| In The Press |
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| "Dell and HP are acknowledging a simple fact: Java is everywhere on the Internet," said Illuminata analyst David Freund. "Given Microsoft's stated intent to stop providing a Java virtual machine (JVM) at the beginning of 2004, PC vendors naturally want to ensure that their customers can access Web sites and run Java-based applications without having to find some obscure widget with a three-letter acronym--in this case, JVM--somewhere first." | |
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There is also a possibility that Apple could reshape itself as a consumer entertainment company, according to Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. In fact, he told NewsFactor that doing so would be a smart move for the company, which could avoid locking itself into a future in which Microsoft remains its main competitor. "When you have a bigger competitor barreling down at you, move out of the way rather than attacking them head on."
Haff said Apple is already well positioned to sell entertainment products. "Apple's strength has always been a sense of style, an understanding of how consumers interact with computers and other devices.... That's much more a recipe these days for consumer electronics than for staid, boring computer success." Haff agreed that Apple will have a tough time being competitive in the server market as is. "Both servers and desktops are increasingly commodity [products] and about price. Apple can't go that way." He said he sees the Xserve as "primarily a play for environments where Apple already has a certain mindshare." According to Haff, the company is not gunning hard for the server market. "It would seem an ambitious and probably ultimately unrealistic goal for Apple to transform themselves into the next big server company. I view servers [as] essential as a tactical move to gain some additional revenue and presence in accounts where Apple is already popular.... There seems to be very little evidence that Apple ... really has great prospects for servers being a breakout growth area for them." | |
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Haff told internetnews.com the way IBM is couching the new mainframe is a break from "traditional mainframe speak." He said they are positioning the machine as more of an on-demand product, consistent with their overarching e-business on-demand strategy.
"IBM is taking the mainframe out of the legacy box and putting it back into the data center," Haff said. The z990 comes at a time when firms are ramping up lower-end Unix- and Intel-based models that have "mainframe-like" capabilities. Mid-ranged servers have become an attractive alternative because they can perform many of the functions of mainframes at a fraction of the cost, thanks to 64-bit processing capabilities of Unix and the Windows Server 2003. "But this is not to overstate [z990's] strength and say Unix and Windows will go away," Haf said, noting that "you still need specialized skills for the mainframe." | |
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Several factors keep this from being a major problem for Intel. "It's been almost a year and this is only coming to light now," Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice says. "If McKinley had only been out for a month, it would be a much nastier problem."
Eunice says most users will have to test their servers to find out if they are susceptible to the problem. This means that Intel is going to its customers, rather than being inundated with complaints. "Still," he says, "it's embarrassing when you have to announce a processor glitch in your flagship product." | |
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At the heart of Tuesday's announcement will be the z990, code named T-Rex, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. The new mainframe will include a processor upgrade and support for a larger number of logical partitions than IBM's current z900 model, according to Haff. It will initially ship with 32 processors, but 48- and 64-processor systems are planned for the end of this year and 2004, respectively, he said.
"If you look at your typical mainframe announcement in the past, it was like you'd been tossed into ancient Sumeria. Everyone was speaking this language that had very little in common with IT on the whole," Haff said. "What you're seeing here, in terms of the materials I've seen so far [is that] IBM's making a real effort to introduce this [new] server as something that fits into the server line as a whole and isn't arcane." IBM's recent success with Linux on the mainframe -- which Big Blue claims accounted for 17 percent of 2002 mainframe revenues -- has given the computer maker an impetus to promote the big iron for new workloads, Haff said. | |
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"It's unfortunate and sad that HP has stretched to be a business process and business reorganization company," said Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata in Nashua, N.H. "There is an element of 'me too', which is unfortunate because on the product side HP has a petty slick story to tell."
He added that HP's Services business, run by Executive Vice President Ann Livermore, does have high-level business-process re-engineering capabilities. "But that is a tiny, tiny sliver of the organization as a whole," he said. According to Illuminata's Eunice, HP should stick more closely to its partnership strengths. Indeed, a host of partners have lined up to support Adaptive Enterprise, including Accenture, BEA Systems, BearingPoint, Cisco Systems, Deloitte Consulting, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel Systems. "They really shouldn't have chased this process re-engineering on their own account," Eunice said. | |
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"The various system groups at HP may have made nice with each other in public since the merger," said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata . "But time and time again, you see an Industry Standard Servers strategy and a Business Critical Systems strategy and you wonder if the merger was just a bad dream that never actually happened because the two strategies certainly appear to be from different companies."
"This reorg looks to be a determined attempt to create the sort of integrated product line that Compaq itself always lacked after its Digital and Tandem acquisitions," Haff said. "But common executives don't automatically create common cultures. That's going to be the tough one." "If things still aren't fixed 6 or 12 months from now, maybe someone else will be going on sabbatical." | |
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As a result, Itanium is divorced from its 32-bit predecessors, while Opteron is in the same line, said David Freund, a technology analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H.
The new processor gives potential customers a tough choice, said Illuminata's Freund. Because it offers backward compatibility, Opteron makes migration from a 32-bit environment to a 64-bit one easier to accomplish. Agencies won't have to immediately replace or rewrite their 32-bit applications. "Moving applications to Itanium requires that you recompile the soft-ware, at a minimum," he said. "There's a tremendous performance penalty to try to run your 32-bit apps on Itanium. Opteron is an extension to the x86. Itanium is a complete departure." However, history may be on AMD's side, Freund added. With the sole exception of the Alpha chip by Digital Equipment Corp. (now a division of Hewlett-Packard Co.), "all successful 64-bit implementations have been extensions" of existing technology, he said. Both AMD and Intel are angling to move into the high-end computing space, which demands 64-bit processors, Freund said. Modern processors, even in home computers, can crunch data at dizzying rates. But they are slowed when they have to retrieve data. "The more disk input/output you can avoid, the faster your transactions," Freund said. He stated that 64 bits "has become the norm for anyone trying to move large numbers of transactions through the system." | |
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"HP decided for HP-UX and that was the right decision, because HP-UX is clearly the market leader compared with Tru64 Unix," said David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata Inc.
However, he cautions that grafting Tru64 Unix's clustering capabilities and file system into HP-UX may be more difficult than HP anticipates. HP is on the record as saying that the first version of HP-UX to feature Tru64 Unix's TruCluster Server and Advanced File System will be HP-UX 11i version 3, due in 2004. "It remains an open question whether they can hold to that timeframe," Freund said. HP does have in its favor that Tru64 Unix users are "religiously faithful," Freund said. "They bought into that platform for specific reasons, such as its performance attributes and clustering capabilities," he said. Consequently, most of those users have adopted a wait-and-see attitude for the moment, he said. To get them to migrate from their Tru64 Unix Alpha systems to HP-UX servers using Intel Corp's 64-bit Itanium chip, HP will need to deliver clustering functionality that is equivalent to what these users have with Tru64 Unix today, not just a subset of it, Freund warned. Otherwise, HP risks seeing these users bolt to its competitors, he said. "HP needs to continue to sell its story of how and why its (middleware) partner approach is best" compared to the strategies of Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp., each of which develops its own middleware, Illuminata's Freund said. Regarding the OpenView systems management platform, HP is positioning it as its enterprise-level offering and tying its and Compaq's other management tools to it, through integration or links. Since the Compaq acquisition closed, HP has been paying more attention to OpenView, a good move, Freund said. "For much of its life, OpenView has suffered from neglect, and been kind of an afterthought," Freund said. Now it appears HP has made it a higher priority and made a bigger commitment to it, he said. | |
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| Computers running test versions of 64-bit Windows and SQL Server have snared three of the top 10 spots on the Transaction Processing Council's closely watched list of business-workload benchmark results for a single system. The second-fastest machine on the list, a $5.6 million NEC system with 32 Itanium 2 processors running Windows Server 2003, crunches transactions just 5% slower than the top-rated system, a $12 million Solaris-on-Sparc Fujitsu machine with 128 CPUs. "This is Microsoft going back to its original playbook and being the cost leader," says David Freund, an analyst at research firm Illuminata. | |
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| "One thing they have done well is the clear decision to take certain product lines and do away with others," said Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at research firm Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H. | |
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Vendors are bundling new technologies to offer flexible, open, integrated services, says Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst and IT advisor at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, a research and consulting company.
"The threads of integration, dynamic provisioning, Web services, and utility computing all work together, and the reason they are all coming out at the same time is because they all riff off of each other," Eunice says. "These technologies, all spin-offs of the Internet, are now maturing and are allowing you to connect everything with everything else." This new dynamic platform integration and simplification offered by vendors gives enterprise IT executives time to pursue the core competencies of using IT to help run business operations, according to Eunice. "[Chief technologists] want to lower the cost of operations and they want to be more efficient in one area so they can concentrate on other projects." | |
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David Freund, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, described the vision as ambitious.
"[Sun] and IBM are the only two server vendors out to offer the entire stack-- short of the applications. They offer 80 percent of what commercial customers are going to need. The difference is Sun is positioning that very much as a platform. The bundling, the integration will be more intense. IBM intends to sell the pieces of the infrastructure on each server based on its role," Freund said. | |
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Sun is moving to a system where it ships all its products on a quarterly cycle, hence the long list. Its pitch is that it can simplify life for customers by releasing the products together. The move also helps Sun position its hardware and software as a single, more tightly integrated environment, said David Freund, an analyst with Illuminata in Nashua, N.H.
"What Sun is trying to do is present a product line and a message that's built around the whole concept of a 'network computer,' as they call it," he said. "A system as we've come to understand it has changed. It's now made up of disparate parts that you put together in the network. It's hardware and software and network components, and Sun wants to provide as many of those as it can." Also Tuesday, Sun will launch the StorEdge 6000 midrange storage line, which it has tried to price aggressively in a bid to undercut rivals including EMC and HP. Bundled with the products is Sun's Enterprise Storage Manager Suite -- a move that mirrors its strategy of bundling its Sun ONE middleware products with its servers, Illuminata's Freund said. "I think so long as the arrays are attached to Solaris [servers] then there's an absolute price advantage with all the bundled software, but if you go off base then much of that software suddenly disappears" because some of the functions won't work with equipment from IBM, HP, and other vendors, he said. | |
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"The reason Sun chose Topspin ... is that unlike other InfiniBand switch vendors, this isn't about simple switching," says David Freund, Illuminata Inc. lead analyst for information logistics.
Topspin makes a switch that connects and manages the flow of information between servers with InfiniBand connections that use different types of networks, including Ethernet, a network used for long-distance application-to-application communications, and Fibre Channel for communicating with storage devices, Freund says. "It's kind of like a brain connected to the spinal column," Freund explains. "And that brain controls what's connected to where, who has access rights, and so on." An adoption hurdle for the InfiniBand standard in data centers is the typical reaction, 'Oh no, not another network,' Freund says. But, Topspin's technology helps overcome this resistance by providing a way to "seamlessly start using InfiniBand without disrupting the current [data center] topology and infrastructure," Freund says. | |
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But is Invent still apt for the new HP? Illuminata's Jonathan Eunice asks the question in an analyst note issued this week titled "HP: Don't Invent."
"At HP, the word's gone out to buy, don't build, wherever possible," Eunice writes. "Leverage partnerships and market standards if at all possible. Get to market quickly and inexpensively with good technology, but not the "best" imaginable from whatever engineering or abstract Goodness standpoint might previously have been the measure." HP pours billions into research and development, but as Eunice points out, there are few places for the technology to go anymore. And HP's competitors may actually end up being the beneficiaries. "HP actively touts its advances in molecular and quantum computing, but has aggressively distanced itself from the microprocessor design and semiconductor fabrication businesses where such advances would be relevant," Eunice cites as an example. "Indeed, HP Labs could very well become the next Xerox PARC--place where genius flourishes, largely for the benefit of other companies, which can then productize the inventions." "If Intel were to lower the priority of IPF--or, heaven forbid, even back away from it--HP would be in a world of hurt, especially since none of its major competitors (and few of its minor ones, for that matter), would be negatively affected." Eunice does praise HP for its choices in some areas--HP has made strong allies on the hardware and software sides of the house, and Fiorina does have a clear vision in mind--Eunice says. | |
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Since the payrolls of tech companies aren't as bloated as they once were, companies may no longer be able to cut jobs as aggressively because they could risk losing customers.
"With all the layoffs tech companies have made, it's getting awfully hard to make more cuts without degrading their businesses," said Kevin Fogarty, an analyst with Illuminata, a high-tech consulting and research firm. | |
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The system is competitive with current Intel-based products, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. But Apple has strong competition from Dell Computer, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, all of which already have established businesses selling technical computing cluster products.
"Apple's always going to be under the pricing gun compared to Dell in particular, so anything at all they can do to jettison unnecessary pieces and drive their prices down has to be a positive," Haff said. "When I last looked, (Xserver performance) seemed pretty comparable for a 1U form factor," Haff said. However, he added, "if you go to 2U (3.5 inches thick), there are definitely faster configurations in the Intel space." | |
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The move will help Sun advance its N1 strategy to simplify data centers packed with dozens or hundreds of severs, storage systems and network switches. Essentially, TopSpin's gear makes it possible to link numerous devices together once, then use software to control which systems actually are communicating with each other without having to replug tangles of cables, Illuminata analyst David Freund said.
TopSpin's approach is good because it grafts onto existing networks without requiring administrators to replace what they've got, Freund said. "A hurdle for (the adoption of) InfiniBand is the response, 'Oh no, it's another network,'" Freund said. But TopSpin's approach is gentler on customers. "It's a way to get there in an evolutionary step instead of a revolution, which always involves lots of smoke, noise and blood," Freund said. ... Lane15 argued it had "the grand, generic InfiniBand management to any vendor's equipment. It just really hasn't gained the traction everybody was hoping," Freund said. With the merger, Lane15's strategy is more strongly tied to just the InfiniSwitch products, he said, a smarter if less ambitious strategy. | |
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Enterprises are generally confused over what are good spam-fighting techniques, so they usually take a trial-and-error approach, David Freund, analyst for Illuminata Inc. said. "Given current e-mail infrastructure, the type of tools that seem to work best are a combination of a rules-based engine and Bayesian analysis," he said.
Nevertheless, the real problem to a solution for spam is in the mail infrastructure of the Internet, Freund said. As long as people and organizations can send e-mail without an identifier that can be authenticated, there's never going to be a highly reliable solution. "Until we fundamentally change the infrastructure, this will remain a cold war," Freund said. | |
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"If you're looking at chips that have a robust future in server designs, kick [HP's] Alpha [and] PA-RISC, and MIPS out of the race," Illuminata chip industry analyst Jonathan Eunice told NewsFactor. "They're good products, but HP has capped Alpha and PA-RISC futures and will be moving to Itanium, while MIPS has been exiting the server market for some years now."
"Alpha--from what is now HP--is only the latest example of a performance-leading processor that will ultimately go down in history as a business failure," added Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. AMD, meanwhile, "is trying to enter the server market, but faces some challenges doing so," Eunice said. Markets--not trainers and jockeys--ultimately will decide who wins the server-chip horse race. "The history of the computer industry is littered with processors that were technically excellent but never gained the level of market acceptance that they needed to survive," Haff remarked. | |
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Scientific and engineering research is relying more and more on computer simulation and modeling, said analyst David Freund with Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, H.H.
"Being able to build mathematical models gives you answers to scientific problems not just faster, but also better," Freund said. Frequently those problems are attacked by dividing them into parts among clusters, or grids, of many computers. UT's new research institute, Freund says, will try to formulate a discipline on how best to model difficult problems and attack them using computing grids. | |
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"The people who would really benefit are folks like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft because this casts some fear, uncertainty and doubt on the Linux market and will cause some folks who were about to embrace Linux to pause,'' said David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata.
"Overall, this is a 'Hail Mary' pass being thrown by a company that has not had a lot of success winning in the marketplace,'' Freund said. | |
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"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace."
Linux itself likely won't be directly affected, Eunice predicted. "If there's any impact on Linux, it'll be principally through fear, uncertainty and doubt," he said. "The principal winners in that would not be SCO, but Microsoft and potentially Sun." "Companies that switch from competing in the marketplace to trying to enforce their basic patents and intellectual property is a style of conducting business that isn't very conducive to getting a lot of business partners," Eunice said. Eunice, who has been involved in Unix for years, questioned the accuracy of some of the history contained in the SCO suit. For example, the suit says that "AIX is a modification of (SCO's) licensed Unix that is designed to run on IBM's processor," but Eunice said IBM was unhappy with the performance of Unix kept only the interfaces higher-level software used to communicate with it. "The AIX kernel...was not principally based on the Unix source code. It was based on their (IBM's) own development," Eunice said. Some claims, though, have more potential merit, Eunice said. One is that creating Unix on Intel processors needed expertise that SCO developed but IBM lacked, Eunice said. | |
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"They've had traction in some of the high-performance computing areas," said David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata. "The key is going to be how these smaller players can act as a boutique firm."
Large manufacturers, however, may begin to tout how different types of chips can fit into their racks, Mr. Freund said. IBM, for instance, is working with Cisco Systems to fit networking equipment into its rack. | |
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"Most information technology people are not trained in thermodynamics," said Illuminata analyst David Freund.
In their earlier days, computers had relatively few processors--the hottest part of a machine--in a large cabinet. But new server models are forcing the cooling issue, said Illuminata's Freund. Rack-mounted and "blade" server models currently fit dozens, or hundreds, of processors in a six-foot rack. In addition, high-end multiprocessor servers from Sun Microsystems already have begun topping the 100-processor mark in a single chassis. | |
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| The cost of connecting file and print users has increased as well, said David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata Inc., a Nashua, N.H., consulting firm. The price for 5-packs of CALs rose by $2 to $3 per user. In fact, the discount for buying CALs in larger "chunks" has disappeared, Freund said. "Twenty-packs now cost just as much per user [$40] as do 5-packs," he said. | |
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That is not to say that blades are always the best choice, according to David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. The technology is still relatively new, with vendors trying different approaches and no standards yet determined. The management and clustering software is still evolving, and blades aren't suitable for high-horsepower chores.
"I think the sweet spot for some time is going to be the low end, creeping into the midrange," Freund said. "Anything where you're putting multiple servers into one cabinet cries out for a blade form. You're looking at lower acquisition costs as you get up into the numbers." Web servers, pattern-matching applications and other high-throughput tasks are a good match for blades. Vendors will find that hardware has quickly become a commodity, Freund said. "What's more important is the logical management," he said. "The blade paradigm, that you have all these servers within a single chassis, has forced on vendors and customers the idea that you have to manage these things in aggregate. The vendors are now rolling out the capability to do that, and the race is on." | |
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"Virtual Server is not a magic bullet, but it's an important technology for their [Microsoft's] portfolio," says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata.
Haff says Microsoft eventually will bake the technology into the operating system. "All Unix virtualization is baked into the [operating system], and that is where Microsoft needs to take this product," he says. | |
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"Building security into software, particularly after the software has been constructed is not an overnight process," said David Freund, an analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based consulting firm Illuminata.
Itıll take a lot of work, and Microsoft has produced many millions of lines of code that it has to go back and re-examine, he said. "That said, the company has made some good efforts in this area." The company has shown a willingness to notify users of security problems as they arrive, and to get patches out the door, Freund said. Subsequent releases have also shown a tendency to improve in their stability and reliability, he said. The problem is there will always be a juggling act between creating applications that are secure versus those that are easy to access and use. "The design centre for most of Microsoftıs existence has been ease of use," Freund added. Another problem, which is by no means unique to Microsoft, is that companies have been rushing to get products out the door as quickly as possible. This was especially true during the dot-com bubble days, Freund said. Now both vendors and users alike are slowing down. Although the release date for Microsoftıs Windows Server 2003 (formerly .Net Server) was originally supposed to coincide with that of the desktop OS, Microsoft has delayed its release, and that shows the company is committed to its trustworthy computing initiative, Freund said. | |
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| "What's impressive is that it's a Windows system, an Itanium system, and it's playing with the big boys," said Gordon Haff, an Illuminata analyst. "It's another proof point among many that Itanium 2 is right up there with (IBM's) Power4." | |
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| "IBM is starting to cross the line between 'We're not necessarily Itanium's biggest supporter' to 'We're not really convinced Itanium has a role at IBM,'" Haff said. | |
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"Certainly HP has a great dependency on Intel for Itanium processor family delivery. They're probably pretty smart not to create yet more dependencies," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.
In the effort to build Itanium servers, "HP is leading, but they're sort of in a race by themselves," Haff said. Intel's track record hasn't been as good when it comes to chipsets, though, and HP was wise not to hand that element of computer design off as well, Haff said. "They (HP) basically are doing all their own chipsets. They're not dependent on Intel to deliver chipsets, which is a real smart move on HP's part," Haff said. And its possible HP will use Itanium processors with smaller amounts of onboard cache, said Haff, noting that the mx2's own cache could counterbalance that weakness. Even with the strong push toward Itanium, Ozil predicted HP Itanium servers would outship PA-RISC servers in 2005. Haff was more guarded. "I would think it would be at least that long," he said. "These things take a long time to happen." | |
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Blade servers also enable multiserver management capabilities, which is something customers have sought for years, says David Freund, an analyst at Illuminata.
Big Blue planned ahead when designing its chassis, Freund says. "IBM overengineered BladeCenter and gave it incredibly beefy power supplies and airflow characteristics that were just massive overkill for the servers they were first shipping. But what they had in mind was to come out with even more powerful things," Freund says. | |
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Mammoth servers, while more powerful than what the majority of customers need, are still in demand, said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice.
"Most do not need (72-processor Sun Microsystems) 15Ks or (64-processor Hewlett-Packard) Superdomes, but from a customer-comfort point of view, you have to have a bigger box than customers currently need," Eunice said. And the big systems are a newer trend at IBM, whose mainframe expertise led its engineers to emphasise a small number of very powerful processors, Eunice said. When they started selling larger multiprocessor systems in 1998 and 1999, though, "They had this coming-to-God experience: 'Wow, people really do want this stuff!'" Eunice said. | |
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| "There has been a tendency to rush to judgment and declare Sun dead,'' said David Freund, an analyst at technology analyst firm Illuminata in Nashua, N.H. ``Sun has been able to surprise the naysayers time and again and lead people up the hill to the future of computing. This is step one of that for them.'' | |
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David Freund, an analyst at research firm Illuminata in Nashua, N.H., agreed that the versatile architecture is designed to allow Sun to play in both x86 and SPARC markets at the same time.
"Sun didn't want to cede the low-end turf to its x86 competitors, but doesn't want to erode its SPARC server base either," Freund said. Freund said Sun's move is significant and represents the biggest change of course since the company branched out from workstations and entered the server market in the 1980s. "Sun has a history of reinventing itself," he said. "With the new multiple-architecture blades, they are out to do that again." | |
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IBM has pulled back on its work tuning the Linux operating system for Intel's Itanium processor, in a move that possibly points to a larger shift away from the fledgling processor, according to an analyst.
"IBM is getting less and less shy about making clear that its Power chip is the company's 64-bit play, especially for Linux," said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata. "IBM would rather use their processor because they can do more with it, and get more money coming out of the system because they own more of it." Illuminata's Haff agreed that the Itanium chip has proved to be a formidable competitor to Power and Sun's UltraSPARC processors but added that he senses the industry cooling on Itanium overall. "I think the industry is starting to shift a bit around Itanium," Haff said. "Two years ago people looked at Itanium and thought it would be the natural order of things to have Intel as the 64-bit chip supplier. The fact is that Itanium is still basically an HPCC (high-performance computing clusters) play, so IBM is looking to go their own route if they can get just as much market share with Power." | |
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The initial launch of the autonomic initiative was nothing more than IBM putting a name on its system-management tools, David Freund, analyst for market researcher Illuminata Inc., said. Since then the company has delivered technology in line with the vision.
"They've been keeping the beat going -- a constant drumbeat of improvements in manageability across the product lines," Freund said. "They've made a concerted corporate effort. The message has been consistent and they've delivered." Because IBM has developed a lot of the technology in-house, it has been able to better integrate the capabilities within its product lines. "The seams in between the various components are a lot less visible, if they're visible at all, by the time they're delivered," Freund said. "Those that partner to get there, like Hewlett-Packard, can get to market faster, but the seams are more visible." | |
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While rare today, authentication based on how people sign their names could someday have a place in retail stores when a person buys merchandise with a credit card or an ATM card, says Jonathan Eunice, an analyst for high-tech researcher Illuminata. The technology could also be used to identify bank customers or to sign for packages.
"All of the places where signatures are the historic mark of authentication could adopt signature-behavior technology," Eunice says. "You can insert a better form of authentication without bothering people with fingerprints or eye scans. I do expect that over the next 10 years, signature systems will become common recording mechanisms." But for high-scale, enterprise use, BioSign will have to support directories from IBM, Oracle, or Sun Microsystems, Eunice says. | |
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"I think they know that the real low end is gone [to Intel], but the midrange and professional blade type of market could be recaptured [from HP and Sun], said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H. "That is what you are seeing with Power5."
Ultimately, the choice of which processor to pick from IBM's arsenal comes down to what type of applications the user needs to run, Eunice said. "I think RISC chips have proven they can keep pace with Intel," Eunice said. "It's a wide open, exciting battle at the moment." Even with Power5 out the door, however, IBM won't be able to rest on its laurels with these software plans, according to Eunice. "There are some elements that are common among Unix and Linux, but there is still an awful lot of divergence," Eunice said. "It will take two to three years to see real progress bringing them together and to deliver the real single look and feel for the management software." | |
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There is positioning and hedging taking place, says Illuminata editor/analyst Kevin Fogarty. While IBM and BEA beat each other up in the portal/application server space, Microsoft sells the productivity technology underneath the Web application. "IBM provides everything on top of that, the transactional capabilities, security, the data centers they've been doing for 30 years," Fogarty says. "The problem is making sure specs are widely accepted and right now, it's a political issue between IBM and Microsoft on one side, and Sun on the other."
So yes, there is an inevitable taint around the egalitarian promise of Web services. "There is all kind of political maneuvering," says Fogarty, "but generally, they're providing water and selling boats." | |
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"They've denied it would replace AIX in the past," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "Perhaps their thinking is beginning to shift. They've been quite clear that they see Linux as picking up AIX technologies maybe a year, two years later, but they've certainly been quite circumspect about saying Linux would ever replace AIX."
"There's a long history of no love lost between Redmond and Armonk," Illuminata's Haff said, referring to Microsoft's and IBM's respective headquarters, in Washington and New York. "As IBM puts more resources into Linux...you do have to ask, what incremental value does AIX bring? And is it worth the incremental development costs?" Haff said. "What happens is the competitive folks at HP and Sun immediately say, 'IBM is shooting AIX,'" and that customers should move to a version of Unix with a future, Haff said. And IBM has some vulnerabilities in this area. Measured by how much support software companies have given AIX, "certainly it's not as strong as other Unixes out there," Haff said. | |
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| David Freund, an analyst at research firm Illuminata, says "This software was already in the [smaller-firm] market, as far back as when Backup Exec was part of Seagate Software. And the basic backup engine in Windows has been Backup Exec, so Microsoft and Veritas have lots of history with each other." | |
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"Send a nice bonus check to the people doing their process technology," says Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at researcher Illuminata. "It means Intel as a company has more confidence it will be able to march more rapidly along in getting a hugely complicated chip shrunk down in a very tight time frame."
"The number of transistors is growing very rapidly," Eunice says. "The question for designers is what you do with them. Intel has decided on big caches. It can have a very dramatic impact on application and database benchmarks." | |
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The changes reflect Intel's confidence in its ability to release high-end server chips faster than competitors' and thereby gain the performance high ground, said Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata...
Intel's "design teams and design resources are well stocked, so they can do a shrink early or do a dual-core (chip) early. They have a lot of leeway that would stress out a Sparc development team," Eunice said, referring to shrinking the size of components on a chip and to Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc processor... Despite its long and often controversial history, the Itanium family appears to be gaining momentum in the market, according to Eunice... Itanium 2 "competes or outperforms the fastest Alpha and Power chips. It is right up there at the elite country club of performance," Eunice said. | |
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| Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata, says HP needs to do a better job of explaining exactly what it is and where it's headed. "[Hewlett-Packard has] not painted a clear picture of 'why HP?'" he says. | |
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"They've gotten themselves over to a processor with pretty good performance prospects," said Gordon Haff, an Illuminata analyst. "If you're in the high-performance computing game, you'd better be able to deliver high performance. This would have become more and more of an issue with MIPS, (and Linux right now is) clearly the current darling of the high-performance computing crowd."
The Altix, though, is geared for its more specialized customers. "This is very technologically impressive. It's not a general-purpose box, but it's technologically impressive for the types of problems it's tackling," Haff said. | |