|
|
Playing by Others’ Rules
By Jim Balderston
Microsoft has announced the Dynamic Systems Initiative
(DSI) which will offer business software that is designed to allow for realtime computing resource demand response and self
management of industry standard hardware. The unifying software architecture
centers on a System Definition Model (SDM) that provides a common contract
between development, deployment, and operations across the IT life cycle.
Microsoft will begin delivering on this initiative with Windows Server 2003.
Support for the DSI architecture and SDM also can be expected in future releases
of Visual Studio developer tools, Microsoft server applications and
management solutions. Support for the initiative was announced by Microsoft
partners including Computer Associates, Consera,
Dell, EDS, HP, Opsware and Think Dynamics. Microsoft plans to begin working with hardware vendors
prior to its May Hardware Engineering Conference and hopes to have
development tools for DSI out in Visual Basic by October.
Well, first of all, Microsoft’s entry in to the
self-managing “autonomic” software arena comes after notable IT giants
including IBM, HP, and Sun already tossed their hats in the ring. Microsoft
can lay no claims to innovative leading-edge technology in this particular
area but their arrival will likely provide reflected benefits to some other
players as the idea of self-managing software and automated enterprise IT
environments evolves from a leading-edge technology toward a run-of-the-mill
business solution. Given the industry standard-specific focus, HP, and Dell
stand to gain the most from the success of DSI.
While Microsoft’s entry into any market tends to
automatically raise concerns in many IT segments, the company’s self-managing
software are likely to do nothing but good things for its competitors, at
least for the time being. Microsoft itself acknowledges it will be years
before its DSI is fully realized, by which time vendors such as IBM, who have
already made formidable strides in this area, could be so far ahead as to be
over the horizon. In other words, this may be a market that Microsoft has
finally acknowledged but may be too late to control or even fully enjoy. This
is a market where the company may propose the terms of the technology
framework, but success will ultimately be measured by the degree of
cooperation and confidence Microsoft inspires in its partners. Furthermore,
as Microsoft promotes a vision of “autonomic” or automated computing, it will
perforce aide and abet its competitors’ strategic efforts, extending the
amount of ground the company has to make up on its rivals. All this leads us
to believe that while Microsoft realizes the need for self-managing
capabilities in its enterprise products, the company will be playing the game
by other people’s rules for the foreseeable future. This is not a position
Microsoft has been especially comfortable with or good at in the past.
|
|
|
Citrix Announces MetaFrame
Access Suite and Updated Product Strategy
By Clay Ryder
Citrix has announced an updated product strategy
that seeks to drive the company’s growth by broadening its position in
server-based computing into the burgeoning infrastructure access market. To
this end, Citrix is extending MetaFrame XP
Presentation Server into a suite of products that addresses end-to-end enterprise
access requirements. The company states that Citrix MetaFrame
Access Suite offers workers secure, easy and instant access to enterprise
applications and information resources, from anywhere, anytime, using nearly
any device over any connection. The new suite includes Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server, FR 3, for Windows 2000
and 2003 Servers, which supports server-based delivery of most any custom or
commercially packaged Windows application. Citrix MetaFrame
Presentation Server 1.2 for UNIX (Solaris 9, HP-UX 11i, AIX 5.1 and 5.2) provides users with secure access to UNIX and
Java applications. Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access
Manager provides secure, single-point Web-based access to internal and
external applications, data sources, documents, Web content, and services.
Citrix MetaFrame Conferencing Manager allows teams
to work concurrently and collaboratively on the same applications and
documents. Citrix MetaFrame Password Manager seeks
to simplify application password management; a user enters a username and
password once and from that point on, the product recognizes an application’s
request for credentials and automatically enters them. Each of these Suite
components will be available in Q2 — pricing information was not released
To the enterprise IT staff, the name Citrix is a
familiar one that boasts substantial penetration among medium and large
enterprises with its server-based application solutions. Many may remember
the day when Citrix = ICA, but for those who had any doubt that this was
still the company’s scope this announcement should clear the air once and for
all. Extending the notion of application delivery to access management is a
logical one, and Citrix is well positioned technologically and strategically
to make this transition come true. Despite ongoing economic doldrums, Citrix
has been successful in maintaining a profitable and growing business, which
is a laudable achievement to say the least. We agree with Citrix that the
access infrastructure opportunity is new, and largely unexploited, and this
is why we find the latest product offering and roadmap rather short term in
focus. With this new suite Citrix seems to be taking a tactically focused,
low-hanging fruit approach to the access infrastructure opportunity — one
whose success would largely be determined by further cultivating Citrix’s
existing customer base.
There is no question that current Citrix users would
gain substantial benefit from the latest suite offering, as it will simplify
the eventual overload of password, security, and other specific management
issues inherent in successful and growing deployments of server based
application technologies. However, this approach is also application-centric
and thus misses the greater notion of the universal directory of network
resources (applications, data, security, printers, people, etc.) that creates
a known universe of resources of against which LOB rules can be built.
Granted, this is a strategic and longer-term vision that clashes with today’s
challenging economic climate, but this is where we believe Citrix may find
itself vulnerable to competitors including Microsoft and Novell, among
others. When the economy moves back to a solid growth footing and business
capital spending returns from its long winter break, we believe that
enterprise wide strategic universal information access and leverage will
become paramount for future growth and positive operating margins. Solutions
that focus on identifying and managing the vast array of corporate IT
resources, not just providing access to select resources, will be well
positioned to be the long-term winners. Will Citrix be able to hold on to its
loyal base and grow its opportunities outside this base, or will more
strategic and global solutions impede Citrix’s long-term growth strategy?
Whatever the outcome, we believe that secured and managed accesses to all
corporate resources will be one of the benchmarks of 21st century computing,
and Citrix has announced how it intends to pursue this opportunity. The rest,
as it is said, is up to the market.
|
|
|
Send In the Clowns, er… Lawyers: SCO Sues IBM over UNIX License
By Charles King
The SCO Group announced on March 6 that it had filed
legal action against IBM in the State Court of Utah for misappropriation of trade
secrets, tortuous interference, unfair competition, and breach of contract.
The complaint alleges that IBM made concentrated efforts to improperly
destroy the economic value of UNIX, particularly UNIX on Intel, to benefit
IBM's new Linux services business. SCO requested damages of no less than $1
billion, together with additional damages through and after the time of
trial. SCO is also demanding that IBM cease the alleged anti-competitive
practices based on specific requirements sent in a notification letter to
IBM. If these requirements are not met, SCO claimed the authority to revoke
IBM's AIX license 100 days following the receipt of SCO's letter. In
response, an IBM spokesperson said IBM said there was no factual basis for
the lawsuit, and that the complaint is full of bare allegations with no
supporting facts.
Further, IBM noted that it has openly supported
Linux and open standards for several years, and neither SCO nor any of its
predecessors ever expressed the complaints alleged in the suit.
Analyzing law suits is a bit like shoveling manure,
a job that is difficult to do well without dirtying yourself in the process.
Some historical perspective is necessary to help understand SCO’s complaint.
UNIX was originally developed by AT&T’s Bell Labs, which licensed the OS
to distributors including HP, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and others.
IBM signed its own UNIX license agreement with AT&T in February 1985, in
order to produce the company’s AIX operating system. In 1995, SCO (before it
was purchased by Caldera, who recently changed its company’s name to SCO)
purchased the rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare (from Novell),
including source code, source documentation, software development contracts,
licenses, and other intellectual property pertaining to UNIX-related
business, thus becoming the successor in interest to UNIX software licenses
originally licensed by AT&T Bell Laboratories. That much is a matter of
public fact. Where the matter gets sketchy is in how IBM’s original agreement
with AT&T was worded, and how SCO is now interpreting or misinterpreting
that language. From our own experience, enterprise licensing contracts tend
to be slipperier that even the principals imagine, with amendments flying
back and forth in the heat of the moment like so much triplicate confetti,
much of it largely forgotten or forgettable over time. The most problematic
issue we see in SCO’s claims is whether they reflect any actual injury to the
company or merely represent an imaginative reinterpretation of a complex
business agreement nearly two decades old.
Beyond the issue of the suit has been the firestorm
ignited shortly after its announcement. Media speculation abounded over
whether SCO was simply trying to shakedown a deep-pocketed partner, or
attempting to enhance its attractiveness for potential acquisition. Given
SCO’s tenuous financial state (the company’s suffered a net loss of $25
million on sales of $64 million in FY 2002), those assumptions were
reasonable enough. But a funny thing happened along the way. SCO, through its
Caldera roots, has deep ties in the Linux community, and is a partner in UnitedLinux with SuSE, Connectiva,
and TurboLinux. Inquiring minds in the Open Source
community began considering and enquiring how a revocation or inhibition of
IBM’s UNIX license could affect the evolution of Linux solutions, and did not
like what they concluded. As a result, SuSE said it would reconsider its
relationship with SCO, believing that the suit was not in the best interests
of the Linux community. Since an injunction preventing IBM from shipping
UNIX-based products would also affect Linux solutions, we would concur.
Overall, SCO’s suit appears to us to be little more than an ill-conceived
exercise in venality by a group unwilling or unable to consider the ultimate
repercussions of their actions.
|
|
|
HP and Red Hat Expand Linux Relationship
By Charles King
HP and Red Hat have signed an agreement making HP a
preferred vendor for the complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line on HP
industry-standard hardware.
Under the terms of the agreement, HP will become a
global services provider for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux product
line, which includes Red Hat’s Enterprise
AS,
ES, and WS solutions. The new agreement also details further collaboration
between the two companies across their respective global services
organizations. HP will support the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of
solutions on both 32-bit Intel architecture and Itanium platforms, and is
working to integrate Linux solutions with services by offering customers
greater flexibility and single-point-of-contact service-level agreements.
Since HP’s press release included claims by a
company spokesman that HP “is the single source for all Linux hardware and
software support for customers," we believe that a reality check may be
in order. First of all, this announcement does not signal the first time that
a major hardware vendor has agreed to support Red Hat’s enterprise product
line. In fact, IBM inked a similar agreement last September that supports Red
Hat Enterprise solutions across all four of the company’s server platforms,
and upgraded it without much fanfare to include Red Hat’s new Enterprise
Linux ES, which is designed for edge-of-network and departmental server applications.
Dell is also an active Red Hat partner. While HP can rightly be proud of its
history of support for Open Source initiatives, it should also be pointed out
that the company’s position in the Linux market benefited enormously from the
acquisition of Compaq, whose Proliant servers have been popular for early and
developmental Linux deployments. The fact is that far from being “the single
source” for Linux, HP is merely one of many vendors focused on developing and
marketing products for the burgeoning Linux marketplace.
That said, perhaps the most interesting element of
this announcement is HP’s linking of support for Red Hat Enterprise products
to its 32- and 64-bit Intel-based product lines. In one sense, there is no
surprise here, since HP has been forthright enough about its plans to migrate
completely to Intel over time. But it delineates a singular difference
between HP’s Linux strategy and some other players. IBM in particular has
focused on utilizing Linux as a unifying factor across its hardware and
middleware solutions, and as a driver for more encompassing grid
infrastructures and the company’s new On Demand initiative. By comparison, HP
appears to regard Linux as a catalyst for its larger (Itanium) platform
migration, and is using Open Source to drive marketing and sales initiatives.
This is significant in itself, since if HP is correct in its assumptions it
will provide further proof (if any is needed) that Linux has successfully
made the transition from IT hobbyware to enterprise-worthy solution.
|
|
|
Cisco Comes Home… to the Jetsons
By Jim Balderston
Cisco announced this week that it was buying home
networking vendor The Linksys Group for $500 million in stock. Linksys
provide a wide range of home networking gear, both wireline and wireless
gateways that allow home users to connect multiple PCs to a single Internet
connection. Linksys had sales last year of $429 million, which was up 24%
from the prior year. Cisco officials noted that broadband connectivity in
homes is increasing by 35% a year, and that networked homes are increasing at
a 51%-a-year clip. These officials also noted that Cisco had been considering
building its own home networking gear but instead opted to buy a company that
had an established brand in the market.
The stock market scratched its collective head at
this move, letting Cisco’s stock fall 18 cents to $14.04 a share after the
bell. For Cisco, this is certainly a departure from the usual buying activity
that has been much more focused on extremely geeky business networking
technology buys that enhance the efficiency, capacity, and intelligence of
Cisco’s core product lines; i.e., big ass routers (BAR). So what is Cisco up
to?
A number of years ago – back in the dark ages of the
Internet when things were flying so high that all rational people lost their
sense of perspective – Cisco CEO John Chambers had a stock speech about how
the home of the future would be so wired that the average homeowner would be
able to turn on music, fire up the oven, set the level of the mood lighting
and so forth while driving home from work or play. And no one laughed at this
essentially Jetsons vision of the Internet-enhanced
future. To date, Chambers’ vision has largely proved unfulfilled. Yet with
this acquisition, perhaps the increasingly wired home – a la the Jetsons and via Cisco – is a step closer to reality. But
we suspect that fulfilling the dream of Chambers’ long-ago speech is not the
real driver behind this deal. Instead, Cisco sees the expanding home networking
market as an increasingly commercially viable pull-through for the kind of
high-speed bandwidth that its core product line is built for. In other words,
the more home networks that Cisco can foster, the more routers they can sell
to bandwidth providers trying to meet this growing demand, allowing Cisco to
profit from both the consumer and provider ends of the same market. From this
perspective, this deal makes a great deal of sense, and one that could,
potentially, begin lighting the glut of dark fiber that still lies dormant
buried in ditches and hanging limply from telephone poles around the country.
George Jetson would be proud.
|
|
|
Peoplesoft Updates Enterprise
Portal
By Myles Suer
Peoplesoft announced this week the release of
Enterprise Portal version 8.8. This version adds expertise finding (called
resource finder), user-driven site management, and instant messaging
capabilities compliant with IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo IM formats. Peoplesoft
claims these features create a measurable ROI enabling users to quickly
locate and collaborate with the appropriate person for a given task or
business process. Peoplesoft also claims its new offering allows users via
wizards to create tailored community specific sub sites with little or no
assistance from IT. Peoplesoft says its portal brings together business
process, departmental sites, knowledge management resources, enterprise
management systems, CRM systems, analytics, email, calendars, external
content, and the proverbial kitchen sink. To stick these capabilities to an
individual Web page, Peoplesoft employs a concept of pagelets,
which the company describes as blocks of content on a home page that display
summarized information within a small rectangular area. Peoplesoft has
pre-built pagelets for each of its enterprise
applications as well as those made by SAP. General availability of Portal 8.8
is slated for March 19th. Pricing was not announced.
In a separate announcement, Rick Bergquist,
Peoplesoft’s CTO, asserted that the first wave of EIPs failed because they could not deliver the content
and did not have the resources to “support something as business critical.”
We have a different view. Portals are a concept introduced during the
Internet era by search engine companies and others attempting to add enough
functionality to acquire higher advertising revenue by getting consumers to
park their surf boards at their sites — the so called sticky eyeball
syndrome. Soon after these B-C portals, an analog was born for the
enterprise, dubbed the EIP (Enterprise Information Portal). Just like Yahoo,
the question quickly became which content creates real user value? Another
question less frequently discussed was who should provide businesses portal
functionality? There remain today many flavors of EIP somewhat like the early
versions of CD players — each showing the origin of the EIP vendor. Sybase’s
version is about infrastructure and security around user created Portlets. IBM embeds their portal into Websphere. Documentum makes a
gateway to enterprise content management, and business analytics companies
see portals as the place to park analytical dashboards.
Although we see Peoplesoft providing a number of
cool features, we question their ability to demonstrate ROI. We believe portal
types need to be defined — initially differentiating between thin and thick
portals. Thin portals integrate single systems sign-on, an internal corporate
Web page, corporate information, and a series of hyperlinks. These links we
think should enable the user to sign-on to discrete enterprise systems and
should provide users with their particular views of these solutions. Beyond
this, we can see potential for further value in allowing users to personalize
their page views and to add content of their choosing, and particular
additional value in adding dashboard functionality for analytical and
business intelligence software. On the thick side, we see the Peoplesoft
system. The problems inherent with a thick portal are in deciding between
buying a new ERP system and buying an EIP, which naturally leads to wondering
whether Peoplesoft the best place to acquire collaborative functionality.
While collaboration has generally been hard to justify, the provable value of
elements beyond simple collaboration are even more illusive. For example, a
resource finder that is a simple profiling system tends to become quickly
outdated and therefore has limited use over time. We believe that
infrastructure players are probably best suited to play the portal game, as
they can sell by the yard, configuring offerings to best fit customers’
needs. They also have no ax to grind in contrast to Peoplesoft. Overall, we
believe the overarching problem with the thick model stems from the fact that
bolting more and more functionality onto portals only increases costs and
limits market size, not exactly a prescription for vendor or customer health
in these “more for less” times.
|
|
|
|
