ibm

Is there life after or with IBM for Geronimo?

The Server Side is reporting that Geronimo, the little application server that largely couldn't, is struggling to catch up with JBoss, but is falling short largely because of its biggest corporate sponsor: IBM. IBM provides productized versions of Geronimo but they don't bring home the WebSphere revenue bacon (neither do support subscriptions around it), leaving Geronimo's future very much in doubt.

Apparently, getting one's sponsorship from a company with a competing, proprietary product to protect is not a winning strategy:

Geronimo is much like Eclipse: not formally controlled by IBM, but since most of Geronimo's core committers are employed by Big Blue, control more or less belongs in IBM's hands.… Read more

IBM reorg: A sign of things to come

Last week, IBM System Technology Group (STG) announced its plans for a reorg. Historically, STG was organized around five hardware "brands" (i.e. mainframe, storage, microprocessors, etc.), but this led to customer confusion and channel overlap. What's more, IBM found its salespeople competing with each other in the field. Something had to give.

IBM, the company that practically invented business computing, will now market its systems in a software, solutions, or industry context. To me, this is an indication that the rules of the technology game continue to evolve into a model where vertical solutions trump horizontal … Read more

IBM continues to submerge its product brands

IBM's last major Systems and Technology Group (STG) reorganization in 2000 both put an exclamation group on and added momentum to the company's resurgence. IBM described the introduction of the umbrella "eServer" brand atop all of its server product lines as:

a product of Project Mach 1, a major cross-company initiative begun three years ago to harness the company's best technologies and practices to support the infrastructure for the next phase of e-business. From the consolidation of IBM server manufacturing and development, to the realignment of its sales force, to breakthroughs such as copper chips, … Read more

Toxic waste suit filed against IBM

Lawyers for about 90 current and former residents of New York state filed suit against IBM on Thursday alleging that chemicals from an IBM plant have caused congenital heart defects in infants and kidney cancers in adults, and continue to cause problems.

The tort lawsuit claims that the plant released hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic and hazardous chemicals, including trichloroethylene (TCE), into the air, soil, and groundwater of Endicott, the birthplace of IBM, and the nearby town of Union over several decades.

A "toxic plume" continues to expose residents to hazardous vapors, according to the lawsuit … Read more

Chinese chipmaker licenses IBM's 45nm tech

IBM has licensed its next-generation technology for manufacturing processors to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., the largest Chinese chipmaker, the companies said Wednesday.

The partnership spotlights the growing technical abilities in China, a country that's already a manufacturing powerhouse for lower-tech products. Terms of the IBM deal weren't disclosed.

The circuitry on microprocessors has steadily shrunk in size, letting manufacturers squeeze more features onto chips, reduce power consumption, and lower chip prices. The industry currently is only beginning a transition from current chips built with 65-nanometer circuitry elements to those with 45-nanometer elements. (A nanometer is a billionth of … Read more

MySQL under siege and the likely need to "roll your own" open source

First it was Oracle buying Innobase (though Oracle has so far played fair). Now it's IBM buying Solid Information Technology. Given much of the proprietary world's public attitude toward open source ("Open source a threat? What's open source?), it's surprising that IBM would even bother to hedge its bets against MySQL.

After all, who's afraid of little MySQL? I mean, who besides everyone with a database business that depends on lock-in, overpriced licenses, and 20th Century software? Matthew Aslett doesn't think this was targeted at MySQL, and he's likely right. But it impacts MySQL all the same, as the New York Times writes:

The IBM acquisition may be seen as a setback for MySQL, since it marks the loss of independence of another company that makes a high-performance transaction engine for MySQL's database....… Read more

Oracle and Linux: It's all about the money

I stumbled across this article today, which goes a long way toward explaining Oracle's affection for Linux. I fault Oracle for the way it went about embracing Linux, but I don't fault its financial acumen:

Last quarter, [Oracle] pointed out that its database market share actually tends to improve when customers move to Linux, which has been a fast-growing server operating system for much of the decade. And Oracle is poised to capitalize on open-source trends in other ways. For instance, the company distributes Linux for free, and makes money by offering support.

So far so good: earlier … Read more

Red Hat, JBoss committers, and the IBM question

James Governor has a thoughtful response to my earlier post on Red Hat's JBoss business. James refuses to be drawn on the easier criticisms of my post, arguing instead:

It's no surprise to see JBoss being marked down by investment analysts. But if it starts to lose more committers it may have a real problem on its hands. Arguably the new business model has significantly evolved from the Fleury Era cult of personality, but in the open source world it is still a massive boon to have core developers on staff. I am not saying JBoss is dead or anything silly like that--but the situation is certainly interesting.

Indeed. It's one thing to lose a sales team. It's quite another--and much more dire--to lose one's development team, and especially in an open-source company. This isn't to say, for example, that JBoss' sales team isn't worth keeping around: if you're an open-source vendor you know how hard it can be to find salespeople that truly grok open source and sell accordingly.… Read more

Rise or fall for Red Hat?

An analyst friend emailed me the other day to get my opinion on the analyst community's negative Red Hat pile-on. Bank of America, Global Equities Research, and others have recently been hand-wringing over Red Hat's future, suggesting that its JBoss business is stalling, that it's "losing momentum" in emerging markets like China, and (here's the one I find immensely laughable) that hardware vendors like HP are having to step in to fill Red Hat's failing shoes on support.

Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research tried to outdo this list, however, arguing that not only does Red Hat stink, but the entire LAMP ecosystem is rubbish, too. He declares that .Net is winning developers' hearts and minds while the LAMP stack is on its way to relegation to the dustbin of history. His bias exposed (just as mine is here: I'm an open-source believer and see rampant uptake of LAMP and open source throughout the enterprise), he has his 15 seconds of fame. Time to move on.

One thing, however, bears further investigation. JBoss. The consensus view from analysts seems to be that JBoss is Red Hat's Achilles Heel. Let's take a look at some data to get a better picture.… Read more