this announcement demonstrates IBM’s commitment to simplifying its eServer architectures by releasing its second eServer line on the common Squadrons platform shared with the i5 (iSeries). Third, IBM has regained short-term bragging rights of offering the best price/performance solutions for the UNIX and Linux market space. Fourth, the company’s Virtualization Engine and its Micro-Partitioning are bringing formerly high-end computing and consolidation opportunities to the small and middle tier of the marketplace.

January 26, 2004

EMC Announces Information Lifecycle Service Portfolio

By Charles King

ILM has lately been the storage buzzword du jour, and most all storage vendors and their systems vendor brethren are offering some kind of ILM solution or another. Indeed, the concept underlying ILM is sound; that the relative value of business information changes over time, so deploying that information on storage solutions appropriate to its relative value can save customers money and effort over time. But like many other buzzwords, ILM suffers from a lack of clarity on exactly what practical means are required for enterprise customers to achieve an effective ILM end. Which is why we find EMC’s new expanded services portfolio intriguing.

January 21, 2004

IBM Expands Linux Strategy and Solutions

By Charles King

For any company, growing business rests on expanding opportunities for your customers and partners, and seizing opportunities from your competitors. IBM’s host of new and maturing Linux offerings richly fulfills most of those goals, with a couple of caveats. Until a couple of years ago, Linux was largely a geek-friendly toy that was mostly the purview of IT staff and high tech hobbyists with too much idle time on their hands. However, the notable support for Linux among major IT vendors including IBM helped push Linux from its initial use as a cheap and effective Web server OS to an enterprise-class operating environment for most any business. However, to drive an emerging OS into the customer base, vendors need a featured platform as well as support from ISVs and partners. IBM’s surprising spark plug for this effort has been its venerable mainframe platform, which has fully enjoyed the fruits of its Linux Extreme Makeover.

December 17, 2003

EMC: Virtually a New Company

By AJ Dennis

Starting with the Legato acquisition and continuing with Documentum, EMC has been securing strategic value-adds to their tactical storage platform heritage. With the acquisition of VMware, EMC has identified both their strategic vision for the future of the company and the tactical keystone for bridging from their legacy as one of yesterday’s leading storage hardware vendors to today’s strategic software value-add vendor to tomorrow’s virtual information solution powerhouse. With this newly expressed vision of a “virtual information infrastructure,” EMC has effectively declared that information management is the software lever in this transformation, virtualization is the fulcrum, and the object they are trying to move is a holistic notion of information lifecycle management (ILM).

December 12, 2003

IBM Broadens Grid and Autonomic Services

By Charles King

For many in the IT community, grid computing has been the equivalent of the weather: an impossibly geeky subject better suited for conversation than meaningful deployments. But like most off the rack generalizations, this notion looks sharper than it fits. In a way, the ascendancy and success of off-the-rack commodity computing solutions have resulted in IT environments that look sharp on paper but do not adequately meet their users’ business needs. On the plus side, grid solutions provide the means to nip and tuck those frumpy IT duds so they not only fit well but can be altered as a company’s requirements change over time. While grid is not yet a shrink-wrapped IT solution, the days of grid use being limited to labs, research facilities, and similar locales rich in inhouse expertise are long gone. Growing numbers of companies are putting grid-enabled IT infrastructures to effective commercial use. However, given the complexity of many grid deployments, why are these businesses getting excited about and committing financial and staff resources to such solutions?

December 4, 2003

HP’s Virtual Desktop Solution Consolidates Costs and Control

By AJ Dennis

On the surface, HP’s CCI appears to be a revolutionary adaptation of industry-standard evolution. The consolidation / virtualization tenets of HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure Strategy are the conceptual drivers in the CCI solution, consolidating desktop compute and storage resources into the secure, managed, data center model. HP’s CCI architecture builds upon the extensive experience HP has in blade server technology and deployment to extend similar virtualization and management value propositions to desktop computing. In sum, consolidation of clients in a centralized data center proffers simplified IT management with increased data security through control of software upgrades, data back up, and other service events, while maintaining a high-quality, personalized desktop experience for end users. This is one of the core values of the CCI solution.

November 18, 2003

IBM Sharpens the eServer BladeCenter with another Blade

By AJ Dennis

The ultra-dense blade server architecture that was initially focused on lowering power and heat is now, because of the industry’s emerging “utility” computing models, a potentially critical component to that computing model’s notions of virtualization and of scale-out computing. While HP, Sun, and Dell, as well as a number of boutique blade vendors, all have blade servers and rack cages in which to deploy them, we find IBM’s story a bit more fine-grained and credible in their “systems-centric” approach than the blade-centric stories coming from the competition. IBM’s approach perhaps reflects their “big iron” highly-managed, virtualized systems understanding, being brought “downstream” to its smaller systems. IBM has been positioning their Intel XEON-based HS20 as the high performance blade for business-critical applications on Windows and 32-bit Linux and the eServer BladeCenter as a powerful and flexible “standard” chassis that incorporates blades, storage, switches, whatever, into the ultra-dense computing model. Now with the JS20, IBM adds POWER to this computing model, which lends itself well to the “scale-out to scale-up” needs of the HPC community.

November 4, 2003

Heroic Salvation or Sleeping with the Enemy?

By AJ Dennis and Tracy Corbo

Novell has announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Nuremburg, Germany-based SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash. This is a good move for SuSE, for Novell, and if properly brought to market, possibly the user and the marketplace as a whole. SuSE gains access to a worldwide partner/channel infrastructure, enterprise sales and support force, and a strong enterprise brand, while Novell revitalizes its eco-system with a new “engine” in the emerging opportunities of Open Source Linux in the enterprise. Linux has made significant impact on enterprises as edge servers have appeared and as enterprises have built out their networking infrastructure. Customers have realized the Linux advantage in Web servers, protocol management, and firewalls, finding a relatively easy justification and quick return. However, save the early adopters in the high-performance technical computing and finance communities, users have yet to embrace Linux for their business process applications, to say nothing of the highly optimized data centers extant with significant man-years invested in finely tuned operations.

October 14, 2003

EMC Buys Documentum and Moves beyond Data to Information

By Jim Balderston and AJ Dennis

Last year, EMC announced that it was initiating a major strategic shift to begin offering a host of storage management software and tools that would make its storage products and SANs easier to deploy, manage, repair, and consolidate. The company’s logic at the time was, in our mind, sound, as it sought to promote value-add in its products, making them more enticing to customers, and staying ahead of the creeping commoditization of hardware storage products. In short, the company sought to differentiate itself from competitors by offering a stronger portfolio of software products that improved the efficiency of storage deployments but also gave support to EMC’s stated direction toward virtualized data storage environments. We believe this acquisition of Documentum takes this effort to the next level.

August 7, 2003

Linux Suit Heats Up; IBM/Red Hat Give SCO a Hot Foot

By Charles King

On August 4, 2003, Red Hat announced that it filed a formal complaint against SCO with the purpose of demonstrating that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe upon any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its "unfair and deceptive actions." Red Hat also established the Open Source Now Fund, whose purpose will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license and non-profit organizations supporting the efforts of those companies. Red Hat pledged $1 million to fund in this initiative.

July 8, 2003

EMC Acquires Legato

By Charles King

For what the calendar says is the traditional IT industry’s quietest season, EMC has been doing whatever it can to keep things interesting, with last week’s announced partnership with BMC (along with the purchase of BMC’s PATROL Storage Manager) followed by this week’s more formidable acquisition of LEGATO. When this deal is consummated, EMC will have broadened its already considerable footprint in storage management software and service offerings, bolstered its efforts in delivering solutions for managing heterogeneous storage environments, and notably extended both its sales and channel programs.

July 2, 2003

Intel Introduces New Itanium 2: Third Time’s the Charm or Madison Blues?

By Charles King

Since Intel’s original “Merced” announcement in mid-1997, the road to Itanium 2 has been more than a little rocky but the company can not be faulted for lack of ambition. From the start, the effort included alliances with as many IT industry leaders as possible, and Intel’s goal of achieving a position in the 64-bit world analogous to its domination of 32-bit computing was clear. The question to ask, then, is how much the new Itanium 2 will contribute to that effort. The fact is that while Intel’s current share of the 64-bit computing market is miniscule (a condition that can be linked to factors from the Itanium’s missed deadlines and performance glitches to sagging IT spending), the company has done an impressive job of lining up support for the new architecture.

June 12, 2003

Larry's Big Parade

By Myles Suer and Jim Balderston

The simple fact that there are too many suppliers and not enough demand is obvious when one looks at the state of various vendors in the space. Baan is sold for a fraction of its acquisition price. PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards are trying to combine. One- time high flyers like Siebel Systems are having a rough go of it. Adding to this supply/ demand issue is the continuing stagnation of the economy: there are no big enterprise IT spending booms in the near future, ones that could revive struggling business application vendors. Consolidation is most certainly upon us...

May 13, 2003

Back to the Future: IBM Introduces the eServer z990

By Charles King

Originally conceived, developed, and deployed during the Jurassic era of computing, IBM mainframes beat the odds in avoiding both extinction and fossilization, and remain vital elements in enterprise datacenters worldwide. Most of IBM’s competitors jumped out of the mainframe market years ago and like to claim that today mainframes belong in museums. Ironically enough, many of these same IT vendors vociferously claim that their own solutions offer “mainframe-like” capabilities, hoping to polish to their products by rhetorically buffing them with the considerable mojo mainframes possess in areas such as scalability, dependability, resilience, and security.

April 22, 2003

Getting By with a Little Help from Its Friends... AMD Launches Opteron

By Charles King

Most every tale contains both literal and mythic elements that turn a flat storyline into a three-dimensional narrative. IT stories are no different. The drama surrounding AMD's Opteron processor includes a bit of unconventional thinking, a soupçon or two of technical whiz bang, ongoing struggles made more difficult by a notably lousy economic environment, and a David vs. Goliath match-up that makes the Biblical bad guy look like a piker. Is there a way to step cleanly through this high tech pasture without encountering (or disturbing, anyway) too many metaphorical cow flops? Stick with us.

February 10, 2003

IBM Web Services Platform Positions It in the Vanguard

By Myles Suer

We believe that this offering represents an inflection point for IBM and, possibly, the IT software industry. It seems clear that IBM is continuing its drive towards Web Services. Heretofore, Web Services have provided a standard method to do what existed in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) software by providing a standard for inter-application communication and sharing of information. Although IBM says that connector companies such as I2 will continue to create value for the enterprise, we believe this announcement opens the door to a new view of enterprise connectivity.

February 3, 2003

Everything Old Shall Be New Again: EMC Introduces Symmetrix DMX

By Charles King

Computer hardware vendors are seldom if ever shy about trumpeting new advances and additions to their solutions. In fact, a brief survey of high tech press releases offers a baffling hodgepodge of geekspeak and naked PR bravado that usually delivers more IT attitude than provable business benefits. As a result, it is wise to approach any press release dressed in metaphorical sou’wester, gum boots, and elbow-length gloves, rather than risk being spattered with excess technomarketing gibberish. So professional skepticism fully in place, what should one make of EMC’s Symmetrix DMX series?

January 29, 2003

IBM Announces Next Generation Architecture for Lotus Notes: Yet Another Step toward eBusiness on Demand

By Myles Suer

Washing away the trade names and marketing hype, IBM has stripped Lotus of its client/server heritage to expose Notes as a collaboration platform. The Notes platform competes with recently announced products from Oracle but uses the Notes base as a potential starting point. IBM has positioned this product for the larger market and placed this product in direct competition with Oracle and Microsoft.

January 27, 2003

Taking Grid to Market: IBM Announces Ten Commercial Grid Offerings

By Charles King

Grid computing may qualify as one of the most highly trumpeted and least understood technologies around. In theory, grid solutions can be used to pool all of a company’s heterogeneous IT resources, from the desktop to the data center, allowing them to be viewed, managed, and allocated as a single computing entity. Not only can this help improve overall IT efficiency and cost effectiveness, but it can also provide enterprises a means of performing complex computational tasks by distributing them across existing IT infrastructures rather than on costly specialized hardware.

January 24, 2003

IBM Announces New Linux Products and Customers

By Charles King

IBM’s LinuxWorld announcements may fall into clear software and hardware classifications, but they also carry individual and collective weight we find notable. On the application side, we find Linux client support for Lotus iNotes to be particularly interesting, since it appears to provide an Open Source solution to the problem of replacing proprietary email/calendar apps. Given iNotes’ long track record and deep market penetration, this could well offer businesses an attractive, solid Linux alternative to, say, Microsoft Outlook. We see the announcements for zSeries and clustering as robust extensions of IBM’s efforts to extend additional practical Linux business solutions into areas where the company has already achieved notable Linux successes.

January 20, 2003

Rediscovering and Reinventing an Old Friend: IBM Announces Transformation of the eServer iSeries

By Clay Ryder

Perhaps one of the more pivotal moments in business computing history was the introduction of IBM AS/400 in the late 1980s. Although the AS/400 may seem a bit anachronistic, untold thousands of these machines continue to quietly hum away at the tasks for which they were deployed. What is more amazing is that many of these machines have remained undisturbed since the day they started operating. In today’s environment where one of the pitched battles between the UNIX and Windows Server camps remains minimizing the need to reboot a system after a configuration change, it is all too easy to forget that deeply integrated solutions with relatively simple management and configuration tools have been around for some time: the former AS/400, now eServer iSeries.

May 1, 2002

Sun Microsystems Announces Leadership Changes and New Organizations

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Today Sun Microsystems announced the departure of President and Chief Operating Officer Ed Zander, effective July 1, 2002. Zanders’ fulltime responsibilities will be handed over to Scott McNealy, who is currently Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sun. In addition, Sun previously announced that three other executives are retiring on the same day. The three retiring executives and their replacements are...

January 22, 2002

IBM and VeriSign Ink Security Alliance

By Charles King

IBM and VeriSign have announced the signing of a technology, services and marketing alliance. Under the multi-year agreement, the two companies plan to collaborate on Web technology, infrastructure and security, integrate key technologies and market new and enhanced services to their customers. As part of the agreement, IBM and VeriSign will...

November 5, 2001

HP Announces “Service-Centric Computing” Tools/Solutions

By Jim Balderston

Hewlett-Packard has announced over fifty new products and software solutions that the company described as providing the infrastructure for “service-centric computing,” where everything is connected and computing is provisioned, delivered, metered and purchased as a service. HP also claims its new products and solutions, which fall into four major areas, will improve customers’ returns on assets, reduce operational costs and enable new revenue streams. The new products and solutions fall into four major areas...

October 27, 2001

EMC Introduces Open Storage Management Products/Technologies

By Charles King

EMC has introduced four new open storage management products and technologies that the company said delivered on the Automated Information Storage (AutoIS) initiative EMC announced in August 2001. WideSky allows storage management applications to run on products from multiple vendors in increasingly prevalent heterogeneous enterprise environments. EMC Control Center (ECC) Open Edition is a single console that utilizes an Oracle database to centrally view and manage all the platforms, devices and resources across multi-vendor storage environments. ECC Replication Manager is a software solution for automating data replication and backup processes across devices from multiple vendors. ECC StorageScope is an automated reporting tool that allows users to create single views and reports of all of the devices included in heterogeneous data storage environments.

October 22, 2001

Heeding the CLARiiON Call: EMC/Dell Ink Multi-Billion Dollar Enterprise Storage Agreement

By Charles King

EMC and Dell have announced a five year, multi-billion dollar strategic alliance agreement to accelerate the development of both companies’ storage system businesses. Under the agreement, EMC and Dell will co-brand EMC’s CLARiiON line of enterprise storage systems, and the alliance will make Dell the leading reseller of CLARiiON products. The CLARiiON product line will become Dell’s standard offering for storage area networks (SAN) and high-end network-attached storage (NAS) installations. For storage-related services, Dell will augment its Premiere Enterprises Services group with tools, methodologies and practices from EMC, and EMC’s global services organization will support and train Dell personnel. The companies have also agreed...

September 14, 2001

What Now?

By Jack Robert Staff

In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, Internet vendors and service firms, like much of the world, are asking, “What now?” Here Sageza outlines its view of the basic givens of the new order of things, offers some estimations about the short-term economic impacts likely to inform the general business environment over the near-term and highlights some tactical issues that Internet firms will want to address in the days ahead. For reasons too numerous to detail in a piece this brief, The Sageza Group takes as givens the following assumptions which have constituted the basis for this analysis...

September 4, 2001

Hewlett Packard Acquires Compaq

By Charles King

Hewlett-Packard announced today that it is acquiring Compaq Computer Corporation for approximately $25 billion in stock. The new company would have combined revenues of $87 billion, pro forma assets of $56 billion and annual operating revenues of $3.9 billion. The company would employ more than 145,000 people and have offices in 160 countries. HP predicts the new company would save approximately $2.5 billion per year by combining operations. The company would be broken into four divisions; a $20 billion imaging and printing business, a $29 billion access devices division, a $23 billion IT infrastructure business and a $15 billion services arm. The figures are based on trailing revenues of the two companies. Big news, no doubt. What we believe makes this news even bigger...

A review of an industry-changing event delivered to Sageza clients within twenty-four hours providing an assessment of the news, the impact on key competitors, customers and on the key protagonists.

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