One Month of Sun and Oracle Still Shines

Oracle No Responses »
Mar 262010

Oracle – on which as many fortunes hang these days as depended on its ancient namesakes – came in with fiscal Q3 earnings down 10% year-over-year at $1.2 billion, or 23 cents a share, Thursday on revenues up 17% to $6.47 billion.

The revenues beat Wall Street estimates of $6.34 billion as did Oracle’s non-GAAP earnings, which were up 9% to $1.9 billion, or 38 cents a share, a penny better than consensus. Evidently enterprise spending is coming back.

Oracle said its all-important new software license revenues were up for a second quarter in a row, this time by 13% to $1.7 billion – higher than expected – and up 10%, beating guidance, to $1.7 billion excluding Sun, which it finally acquired on January 26. Without Sun, it said, its total GAAP revenue was up 7%.

Oracle’s database and middleware revenue was up 11% to $1.24 billion. Applications new licenses were up 21% to $477 million.

Software license updates and product support revenues were up 13% to $3.3 billion. Oracle’s operating income was down 5% to $1.8 billion, and its operating margin was 29%, impacted by Sun.

Oracle gave some credit to expense management for its results.

Oracle president Safra Catz, responsible for getting the Sun deal closed despite EC resistance, said, “Sun integration is going even better than we expected. We believe that Sun will make a significant contribution to our fourth-quarter earnings per share as well as meet the profitability goals we set for next year.”

Oracle figures Sun is a curiosity that draws crowds and that it can now get an audience with any CIO. A recent CIO meeting brought in 50 more than the 125 invited; most had to travel and 91% were new.

Oracle’s other president Charles Phillips said Exadata – Oracle’s now Sun-base warehouse appliance – “is the fastest growing product in Oracle’s history. Introduced a little over a year ago, the Exadata pipeline is now approaching $400 million with Q4 bookings forecast at nearly $100 million. This strengthens both sales growth and profitability in our Sun server and storage businesses.”

And they laughed when Oracle said it would use Sun to go into the hardware business. Oracle is using Exadata like a stick to beat IBM about the head and shoulders, claiming it’s better than anything IBM’s got.

Hardware revenue from Sun came to $458 million, 7% of revenue. Total contribution was $596 million, better-than-expected. Customers are supposedly responding to the acquisition. Oracle is refusing to sell Sun products at a loss – like those great HPC deals that caused Sun to bleed – and is dropping third-party products like Hitachi storage that Sun distributed, preferring to stick with Sun’s own IP. It said it was not canceling Sun products and is hiring “aggressively” for Sun, paying on net, not gross.

Apparently Oracle got a deal with one of the hush-hush military agencies for Sun Rays that promises to require lots of units over time.

More support for Sun products is required, it said, especially apparently for the channel.

CEO Larry Ellison claimed, as he is wont to do, market share gains against rival SAP. “SAP’s most recent quarter,” he said, “was the best quarter of their year, only down 15%, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21%. But SAP is well ahead of us in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while we only had one.”

Larry predicted dire consequences for SAP and its 25-year-old proprietary technology against Oracle’s soon-to-be Fusion-based rewrite of all its applications. He claimed SAP’s customers are “nervous” and that the company can’t make any money selling its long-delayed Business ByDesign on-demand software to companies with less than 100 people with a different sales force. It’s a “distraction,” he said.

With SAP down double digits and Oracle’s “stunning” returns in database, middleware and applications, “No wonder SAP is so unhappy,” he said, playing on SAP’s recent explanation for why it fired its last CEO.

Catz predicted that Oracle’s total revenues this quarter – Sun’s first full quarter as part of Oracle – would be up 35%-40% to $9.3 billion-$9.6 billion, with non-GAAP earnings of 52 cents- 56 cents a share. Revenue from new licenses is supposed to be up 3%-13%. She called the forecast “conservative,” hard apparently on conservative.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:17 pm

Open Source Start-Up Complains about IBM to Antitrust Regulators

IBM No Responses »
Mar 252010

TurboHercules SAS, the Paris-based concern started last year to commercialize the 10-year-old open source Hercules mainframe project, filed a formal antitrust complaint against IBM with the European Commission Tuesday.

The little company says IBM is blocking it from selling its open source solutions.

Its software, which reinterprets or emulates the mainframe hardware architecture, makes it possible for mainframe applications to run on non-IBM operating systems such as the Mac OS, Windows and Linux on x86 and x64 hardware, a lot cheaper proposition for mainframe users and in some cases reportedly more performant.

TurboHercules is charging IBM with abusing its market dominance by refusing to let its mainframe customers run z/OS on anything other than IBM mainframe hardware. It says this is tying, a mortal sin for a dominant vendor.

It also charges IBM with recently introducing undocumented software interfaces and protocols to lock out competitors and prevent the open source project from maintaining full compatibility.

It says both these practices were outlawed by the undertaking IBM gave to the EC back in 1984 to resolve the EC’s antitrust finding against the company and by the EC’s 2004 decision against Microsoft upheld on appeal by the Court of First Instance – a decision IBM encouraged, one might add.

TurboHercules wants the EC, known for having an open source protectionist streak – look at how it almost blocked Oracle’s acquisition of Sun over MySQL – to make IBM stop tying and open up its interfaces and protocols like they used to be back before 2002 when IBM introduced z/OS.

The start-up also wants IBM ordered to license it what it needs to compete on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. It’s not asking for any freebies, simply a fair shake.

Roger Bowler, the mainframe maven who started the Hercules project in 1999, says that when he started TurboHercules last year, he asked IBM to license z/OS to customers for use with Hercules at prices and on conditions set by IBM provided they were fair and reasonable.

That was last July. It took IBM four months to answer. In November IBM’s mainframe CTO Mark Anzani rejected the request and accused Hercules of infringing IBM’s intellectual property.

Anzani is quoted as saying that Hercules open source emulator “requires IBM intellectual property and you will understand that IBM could not reasonably be asked to consider licensing its operating system for use on infringing platforms.”

Bowler says in a blog dated Tuesday that “We wrote back immediately to Mr. Anzani to express our surprise that, after 10 years during which Hercules has acquired thousands of users around the world, including many within the ranks of IBM itself, IBM has now suddenly discovered that we are violating its intellectual property. In our reply we asked that IBM identify the specific property we allegedly violated in order that we could investigate that claim. In the unlikely event that IBM’s assertions were found to have merit, we asked further that IBM consider adding such intellectual property to their much-publicized and deservedly admired ‘non-assertion’ pledge to the open source community – the ‘IBM Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS’ published at www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf.”

Bowler is still waiting for IBM to tell him what IP Hercules is supposed to infringe, which is why he says TurboHercules has complained to the EC.

Once IBM asserted infringement and wouldn’t identify it, he says, “We then realized that our only hope as a small company was to file a complaint with the European Commission.”

So let me get this. IBM, the open source hero, is doing exactly what SCO was pilloried by the open source community for doing when it wouldn’t say – because of its lawsuit against IBM – what lines of Linux code were supposedly stolen from Unix. Does that mean that the open source community is now going to tar and feather IBM and ride it out of town on a rail à la SCO?

And the complaint that IBM shows no reluctance in using its patents as an offensive anticompetitive weapon – instead of using patents to ensure compensation when other people use its inventions – should scare the bejaysus out of everybody since IBM owns patents on just about everything. According to TurboHercules, IBM is simply saying that we own the patents and you can’t compete with us under any circumstances. Goodness gracious, whatever happened to fostering innovation around inventions?

Like MySQL, Hercules was developed in Europe and has been maintained by global volunteer community for the last 10 years. It is said to be used by 5,000-10,000 users worldwide.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), whose similar complaint to the US Justice Department kicked off an on-going investigation, says TurboHercules’ anticompetitive complaint resembles its own and other complaints made to the EC the last couple of years. It claims it shows a “systemic pattern of behavior by IBM directed at anyone who threatens its mainframe monopoly.”

CCIA CEO Ed Black also claims that “IBM is speaking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to its support of the open source community and its commitment to the responsible use of its patent portfolio. The fact that IBM would actually assert that an open source project infringes its patents is proof that IBM’s support of open source stops the minute it threatens IBM’s lucrative mainframe monopolies.”

CCIA is supported by IBM foes like Microsoft.

Steven Friedman, president of T3T, which filed one of the other complaints CCIA is talking about last year, said, “I’m obviously very happy to see a formal complaint from another company that, like T3, is seeking to restore competition to the mainframe market. In reading today’s press, TurboHercles seems to have suffered from the same IBM anticompetitive tying of hardware and software conduct as T3. Further, TurboHercules seems to support everything T3 said in our complaint.”

In its complaint TurboHercules positions IBM as “super-dominant” under EU law because it holds 100% of both the mainframe operating systems market for running so-called legacy workloads and the mainframe hardware market for running these same legacy workloads.

When it suits it, IBM likes to dilute the market and lump mainframes in with other servers to make its share seem smaller but, as TurboHercules told the EC, no other system can claim to hold 80% of the world’s data or represent an investment worth $5 trillion by its users or have a lock on 200 billion lines of code.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:17 pm

Headlines – Issue N0. 597 (March 29 – April 2, 2010)

Headlines No Responses »
Mar 252010

Open Source Start-Up Complains about IBM to Antitrust Regulators
Dell Dumbs Down Really Big Clouds
Ex-IBM Server Chief Expected To Plead Guilty to Corruption Charges
One Month of Sun and Oracle Still Shines
Novell To Support KVM
Cloud Start-Up Picks the Lock on Hypervisors
Numo Chip: The Stuff That Desktop-as-a-Service is Made Of
HyTrust Revs its Appliance
Elliott Keeps Its Novell Powder Dry
MySQL Ace To Run Eucalyptus
Google Moves Chinese Search to Hong Kong
Red Hat $252 Million Short of its Bogey
Berners-Lee Gets New Institute
Microsoft Suffers Twitter-Envy
Dell Creates its Own Chinese Flap
Lenovo Poaches HP Exec
Linux Foundation Up Another Member
IBM Open Analytics Lab in China
SCO Takes Out Loan To Keep Going
Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 Scheduled
$165m Raised for European Start-Ups

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:16 pm

Who Are All Those People at the SCO Trial?

SCO No Responses »
Mar 192010

Sources report the distinct smell of gold American Express cards in the SCO v Novell courtroom in Salt Lake City this week suggesting that some of the spectators are money people like, oh, say, Charles River assessing whether there’s an opportunity to clean up if SCO wins.

Darl McBride may not be the only person willing to press SCO’s Linux claims.

They could also be there protecting their assets.

The spectators have probably observed that Novell appears to be down to catching out either the judge or SCO’s lawyers in a mistake so it can appeal. It’s already asked the judge to declare a mistrial because SCO told the jury that Novell continues to publicly cling to the idea it owns Unix despite the 10th Circuit overturning that decision and saying a jury should decide (speaks to damages).

McBride testified this week that Novell’s claims to own Unix led to a drop in SCO’s stock price as well as a loss of revenues and Linux licensing deals such as a $30 million arrangement that was in the works with HP and a $50 million one with Google. It’s unclear what the one that was being negotiated with Dell would have been worth.

McBride said that when he confronted Novell CEO Jack Messman, Messman ducked the issue of whether IBM was behind Novell’s ownership claims – to protect IBM against SCO’s charges of pilfering Unix code for the sake of Linux – and refused to discuss the subject without his lawyer being present. IBM did after all give Novell $50 million to buy SUSE after SCO sued IBM.

Novell claims SCO’s losses were its own fault since it alienated the Linux community, which, however, one would be hard pressed to see as being decisive Wall Street punters or controlling the legal opinion of Fortune-something companies.

Novell’s position so far depends on a Novell lawyer saying he and a couple of other Novell attorneys exceeded their instructions and excluded the Unix copyrights from the Santa Cruz purchase agreement without telling anybody. SCO maintains that deficit was later corrected by an amendment, a point Novell initially conceded in a press release then retracted.

An observer in the courtroom with a SCO bias said Novell’s case consists of the amendment not existing and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals not overturning the summary judgment saying Novell owns the copyright.

SCO experts testified that SCO was damaged to the tune of $130 million-$215 million plus punitive damages. SCO has conceded what is called a “higher standard” or constitutional proof, meaning the jury has to decide that Novell exhibited “reckless disregard” in claiming ownership.

Novell hammered at one of the witnesses, a lady accounting professor, part of Wednesday and all day Thursday and insisted on bringing up the summary judgment – even reading parts of it into the record – despite the judge’s previous warnings that he would instruct the jury to disregard what Novell said and tell them that decision was overturned because it was wrong and that it was their job to make a decision, which is exactly what he did – three times. It is unclear what Novell gained in courting his ire.

In the interests of full disclosure, we should say that this paper is being called to testify that then Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone said in an interview on May 27, 2003 that Novell would assert its ownership claims the following day and pointed out that that was the same day that SCO was due to report its earnings, a point that would have escaped us if he hadn’t mentioned it and laughed. We put out a story, Novell made the claims and SCO’s stock took a dive. The point is malice. And it was not the only time Novell timed an ownership claim to a SCO earnings call. Chris Stone was also supposed to appear last we heard.

So far it’s been SCO’s show; Novell’s case is expected to kick off next week then go to the jury. If left to its own devices there could be a verdict this time next week. Usually in such cases the defense starts off trying to prove it has no liability. Novell’s first witness, however, is supposed to speak to damages.

By the way, the bankruptcy court in Delaware has cleared it for SCO to get maybe up to $2 million from its former chairman and friends as a “super-priority credit facility” in case it needs it to survive and press its litigation claims, support the remains of its Unix business and sell off other assets. The hearing on McBride’s bid to buy SCO’s mobility business was moved from March 15 to April 7.

Meanwhile, Novell has asked the Supreme Court to hear its claim that copyrights need an itemized bill of sale signed by the owner – or at least something in writing – to transfer. As with most appeals to the Supremes, it’s a long shot.

Posted by rhall2091 at 10:19 am

Microsoft & Citrix Gang Up on VMware

Microsoft No Responses »
Mar 182010

Microsoft and Citrix got together Thursday to beat up VMware and warn it off their desktop turf.

They position VMware as a server virtualization company with little skill or interest in the desktop that’s using View, its desktop virtualization product, as a “sweetener to sell server virtualization” and screwing up the customer and the VDI market in the process.

Poor experience with View has purportedly led to stalled VDI implementations and failed pilots so to remove this ostensible logjam that’s delaying the widespread adoption of the virtual desktop Microsoft and Citrix are offering a Cash for Clunkers-style deal officially called Rescue for VMware VDI.

Users covered by Microsoft’s Software Assurance program can trade in 500 VMware licenses for Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI Suite and use the stack for free for the next year. By then, they reason, companies should have figured out their desktop strategy.

Citrix and Microsoft have also concocted a VDI Kick Start program to tempt users new to VDI to try their stuff first by cutting the price of XenDesktop VDI Edition and Microsoft VDI Suite Standard Edition to $28 a user for the first 250 user for a year or a total of $7,000, roughly a 50% discount.

The user gets Hyper-V, App-V and System Center virtual machine manager; and the XenDesktop delivery solution with its HDX high-definition user experience and image management for optimizing storage and the ability to use any device, anywhere, LAN or WAN.

And just to make certain it’s driving its point home, come July 1, the beginning of its fiscal year, Microsoft will be canceling those separate, arcane, headache-inducing $23-a-desktop-a-year VECD or Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop licenses it’s demanded of its Software Assurance customers to access their Windows operating system in a VDI environment.

They’ll also get full roaming rights so they can use their desktops from any device anywhere without paying for each and every widget.

Starting this summer virtual access – even complements of VMware – will be a “Software Assurance benefit.” Unless you’re using thin clients that haven’t paid the Windows tax; if you’re running thin clients or aren’t covered by a Software Assurance plan the best you can expect is a few bucks off the price; instead of $110 a year per device, it’ll be $100.

Microsoft has also fiddled with the Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional and up so it’s no longer dependent on the virtualization technology in the desktop’s chip. It was altogether too confusing, Microsoft admits, and made it hard for people to run their old XP programs on the new operating system, suggesting it could be holding back some Windows 7 upgrades.

Citrix also come away with a new technology deal with Microsoft though it won’t be making any money off of it, well, not directly. Microsoft is going to use the high-definition HDX technology in Citrix XenDesktop to enhance and extend the RemoteFX widgetry that’s supposed to turn up in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, whenever that happens. The Citrix widgetry, however, won’t turn up in the thing until six months after the service pack ships.

RemoteFX, the graphics acceleration for virtual desktops Microsoft got when it bought Calista Technologies and its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) improvements in 2008, is supposed to make using a virtual desktops and applications an utterly local-style, rich 3D, multimedia experience.

According to independent desktop virtualization maven Brian Madden the RemoteFX-HDX tie-up will make XenDesktop, most of whose deployments are on VMware ESX, more beholden to Hyper-V and give XenDesktop a real reason to run on Hyper-V. Madden figures VMware is working on a PC-over-IP retort.

Microsoft also means to fiddle with the Dynamic Memory in the Service Pack so users can adjust the memory of a guest virtual machine on-demand and maximize server hardware.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Citrix announced a new version of its desktop widgetry XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 1.

The new release, available March 24, builds on recently announced XenDesktop scalability enhancements, enabling customers to host 100,000 shared virtual desktops concurrently from a single location, shortens virtual desktop and application log-on times up to 5x and simplifies application management by incorporating all the capabilities of the recently announced XenApp 6 as an integrated feature, including seamless new integration with Microsoft App-V and support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:19 pm

Headlines – Issue No. 596 (March 22-26, 2010)

Headlines No Responses »
Mar 182010

Microsoft & Citrix Gang Up on VMware
Google Strikes at Exchange
IBM Cloud Courts Test & Dev
Appistry Moves into – Whoa – BIG Storage
Memcached Goes Commercial
SAP To Resurrect Business ByDesign This Summer
Intel Xeon: Big, Better, Faster, Safer
VMware Cuts Prices for SMBs
EMC Hires its First Chief Marketing Officer
Google China Has Called the Movers: Reports
Who Are All Those People at the SCO Trial?
The Second Coming of Internet Explorer
Coming to a Small Screen Near You – iCON, A Satire of Silicon Valley Ego, Power & Greed
XML Maven Goes to Google To Fight the iPhone
SGI Brings Back a Brand
The Forecast is Cloudy in More Ways Than One
Microsoft Nailed in VPN Suit
Dell Sues LCD Cartel
Microsoft Does Dallas
CA Supports Solaris Zones
Symbian Foundation Builds Cloud Platform on Red Hat
Rackspace Pitches Music Labels
Pegasystems Buys Chordiant
newScale To Support Cisco
Raj & Dani Want Separate Trials
RightScale Upgrades
Oracle Touches the Cloud
Ingres To Be in Novell Appliance
Google Denied Nexus One Trademark
Google’s AdMob Acquisition Likely To Be Nixed
Jerry York Dead at 71

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:18 pm

Whither Novell?

Novell No Responses »
Mar 132010

Novell’s gone awfully quiet since last week when Elliott Associates, a New York hedge fund better known for trafficking in Peruvian debt, offered $5.75 a share to take in private.

In fact, the only peep out of it has been the constant rustle of its stock trading hands apparently in anticipation of either a sweetened offer or a white knight riding in to save it from the clutches of a known “vulture capitalist.”

From March 3 through March 11, something like 240 million shares of Novell were bought and sold. It’s only got about 300 million shares outstanding – and Elliott already owns 8.5% of the company – so that theoretically means that only around 11.5% of its shares didn’t trade.

The spike in Novell’s price has simmered down since ballooning to $6.15 last Wednesday, the day after the offer was made. It had slipped to within a nickel of Elliott’s price when the market closed Thursday, possibly because no other offer has appeared on the horizon.

No surprise there.

Bloomberg found someone “familiar with the matter” to tell it Thursday that Elliott would sell off Novell’s legacy NetWare business if it gets its hands on the company, maybe try to find a buyer for its Linux unit, repatriate the $400 million in cash Novell has offshore (despite Elliott’s stated concerns about taxes, it would seem), try to run the joint more efficiently and improve the current $239,496 ratio of sales to employee.

Bloomberg’s source said the company is overspending on employees. Guess we know what that could mean.

The source also told Bloomberg that Novell’s board is supposed to meet early next week to consider Elliott’s offer.

Bloomberg got a lot farther than we did. Novell’s spokesman didn’t return our calls and Elliott’s spokesman wouldn’t be pinned down on whether or not the two companies have been talking, a simple question to which we basically got “yes,” then “no,” then “I can’t talk about it yet.”

But darned if he didn’t keep his word and call back later to say that no Elliott hasn’t heard back from Novell since a week ago Tuesday when it acknowledged its offer; no, Elliott wasn’t acting for somebody else (although that like any discussions of the SCO suit against Novell may be over his pay grade); and that Bloomberg was wrong, wrong, wrong.

He forwarded a statement saying that the Bloomberg story was “inaccurate and erroneous” and that “Elliott wants to own the company. Elliott has no plans to sell any business units.” He said he tried to reason with Bloomberg before its story went out but the wire service wasn’t having any of it.

Like Bloomberg, Ovum, the London researcher, figures that whether or not Elliott succeeds in buying Novell, Novell is still burnt toast and “likely to end up in pieces.”

It thinks there will be a better offer but not much; that Novell’s board is likely to reject the Elliott’s bid ahead of BrainShare, which starts on March 21; and that Elliott might go directly to Novell’s shareholders.

It also figures that the only way any of the great industry lights speculated on as potential Novell saviors – everybody from Cisco, CA, Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP, VMware through to Microsoft – are going to get within a 10-foot barge poll of Novell is at a rummage sale.

Heck, it even imagines that “As part of its strategy to rebuff EA’s efforts, Novell’s board may well offer to dismantle the company itself so that all profits end up in its shareholders’ pockets rather than EA’s.”

It thinks the Linux business will be the first to go with IBM the most likely buyer – presumably after Elliott deals with SCO, we might interject – since IBM lent Novell the money to buy SUSE in the first place to make sure Red Hat didn’t turn into Microsoft II and since SUSE is the preferred Linux on its mainframes.

Ovum also likes CA for Novell identity and access management portfolio, maybe even its system management stuff too though it needs more integration.

It figures Elliott could probably make a buck on Novell’s patents. Whether the same could be said for Novell’s WordPerfect suit against Microsoft remains to be seen.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:22 pm

IBM Adopts Unconventional Strategy in Neon Antitrust Case

IBM No Responses »
Mar 112010

by Maureen O’Gara

IBM replied Monday to the antitrust charges hurled at it last month by Neon Enterprise Software and what’s interesting is not what’s there – which contributes nothing to the discussion outside of adding “parasite” to the list of dirty names it calls Neon – so much as what’s not there.

Typically in these cases there would be your basic knee-jerk motion to dismiss these charges.

Neon was certainly prepared for months of foot-dragging legal debate over dismissal but IBM eschewed that course, opting instead to go straight to trial (straight of course being a relative term among lawyers).

IBM’s unconventional strategy suggests that it reckoned it could lose a motion to dismiss based on its conduct in the market as cited in Neon’s suit and didn’t want to risk getting that customer-unsettling black eye. Mainframe users might get unruly if its case looked weak.

Instead it’s going to try to win the case and bury these guys in the courts, which is what Neon already claims IBM has done in the market.

Neon wants the case heard early next year, which means starting discovery in the US and Europe next month, taking scores of depositions and assembling acres of documents.

Of course IBM has to respond to Neon’s proposed schedule first, which it hasn’t done. A schedule has to be filed with the Texas court hearing the case before the end of the month.

Neon amended its pre-Christmas unfair competition suit against IBM last month to include claims of monopoly maintenance in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and conditioning sales to mainframe users on their promise not to buy from a competitor in violation of the Clayton Antitrust Act.

If IBM loses it could be forced to disgorge a billion dollars or more of its profits on software licensing fees for violating the Lanham Act and hundred of million of dollars more in damages – which, under antitrust rules, could be trebled.

Neon named names in its amended suit and claimed IBM threatened retaliation against Honda, FedEx, Daimler-Benz US, Swisscom, Sainbury’s HuK Coburg, Home Depot, Wells Fargo and Experian if they used its zPrime software to offload legacy DB2, CICS, IMS and z/OS workloads onto the so-called mainframe specialty processors that they buy from IBM thereby saving themselves billions of dollars in exorbitant monthly licensing fees.

Neon says IBM threatened to sue these users, jack up their mainframe fees or curtail its maintenance and support. It also allegedly threatened to cancel a reseller’s contract if it handled zPrime. Among other things Neon claims lost sales.

IBM, which has countersued for damages of all descriptions and an injunction, claims Neon’s technology is “illegal” and that mainframe users are contractually restricted from running anything but IBM-authorized workloads on the zAAP and zIIP specialty processors Neon makes use of.

IBM’s problem is it doesn’t charge for running workloads on these widgets, which are just mainframe central processors masquerading under a different name.

They were dreamed up to keep mainframe users from running off and using commodity servers for their XML and Java apps and to accelerate DB2 and although IBM stands on its Machine Code License as well as so-called IBM Customer Agreements (ICAs) and “Purchase Supplements” Neon claims that neither IBM nor any of its customers can produce any workload-restricting contracts.

The Machine Code License says customers can’t use a mainframe’s dormant or “built-in capacity” beyond what IBM has authorized. Hence, it can’t run zPrime.

Neon calls it bunk and has asked IBM to produce the list of forbidden workloads, and since it hasn’t concludes there is none and that that’s why IBM is trying to undo its legal oversight by asking users – who want to buy new specialty processors – to sign retroactive agreements that would foreclose their right to use zPrime. Neon calls that an antitrust violation.

For IBM’s reply see http://openmainframe.org/downloads/legal-documents/2010-03-08_IBM_Amended_Answer_And_Counterclaims.pdf.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:21 pm

Apple Sues Google, er, Google Phone Maker

News No Responses »
Mar 062010

Apple, which is generally litigation-shy, said Tuesday that it had filed suit against HTC, the Taiwanese company that’s making Google’s Nexus One phone. It’s charged with infringing 20 Apple patents.

Microsoft phones don’t escape either, but they’re more of an after-thought. HTC made the very first Android phone and now makes a bunch of them.

Apple said the patents are on iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

Its press release didn’t say which of the phones that HTC makes infringe and didn’t mention a word about Google – and neither did its federal suit.

But Apple fired out of both barrels of its shotgun, filing suit with both the US International Trade Commission (ITC) and the federal court in Delaware.

The first cites 10 multi-claim patents; so does the 15-page Delaware case but it’s a different set of patents more focused on the UI. Some of the IP dates back to the 90s; some to Apple’s joint ventures with IBM like Taligent as well as NeXT, the Jobs-created company Apple bought for its operating system.

Apple wants a permanent injunction and treble damages. Presumably it might settle for a license.

Apple notes that the Mac OS, iPhone, iTunes and other software use some of the same patented IP.

The ITC complaint specifically calls out “the accused HTC Android products” and the Nexus One.

Android is supposed to have copped some of Apple’s multitouch touch-screen widgetry, its wake-up and its finger-dragging scrolling as well as more esoteric stuff like executing object-oriented programs on a computing running a procedural OS, method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system and a real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data.

Other indicted products include the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), HTC Magic (the myTouch 3G), the HTC Hero and the HTC Droid Eris as well as the Windows Mobile-base HTC Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Touch Pro2, Tilt II, Pure, HD2 and Imagio. Apple still appears to be more interested in Android’s sins.

HTC is assumed to be a stand-in for Google with its deep pockets and – more particularly – its free Android operating system. The suit filed with the ITC is all about the OS.

Google, who was not charged, issued a statement saying “we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us develop it.” HTC was still reading the suits.

In a canned statement CEO Steve Jobs said, “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

iPhone is way ahead of Android phones in the market but lost share to the widgets in the fourth quarter.

The New York Times figures HTC and friends may be able to turn up prior art by such as Palm or Synaptics.

Apple and Nokia are also in litigation over some of the same patents. Nokia sued citing iPhone for patent violation and Apple countersued. Eastman Kodak has also complained to the ITC about iPhone and the Blackberry

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:37 pm

IBM Claims To Take the PC Out of PC Servers

IBM No Responses »
Mar 042010

IBM wants to be HP.

Well, it wants first in x86 server revenue, a slot HP currently occupies. IBM is third. So Blue has taken a whack at “rewriting the economics of industry standard computing” by redesigning the PC server to take the PC out of it and put the enterprise in it.

It’s been three years engineering the latest generation of its so-called mainframe-borrowing X-Architecture and ahead of Intel trotting out its high-end eight-core Nehalem EX Xeon chips later this month IBM unveiled its Nehalem EX-based x86 servers at CeBit in Germany this week.

They’re designated eX5 and are supposed to offer “dramatically more scalable, workload-tuned computing on the x86 platform.”

Think of them as sort of a soup kitchen for poor memory-starved applications in virtual environments.

IBM has decoupled the memory from the processors, breaking the traditional PC architecture so the boxes can be loaded up with 600% more memory than everybody else. And it’s invented a chip that lets the eX5’s processors access the extended memory very quickly.

Users will be able to add up to 32 DIMMs.

It pitches the solution as a cure for server sprawl with its attendant power and management costs. Users won’t have to buy extra servers for memory-intensive workloads and in the process they might save themselves some of the license fees they pay to VMware by putting a lot more virtual machines on a chip – figure half the servers and half the licensing cost, IBM says, or 82% more virtual servers for the licensing costs – not to mention reduced middleware and application expenses. Clients running a Microsoft database should be able to cut their license costs by 50%.

On the other hand users should be able to virtualize 80% of their data centers by fixing the limiting memory issue.

IBM’s boxes also have new flash storage, which together with the increased RAM should produce 30 time better database performance and 99% better performance-per-watt and cut storage cost by 97%.

Forrester analyst James Staten calls it a “direct response to Oracle’s Exadata database appliance, but the IBM approach is more widely applicable.”

IBM has also invested the boxes with what it calls FlexNode widgetry that physically partitions a system into two and back again so it can be used for infrastructure applications by day and larger batch jobs at night. It borrowed the device from its Power systems.

IBM plans on releasing three eX5 models this year: a four-processor System x3850 X5, a BladeCenter HX5 and an entry-level enterprise-class two-processor System x3690 X5. It will be the first time IBM has used its X-Architecture widgetry in a blade. No pricing yet.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:37 pm
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