-------------------
|ClieNT Server NEWS |
-------------------
New York and London
December 21, 1998 - January 8, 1999 Issue Number 280
-------------------------------------------------
SEASON'S GREETINGS
ClieNT Server News and its staff extend to all of our readers and
sources the compliments of the season, especially the part about
having a prosperous New Year. This is our last issue in 1998. We'll
be back on January 8. In the interim, breaking news will be flashed
to you and put up on our web site at www.clientservernews.com for
those of you who read our paper edition. Bye for now and have a
great holiday.
-------------------------------------------------
HEADLINES
CSN 280-01 Corollary Said To Be Late Again; Why, It Must Be in the
Grip of the Microsoft Disease
CSN 280-02 NT5 Beta 3 RC Released
CSN 280-03 Intel Gets the Exponential Patents the Hard Way
CSN 280-04 Microsoft To Appeal Java Injunction
CSN 280-05 Microsoft's $100m Motives Mystify VCs
CSN 280-06 Redmond's Pumps $200m into Qwest To Guarantee NT
Dominates TeraPOP Network
CSN 280-07 Qwest Lines Connect Conxion
CSN 280-08 The Hardy Boys Bend Raw Iron To Their Whim
CSN 280-09 First "Real" NumaCenter Ships
CSN 280-10 The Microsoft Empire: Roots and All
CSN 280-11 Cambridge Technology, the Unix Integrator, Joins
Redmond's Team
CSN 280-12 Softway Adds COM to Interix
CSN 280-13 AOL, Sun Will Gain, but Netscape's Dead Meat, Meta Group
Says
CSN 280-14 HP Remains Schismatic
CSN 280- 15 Linux Watch: Free WordPerfect-on-Linux Is One Big Baby
CSN 280-16 Informix Gift Wraps Dynamic Server For Linux
CSN 280-17 Compaq Offers Up Linux Disk Array Driver
CSN 280-18 BSD/OS To Run Linux Apps
CSN 280-19 Judge Sides With Microsoft About AOL/Netscape, Trial
Recesses
CSN 280-20 Hyperion & Arbor Programs Mate
CSN 280-21 IBM Readying LDAP Products For '99
CSN 280-22 Novell Puts Money into Five Concerns, But Not Caldera
CSN 280-23 Kingston's Startling Discovery: More Memory Makes NT Work
Better
CSN 280-24 Vinca Buys Rights to NT Service Monitor
CSN 280-25 IBM To Release Java 1.1.6 For Mainframes
CSN 280-26 New Reback Lawsuit Portrays M'Soft as The Grinch That
Stole Christmas Cards
CSN 280-27 Holland Group Studies Java Embedded Apps Compiler
CSN 280-28 ComPort To Resell Opalis NT Automation Code
CSN 280-29 CD Anti-Piracy Start-up Lands World's Biggest Replicator
CSN 280-30 Sylvain Faust Readies SQL-Programmer Upgrade
CSN 280-31 Microstate Rejoices Over Reaction
CSN 280-32 Seagate Repackages Vinca's Open File Backup
CSN 280-33 New Gartner Service Measures IT Alignment with Business
Goals
CSN 280-34 NT Security Scanner Gets Hacker Simulator
CSN 280-35 NEC Unveils NT-based IVR Call Center System
CSN 280-36 Accelerator Speeds VPNs
CSN 280-37 Open Text Eschews New Bid For PC Docs
CSN 280-38 DPI Bundles ISO 9000 Code with IBM's NT Suite
CSN 280-39 Citrix Nabs Merisel for Mega Distribution
CSN 280-40 Quark To Bundle Corel Draw
CSN 280-41 Amiga Diehards Get Amiga Forever - On Windows
CSN 280-42 Like the Boy who Cried Wolf; Packard Bell Says It'll Be
Profitable in '99
CSN 280-43 Billygrams
ClieNT Server News is published weekly by G2 Computer Intelligence
Inc. http://www.g2news.com ; 3 Maple Place, Glen Head, New York
11545-9864, USA; Tel.:516 759-7025 Fax: 516 759-7028.
Send press releases to news@g2news.com
Subscription price: $595 individual reader. Available at quantity
discount to associations, groups, departments and companies.
paperboy@g2news.com
Copyright notice: While we are flattered that some of our readers
pass along copies of our stories to friends, family and co-workers,
please know that this practice undermines our efforts to bring you
the kind of reporting you've come to expect.
And, so the legalese:
It is illegal to reproduce, copy, forward, republish, broadcast,
post on an Internet/Intranet site or otherwise distribute this or
any other materials, files or documents without the prior written
permission of G2 Computer Intelligence. Subscribers to the e-mail
versions can print one copy which may be passed around. Subscribers
to the paper edition can pass the issue around but it is illegal to
photocopy it in part or in whole.
Comments? Subscription, permission to post to a web site or reprint
info?: e-mail: paperboy@g2news.com
--------------------
CSN 280-01 Corollary Said To Be Late Again; Why, It Must Be in the
Grip of the Microsoft Disease
Apparently nobody's been officially notified or anything, but the
word coming over the transom is that Corollary is gonna be late
again with its Xeon-based Profusion eight-way. The thinking is it'll
go ahead with its CeBit launch in March but that you can forget
production units for another quarter. That means that long-suffering
Corollary customers that are going with the standard Profusion stuff
couldn't have machines out before the end of the second quarter or
sometime in the third. Ah, well, maybe Profusion will eventually
catch up with NT 5.0 whose non-appearance has stifled the eight-way
market anyway. Corollary, which is now owned by Intel and carefully
watched by the Intel thought police, declined to comment.
The news should cheer Corollary licensee Hitachi PC Company which
has done what Corollary can't seem to manage and has developed an
eight-way out of the Profusion architecture using its own ASICs and
chips (CSN No 275).
Hitachi, which is anxious to get out and establish itself as a new
player, is supposed to officially announce its 400MHz Xeon-sporting
VisionBase 8880 boxes the middle of January, but says that three or
four of the units it has out in the field have already gone
production. Hitachi says all the chips it's currently producing work
at the 100MHz bus rate of the Xeon chip, which Corollary was
recently reported as still struggling to do.
Hitachi PC, which could find itself merged with its mainframe sister
Hitachi Data Systems by March when the Japanese fiscal year ends,
expects to sell under 100 eight-ways in the US in 1999. Unless of
course Corollary's failure to deliver releases some pent up demand.
Hitachi PC is supposed to sell its stuff to HDS' mainframe customers
so bringing them together would be natural once EDS, which still
owns 14% of HDS, gets out of the way. EDS is looking for an exit
strategy and rumor has it may trade its equity position for HDS'
service business. EDS, by the way, just named Dick Brown, Cable &
Wireless' former CEO, as its chairman and CEO. Guess that ends any
misplaced speculation that EDS was going after Computer Associates
boss Sanjay Ku-mar. Among $20 billion in deals cut during his 29-
month tenure, Brown purchased MCI/WorldCom's Internet backbone for
Cable & Wireless after the antitrust authorities said they couldn't
keep it. Cable & Wireless pretax profits jumped 60% during his
administration.
Meanwhile, Hitachi PC, which just started selling two-way and four-
way Intel servers in the US two months ago, is supposed to be
bringing out a mid-range four-way with something like six drives and
4 gigs of memory. It'll be priced up against Dell.
CSN 280-02 NT5 Beta 3 RC Released
Microsoft has quietly begun shipping the first release candidate for
the NT5 beta 3, and it's been a long up-hill slog getting to even
this interim stage. Microsoft's enemies have of course used 5.0's
non-appearance as a scourge to lacerate Micro-soft with. The best
that Microsoft can now reply is that at least 5.0 is finally
"feature complete."
RC Zero, which was last due on November 20 (CSN No 272), goes to
about 1,000 ISVs and OEMs on CD with another 15,000-16,000 folks
enrolled in Microsoft's technical beta program eligible to get the
build off a secure web site. Most of those getting beta 3 RC Zero,
or RC0 (Build 1946), will get the restyled Windows 2000 Profession-
al, Server and/or Advanced Server. A small select group will also
get the DataCenter Server.
Windows 2000 Server lead product manager Jonathan Perera said that
Microsoft expects at least two more beta 3 release candidates before
the thing is ready for the kind of mass marketing beta that's become
the norm. Perera said that the beta 3 schedule, or at least
Microsoft's latest schedule, continues to call for the mass release
by the end of Q1. He wouldn't discuss 5.0's final release dates.
Beta 3 is supposed to be the last beta. Insiders say Microsoft will
move mountains if it has to to get WinY2K out by mid-year. Sources
close to the company say that beta 3, let alone the final release,
is date-driven and not based on a bug count.
The server versions of beta 3 are said to include major improvements
involving the reportedly dicey Active Directory and Terminal Server.
Perera says lots of "finish work" had to be done to Active
Directory, i.e. tuning and fixing. Redmond has also added a setup
wizard to deploy Active Directory. Perera admits installing Active
Directory was tricky in beta 2.
Terminal Server has been tightly integrated with the operating
system. In beta 2 it was almost a standalone program.
On the client side, Perera says, the bulk of the work has centered
on improving WinY2K Professional's mobile platform support. There's
also a passel of new drivers for multimedia devices.
RC0's release signals the end of the reign of Windows Division VP
Moshe Dunie, head of NT development. News of his departure was e-
mailed to Microserfs on December 7 by NT Überboss Jim Allchin (CSN
No 279). Dunie's exit has touched off speculation as whether he is
the sacrificial lamb offered up to atone for 5.0's incredible delays
although there's obviously enough guilt to go around. It is said 5.0
suffered badly because no one seemed to be able to make the "hard
choices' and say "no" to people when they lobbied on behalf of their
pet projects.
It is also interesting that they brought in Brian Valentine to
replace Dunie. Valentine delivered Exchange and, while in and of
itself that is no recommendation given its own delays, Exchange is
heavily dependent on Microsoft's infamous directory, supposedly the
real sore spot in the whole 5.0 program.
CSN 280-03 Intel Gets the Exponential Patents the Hard Way
Intel took out an insurance policy last week that Merced won't be
sued for patent infringement and trespassing on prior art. The
policy comes in the form of a 10-year patent cross-license
arrangement with graphics chip house S3, which has been holding a
gun to Intel's head ever since it proved to be the highest bidder
for the Exponential patents.
Exponential was the bleeding-edge PowerPC house that went belly up
when Apple pulled the rug out from under them by not honoring its
agreement to buy their CPUs. Exponential had 45 patents that
supposedly held the key to building 64-bit chips that can read both
CISC and RISC instructions. Merced is supposed to read both CISC and
RISC instructions. Wonderfully divine symmetry, don't you think?
Anyway, Intel only bid $5 million when Exponential's IP went to the
block as part of its dissolution. S3 reportedly bid $10 mil and
wrangling, er, negotiations between it and Intel have been going on
practically ever since. S3 emerges with rights to the P6 bus which,
one would guess, will turn up in S3's chip set before Intel gets
Whitney out. Intel also kicked in a knighthood for S3. Now it's one
of Intel's AGP 4X validation partners and S3 is hoping that makes it
first-to-market with AGP 4X product, a direction most of the smart
money is taking. Oh, yes, and there was a little financial sweetener
as well. Intel is to purchase warrants to S3 shares under the usual
undisclosed terms.
S3 says that with these victories under its belt it "intends to re-
establish its position as the number one supplier to high-volume
OEMs and add-in card manufacturers." It's also not going to be
content with its traditional low-end 2D and 3D markets. It's going
to branch off into set-top boxes, WinCE machines, consumer
appliances, industrial point-of-sale equipment and automotive GPS
systems.
CSN 280-04 Microsoft To Appeal Java Injunction
Microsoft has decided to appeal the preliminary injunction it got
hit with a few weeks ago as a result of the landmark Java suit that
Sun lodged against it. The judge slammed it with an injunction on
the basis that Sun would prevail in the case. The trial hasn't
started yet and no date has been set.
Microsoft has merely given the court notice of its intent to appeal.
It has until mid-January to file the papers laying out its grounds.
In its first public reaction to the injunction, which was handed
down on November 17, Microsoft hinted it might buck the thing.
Few people expected Microsoft to suddenly become a good Java
citizen. It is even believed it may eventually turn and attack Java
broadside with a Java-subsuming universal virtual machine and new
Intermediate Language (IL) it's been working on (CSN No 276, 239).
The universal virtual machine is believed to be based on technology
it acquired when it bought Colusa Software in the spring of 1996.
Even then it was thought that Microsoft might use Colusa's Unix-
derived Architecture Neutral Distribution Format or ANDF-style
technology to offset Java's cross-platform ace-in-the-hole (CSN No
147).
The injunction has forced Microsoft to make its Java technology Sun-
compatible. On December 7, Microsoft released a Java virtual machine
with the hated Java Native Interface (JNI) in it. Microsoft has been
resistant to JNI because it provides an alternate way for developers
to write directly to the Windows operating system, a way not of
Microsoft's choosing.
The injunction also orders Microsoft to insure that its compiler
doesn't default to the proprietary keyword extensions and directives
it put in, the stuff that Sun alleges "pollutes" Java. It has to put
a warning label on all its proprietary extensions cautioning
developers that using them will result in compiled code that may not
run on all compatible VMs.
CSN 280-05 Microsoft's $100m Motives Mystify VCs
Microsoft has been making the rounds of high-tech venture capital
outfits, looking to place as much as $100 million with them,
according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. Redmond's
reportedly ready to drop from $5 million to as much as $10 million
into the investment kitty at up to 10 firms. Such investments aren't
unprecedented. Microsoft put $10 million out with Accel Partners,
last spring. But some VC companies are said to be wary lest Redmond,
or any large company, use its investments to gain an insider peek at
a hot start-up's IP or business plans. Others, looking on the
positive side, say they figure letting Redmond in the door might
grease the path in future deals, the Journal said.
CSN 280-06 Redmond's Pumps $200m into Qwest To Guarantee NT
Dominates TeraPOP Network
Microsoft is putting $200 million into IP backbone carrier Qwest in
a deal to ensure that NT dominates what will be the world's newest
and fastest high-speed IP backbone. The pact encompasses e-commerce
hosting, VPNs, the distribution of Microsoft software and Redmond's
first foray into the rent-an-app business.
Under the terms of the deal Microsoft gets 4.4 million Qwest shares,
paying a market price of $45, the number the stock was at when the
pact was inked. The investment represents a surprisingly small
equity stake in Qwest, just under 1.3%.
Denver-based Qwest will turn around and use $150 million of the cash
to fund a new subsidiary that will spring to life in January with 60
employees and a charter to offer Windows NT-based services
exclusively. The unit expects to do $150 million in business in its
first two years, the bulk of it in the year 2000, after taking a
small loss in 1999. It figures on making a small profit in 2000.
Over the next five years the business segments covered by the deal
will represent a $35 billion market. Qwest wants to own 7%-10% of
it, according to Qwest president and CEO Joseph Nacchio. He said
Qwest figures on $3 billion in revenue.
Qwest said it was already planning to enter businesses such as
software distribution, virtual private networking and e-commerce
hosting and that the deal with Microsoft will cut its time to market
by a year. For Microsoft it precludes competitors from providing the
software Qwest uses to build its services.
"It is about driving market share for NT. That is clearly our goal,"
said Microsoft Internet Customer Unit VP David Cole. Cole,
interestingly enough, was just assigned to help NT's new czar, Brian
Valentine, get NT 5 out the door (CSN No 279).
The deal gives Redmond access to what will be the newest and fastest
IP backbone in the world once Qwest finishes its build-out next
June. It's creating a 16,000-mile US network, plus a 1,400-mile
Mexican extension, linking 125 cities with terabit-per-second points
of presence (TeraPOPs), a construct Cole extolled as "the network of
the future."
Although some of the deal's technical terms were still being ironed
out last week, Microsoft and Qwest said they had a definitive
agreement and that Redmond's $200 million had already been
transferred to Qwest's bank account.
Under the agreement Qwest will be responsible for handling the
mechanics of things like hosting and software distribution. It gets
a license to a broad but unspecified list of Microsoft software. In
return, Microsoft will share in the revenues Qwest sees from its new
unit. The formula was not divulged.
The twosome's first offering will be complex web hosting based on
Microsoft's Commercial Internet Services platform. A beta is to
start by the end of Q1. Concurrently Qwest will put together an NT-
based VPN offering. By the end of Q2, Qwest plans to be selling both
the hosting and the VPN services.
In the second half work starts on a managed software portfolio. The
service will include application distribution, software management
and license management services. Some observers fret that this part
of the deal might cut Microsoft's huge reseller network out of the
loop. But Cole said that, to the contrary, Microsoft's 88,000
solution providers would get the right to resell Qwest services.
That will apparently allow them to deliver software to their
customers via the Qwest service as well as use Qwest to provide
software maintenance, rather than devote their own resources to the
task.
Qwest will also host the applications for businesses that don't want
to do it themselves. Customers will use Qwest's network to get at
their databases and whatnot either over a dedicated portion of the
Qwest network that's separate from its Internet carriage or by using
VPN technology.
Qwest will also offer to host desktop applications such as Microsoft
Office. Cole said that in some cases businesses will buy the
Microsoft software and Qwest will host it, but the deal with Qwest
also envisions renting software, a concept now prohibited by
Microsoft licenses. "We will make the licensing changes that are
necessary," Cole said.
Cole and Nacchio didn't delve much into the technical details, but
apparently Qwest will use Microsoft Terminal Server and its client
will use Windows terminals under such hosting arrangements.
An interesting sidelight to the deal is that Qwest recently signed a
deal with Netscape for it to carry traffic from Netcenter. Nacchio
insisted the new romance with Microsoft would not affect the
Netscape deal. He characterized the Netcenter arrangement as
consumer-oriented and the deal with Microsoft as business-oriented.
Of course, with America Online soon to own Netcenter, one wonders
whether the Netscape-Qwest deal was already doomed.
In any case, the possible conflict with Netscape doesn't seem to
bother Qwest, since talks with Microsoft started long before AOL's
acquisition of Netscape was announced. Talks began a little more
than four months ago when Nacchio called Microsoft president Steve
Ballmer. The two sat down to talk in person in September, finally
signing the deal last weekend.
Meanwhile, wasting no time in organizing its new Microsoft-centric
unit, Qwest last week named Lewis Wilks president of Internet and
multimedia markets. Wilks, who had been president of Qwest Business
Markets, will lead a team of six vice presidents that Qwest has been
quietly recruiting from around the industry including former
Taligent VP and general manager John Kirkpatrick. The other new VPs
are: James Becker, former managing director of XDSL and
international dial access for UUnet; Greg Bell, formerly business
development and marketing SVP at VCON Inc; John Charters, who had
been US West's VP of Internet services and applications development;
Maha Ibrahim, a Boston Group consultant; and Doug Stone, a start-up
specialist with 20 years experience. Qwest didn't detail individual
assignments for its new VPs.
CSN 280-07 Qwest Lines Connect Conxion
Software download specialist Conxion Corporation last week signed up
with Qwest for an OC-48 link, enough to handle 2.4GB of data per
second, between its headquarters in Santa Clara and Seattle.
Conxion, which already rents OC-12 links from Qwest, didn't say why
exactly it needs so much capacity to Seattle but the reason's pretty
obvious. Microsoft outsources most of its software download
requirements to Conxion, which estimates it dishes up almost 3
terabytes of software a day on Redmond's behalf including Internet
Explorer and Windows updates.
CSN 280-08 The Hardy Boys Bend Raw Iron To Their Whim
Told you so. Told you so. Oracle and Sun trotted out that Raw Iron
deal they've been working on (CSN No 276) to far more attention than
it probably deserved, but it was a slow news week and the coupling
wreaks of anti-Microsoft venom so it's only natural for the press
corps to overplay it. Besides Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy, two
of the industry's best attention-getters, did the honors.
Sun is going to provide Oracle with the Solaris microkernel - they
kept calling it a core - so Oracle can fiddle with the IP and come
up with an OS-less thin server dedicated to running its Oracle8i
database. Oracle said it would have the thing ready by March, fit to
handle both uniprocessors and multiprocessors. (Hmmm, Oracle as its
own OS developer...and after it did so brilliantly with the NC.)
Ellison on Monday moved the Maginot Line defending Oracle against
the incursions of Microsoft further upmarket than he originally
suggested when he preannounced Raw Iron at Comdex in November. Now,
according to him, there's no such thing as a low-end database
market, only mid-range and high-end. Such things as Raw Iron would
be "wacko" in a dentist's office or a hamburger stand, he said.
Given reverse psychology, his protestations must mean Microsoft is
clobbering him at certain levels of the enterprise.
The idea behind Raw Iron is to offer a simple, reliable, pre-
configured turnkey system. The excuse, other than Microsoft, was
Oracle's discovery that 50% of its customers run nothing but
dedicated Oracle systems. Ellison bragged that Raw Iron would mean
"huge" incremental business, but that remains to be seen, talk of
"appliances" being the coming thing notwithstanding. Outside
channels like Dell, which is one of his targets for the stuff,
question whether there's really a market for it even though it's
experiencing a lively new Oracle business. And if Ellison wants HP
to peddle the thing - and HP is his second largest market - well,
he's gonna have to come up with something other than Solaris now
isn't he? Good thing the deal with McNealy is non-exclusive.
Researchers like Illuminata basically say Raw Iron's a crock. The
RDBMS market is saturated and Oracle's got itself an aging franchise
that's prey to newer technologies, revitalized competition (read
DB2), the industry-wide shift to other concerns and of course
attacks from commodity vendors like Microsoft. Note, please,
Oracle8i won't be any cheaper on Raw Iron than on any other box.
Oracle needs the revenue growth so it's gotta create some noise,
Illuminata argues. And that's all it is - noise. Illuminata won't
even give it interesting noise.
Scooter looks like he comes off the better of the two in this thing.
Raw Iron plays on Intel and Sparc. He sells it and hopes the Raw
Iron buyer trades up to the real Solaris. Meanwhile, it's a cross
license and he gets Oracle IP like data store, mail store and
single signon to buck his e-commerce middleware. Seen the new Sun
ads? It's the dot in dot.com.
CSN 280-09 First "Real" NumaCenter Ships
Sequent has gone to market with the first "real" NumaCenter,
something it calls a second-generation configuration that will begin
to deliver on the promise of an integrated NT-Unix system.
NumaCenter 2a sports a long list of NT-Unix integration features
ranging from a single cabinet to shared storage that were missing
from NumaCenter 1. NumaCenter product manager Peter Loeb now
characterizes the initial NumaCenter as "largely packaging,"
designed mainly so Sequent could stake a claim in the mixed-mode
space. The premier NumaCenter primarily hooked separate NT and Unix
systems over a 10/100 LAN but let things like unified management go
begging.
Still, Loeb said, Sequent has delivered the first NumaCenters to
better than 20 companies, bringing in what he described as "tens" of
millions of dollars in revenue. He wouldn't disclose how many tens
of millions or exactly how many systems, though he agrees many of
them are simply test bed units at companies intrigued by the
NumaCenter concept of running productivity applications on NT hooked
directly to heavy-duty environments like databases running on the
Unix side of NumaCenter.
The most marked physical difference between NumaCenter 1 and 2 is of
course the packaging of Sequent's N300 quad Xeon NT server and its
Scorpion Unix server in the same cabinet. More important is the more
intimate integration of the NT and Unix sides of the house.
NumaCenter 2 has shared EMC storage and StorageTek backup
facilities. There's now single log-on and access to Unix file and
print queues from Windows desktops, single point event viewing and
monitoring and single view performance monitoring. Support for
Citrix MetaFrame, Windows Terminal Server and Java web clients has
been added. All storage system connections are now fibre, opening
the way for eventually integrating storage area networks (SANs) with
NumaCenter.
Built into NumaCenter 2 is a hardware management infrastructure
Sequent calls Advanced Detection Availability Manager (ADAM), which
handles single-point monitoring of all NumaCenter network resources
and will be able to monitor any attached SANs. ADAM uses its own
private LAN to manage and control hardware, removing the network
management traffic from the corporate data LAN. A single ADAM can
support up to 24 N300s and literally hundreds of Scorpions.
Sequent also got a pat on the back from Microsoft for NumaCenter 2
in the form of a joint announcement that said Redmond's been helping
Sequent optimize NT Server configurations for NumaCenter. It also
helped in developing partitioning and management tools.
NumaCenter 2a comes to market with an entry-level price of $250k for
an eight-way Xeon system that Sequent estimates costs about $100k
less than a pure Unix system would.
With NumaCenter 2a out the door, Sequent's got a NumaCenter 2b under
design in the lab, scheduled for release in Q2. The 2b includes
further enhancements to ADAM. Depending on what's finished before
the final design is frozen, the upgrades will include dynamic
reconfiguration, web enablement, a "phone home" capability for
remote N300s to contact the NumaCenter at corporate HQ and a remote
revive capability.
The ultimate goal remains NumaCenter 3, whose first incarnation will
be Merced-based running 64-bit NT, or whatever Microsoft calls the
stuff by the time it's ready. Loeb says Sequent's best guess puts
the first NumaCenter 3 shipments in the final quarter of 2000,
though what with the beast dependent on both the Merced and 64-bit
NT timetables he won't guess whether they'll be beta or production
units.
CSN 280-10 The Microsoft Empire: Roots and All
One of the favorite plaints of Microsoft's detractors is that it
bought huge amounts of the technology that's made it so successful
rather than build it, starting with DOS. While acquisitions, joint
ventures and minority investments were hardly invented in Redmond,
Washington, Microsoft's use of its fabled bankroll is starting to
get it in the IBM class. Intel, currently regarded as the biggest VC
is the Valley with dough in over 200 firms - the old finger-in-
every-pie approach - has a ways to go to catch up with Microsoft.
Intel has something like a billion and a half out. Microsoft's tab
looks to be over $4 billion from what we can see and it's really
less investment-minded than it is purely acquisitive. Here's what
they spent the money on. - Stuart Zipper
To get this exclusive report on Microsoft's activities in a chart
format, Adobe Acrobat, or .gif. contact paperboy@g2news.com or call
516 759-7025
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.15.98
Company: Qwest
Year Founded:
Technology: Internet-based broadband delivery of software and
hosting services
Notes & Comments: Qwest licensed to use Microsoft software for new
services
Terms: $200m minority investment (<1.3%)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.10.98
Company: Qualcomm
Year Founded: 1985
Technology: Internet & Wireless data networking convergence
Notes & Comments: Microsoft & Qualcomm set up Wireless Knowledge to
hook up PCS phones & PDAs to the web
Terms: Joint Venture
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.5.98
Company: Link Exchange
Year Founded:
Technology: Internet banner advertising
Notes & Comments: LinkExchange to become part of MSN
Terms: Estimated $20m in Microsoft stock
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.25.98
Company: Valence Research
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: NT cluster load balancing
Notes & Comments: Five-man startup. Technology used by Microsoft for
its web sites, needed to beef up Wolfpack
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: .7 31.98Company: : Thomson Multimedia
France
Year Founded:
Technology: Multimedia and interactive TV
Notes & Comments: Thomson to use WinCE inside interactive TVs & make
WebTV set-top boxes. Microsoft gets board seat.
Terms: Minority investment - 7.5%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.29.98
Company: OpenPort
Year Founded: 1993
Technology: IP fax for NT and least-cost routing
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets technology license and one board
seat
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.18.98
Company: Pluto Technolgies
Year Founded:1995
Technology: Computer-based video storage
Notes & Comments: Technology to be used with Microsoft Theatre
Server (Tiger)
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.15.98
Company: RoadRunner
Year Founded: 1997
Technology: Cable modem Internet access service
Notes & Comments: Compaq invests equal amount in venture started by
Time Warner Cable, Advance / Newhouse Media One
Terms: Minority investment -$212.5m 10%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.15.98
Company: Avid
Year Founded: 1989
Technology: Video production software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft sells Softimage to Avid - Microsoft's
first divestiture - for $285m in cash, notes equity
Terms: Minority investment in Avid <10%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.4.98
Company: Tut Systems
Year Founded: 1991
Technology: Consumer LAN system for in-home use
Notes & Comments: AT&T and Itochu International also invest
Terms: Minority investment - estimated at $5m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 5.27.98
Company: VenturCom
Year Founded: 1980
Technology: NT & CE embedded control software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft & Intel join others in $9m VC round
Terms: Minority investment - estimated at $1m-$2m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 5.9.98
Company: The MESA Group
Year Founded: 1989
Technology: Notes-to-Exchange migration tools.
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.27.98
Company: Reservation Works LLC
Year Founded: 1997
Technology: Travel software & vacation home rental site operator
Notes & Comments: Vacationspot. com becomes part of Microsoft
Expedia
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.9.98Company: Firefly Network (formerly
Agents Inc)
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Online privacy technology
Notes & Comments: Employees moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to
Redmond
Terms: Acquisition - estimated at $25m-$40m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.2.98
Company: The Royal Mail (Britain's Postal Office)
Year Founded:
Technology: E-mail service
Notes & Comments: MSN and UK Post Office launch RelayOne, letting
folks send e-mail which is then printed and delivered as regular
mail.
Terms: Joint Venture
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.23.98
Company: Ioptics
Year Founded: 1991
Technology: Optical read-only memory, first products to target CE
market
Notes & Comments: Microsoft participates in $9.5m VC round
Terms: Minority investment - estimated at $1m-$2m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.3.98
Company: General Magic
Year Founded: 1990
Technology: Voice interface for applications like Outlook
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets technology license
Terms: Minority investment - $6m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 2.23.98
Company: Flash Communications
Year Founded:
Technology: "Buddy List" & instant messaging technology
Notes & Comments: Startup consisting of 8 MIT graduates
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 2.17.98
Company: SaveSmart
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: Interactive "personal promo" web ad technology
Notes & Comments: Microsoft, Intel, Softbank others in $14m VC round
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.12.98
Company: ShareWave
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: In-home Win32-based wireless networking
Notes & Comments: Microsoft participates in $12.5 m VC round
Terms: Minority investment - estimated at $5m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.31.97
Company: Hotmail
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Free e-mail service
Notes & Comments: Microsoft covets company's 9m subscriber base
Terms: Acquisition - reportedly worth $300m-$500m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.9.97
Company: Elemental Software
Year Founded: 1997
Technology: Web software development tools
Notes & Comments: Company: promises to support Microsoft
"scriptlets" in place of Java. AT&T is also a major investor
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.9.97
Company: PulsePoint Communications (formerly Digital Sound)
Year Founded: 1977
Technology: Network-based management of voice data communications
Notes & Comments: Part of $20m financing round
Terms: Minority investment - $5m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.6.97
Company: Infoseek
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: Internet search engine
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets preferential product display
position on Infoseek web site as an "Anchor Channel Partner"
Terms: unknown
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 10.20.97
Company: Wildfire Communications
Year Founded: 1992
Technology: Speech recognition software for telephony
Notes & Comments: Intel also joins in $12m VC round
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.22.97
Company: E-Stamp
Year Founded: 1997
Technology: Snail mail postage sold over the Internet
Notes & Comments: AT&T Invests an equal amount
Terms: Minority investment - 10%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.11.97
Company: Lernout Hauspie
Year Founded:
Technology: Speech recognition software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets board seat, deal includes joint
development a joint venture to research speech and Linguistics.
Microsoft also donates $3m to L&H "pet" project, the Flanders
Language Valley & gets Fund board seat
Terms: Minority investment -$45m (8%)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.9.97
Company: TRADOS
Year Founded: 1984
Technology: Multilingual translation software for software
localization
Notes & Comments: Microsoft, a major TRADOS customer, provides cash
to tailor TRADOS software to Microsoft needs
Terms: Minority investment - 20%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.25.97Company: eFusion (formerly
Telepresence Inc)
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: Internet application gateways to hook the web &
telephones
Notes & Comments: France Telecom & Telecom Italia also participate
in second-round VC
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.6.97
Company: Apple
Year Founded: 1977
Technology: Mac PCs
Notes & Comments: Microsoft pledges continued development of Office
Suite for the Mac, Apple says it will default to Internet Explorer
Terms: Minority investment -$150m non-voting stock
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.5.97
Company: Vxtreme
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Streaming media for the web, competitor to RealNetworks
Notes & Comments: Technology to beef up NetShow
Terms: Acquisition - estimated at $75m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 7.29.97
Company: Navitel
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: Internet Appliances
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets board seat, Navitel drops plans for
web phone to concentrate on CE-based software
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: .7.21.97Company: RealNetworks (formerly
Progressive Networks)
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: Internet streaming multimedia
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets RealAudio & Video 4.0 license,
announces divestiture of its shares on 11.18.98 after two clash on
future standards
Terms: Minority investment -$30m for 10% of non-voting plus $43
million for technology license
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.97
Company: Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd
Year Founded:
Technology: Australian Internet service
Notes & Comments: Deal to create NineMSN Internet service
Terms: Joint Venture - $25m Australian (about $15m US)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.30.97
Company: LinkAge Software
Year Founded: 1985
Technology: E-mail connectivity & directory synchronization software
Notes & Comments: Acquisition follows five years of cooperation.
Microsoft needs technology to hook Exchange to other systems.
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.26.97
Company: MSFDC
Year Founded: 1997
Technology: Bill payment over the web
Notes & Comments: Joint venture with First Data Corporation
Joint Venture (50/50)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.13.97
Company: Coopers & Peters
Year Founded: 1989
Technology: Object-oriented user interface for Java & Smalltalk
Notes & Comments: Two-man boutique. Technology bolsters Microsoft
Application Foundation Classes (Win-specific Java extensions.)
Terms: Acquisition -reported $20m+
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.9.97
Company: Comcast
Year Founded: 1963
Technology: Nation's fourth largest cable TV operator
Notes & Comments: Microsoft funds development of web access via
cable, gets "observer" status on board, promises technical help
Terms: Minority investment - $1b (11.5%)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 5.7.97
Company: DimensionX
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Java-based VRML multimedia
Notes & Comments: 40-man company. Technology added to DirectX, Sun
is said to have also bid for company. "Industry's 1st Java start-up"
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.6.97
Company: WebTV Networks
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Internet access on TV sets via telephone lines
Notes & Comments: Following a minority stake acquired on 9.30.96,
Microsoft buys the rest - and takes a $296m tax writeoff.
Terms: Acquisition -$425m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.3.97
Company: Interse
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: Web site traffic analysis software
Notes & Comments: Company: had been tracking market share of IE vs
Netscape.
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 2.19.97
Company: Digital Anvil
Year Founded: 1996
Technology: PC games developer
Notes & Comments: Microsoft funds five-month-old start-up, in return
company will only do games for Microsoft.
Terms: Minority investment - "Significant" equity
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.17.96
Company: Proginet
Year Founded: 1986
Technology: SNA-based NT server-to-host integration for use with
Microsoft SNA Server
Notes & Comments: Technology transfer & marketing deal
Terms: Minority investment - increased to $756k (<10%) on 11.3.98
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.10.96
Company: NetCarta (majority-owned CMG subsidiary)
Year Founded:
Technology: Web site management software
Notes & Comments: WebMapper software becomes part of BackOffice
family
Terms: Acquisition- $20m
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.10.96
Company: CMG Information Services (formerly College Marketing Group)
Year Founded: 1968
Technology: Internet "incubator & investment" company: and direct
marketing services company
Notes & Comments: Investment is part of NetCarta acquisition deal
Terms: Minority investment - 4.9%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.6.96
Company: Verisign
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Digital certificate authority
Notes & Comments: Microsoft one of 10 companies in $30m VC round.
Verisign certificates used in IIS & IE
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.20.96
Company: ResNova Software
Year Founded:
Technology: Personal web server for the Mac
Notes & Comments: Five key ResNova developers, including president,
hired by Microsoft. Company then puts rest of its products on block
and fades away.
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 10.29.96
Company: Panorama Software
Year Founded:
Technology: OLAP technology
Notes & Comments: Panorama's server becomes Plato OLAP engine for
SQL 7.0. Key developers join Microsoft
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 10.28.96
Company: VDOnet
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Internet streaming video, audio and data-sharing
technology
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets license to key technologies. VDOnet
gets rights to use Microsoft technology. US West also takes stake in
company.
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.30.96
Company: WebTV Networks
Year Founded: 1995
Technology: Internet access on TV sets
Notes & Comments: Venture funding to help develop the technology. IE
to be adapted for WebTV use. Microsoft eventually buys entire
company
Terms: Minority investment - 5%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.9.96
Company: SingleTrac Entertainment Technologies
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: PC games developer
Notes & Comments: Microsoft's 1st investment in games software
company. It gets exclusive marketing rights to company's software.
SingleTrac is later bought by GT Interactive Software in 10.97.
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.24.96
Company: Entex
Year Founded: 1993
Technology: PC integrator
Notes & Comments: Money goes to pay for training a 200-man Entex
"strike force" in NetWare-to-NT migration
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.17.96
Company: Electric Gravity
Year Founded:
Technology: Online games
Notes & Comments: Creators of Internet Gaming Zone, now part of MSN
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.11.96
Company: eShop
Year Founded: 1992
Technology: E-commerce server software & online mall pioneer
Notes & Comments: Microsoft halts its own e-commerce server
development in favor of an eShop port. All 35 employees move to
Redmond. GE owned a minority share. Netscape rumored to have also
bid.
Terms: Acquisition -reportedly <$50M
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 5.7.96
Company: Tandem
Year Founded:
Technology: Clustering
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets clustering technology rights,
Tandem agrees to work on Wolfpack NT clustering program
Terms: Minority investment, liquidated when Tandem is bought by
Compaq
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.15.96
Company: EXOS
Year Founded: 1988
Technology: Force-feedback technology for game controllers
Notes & Comments: Technology used in Microsoft's Sidewinder 3D Pro
joystick
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.9.96
Company: Helicon Publishing Ltd
Year Founded: 1992
Technology: UK publisher of reference books in print and on CD.
Terms: Minority investment - 24.05%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.8.96
Company: aha! software
Year Founded:
Technology: Handwriting recognition technology for mobile computers
Notes & Comments: Microsoft wants technology both for CE-based
mobiles & NT workstations
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.12.96
Company: Colusa Software
Year Founded:
Technology: Development software for memory protected high-
performance Internet applications
Notes & Comments: Company: was working on architecture-neutral
distribution format (ANDF) technology, possible Java alternative
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.12.96
Company:
Year Founded: Aspect Software Engineering
Technology: Internet dB connectivity middleware
Notes & Comments: Technology goes into various Microsoft development
tools
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 2.1.96
Company:
Year Founded: Black Entertainment Television
Technology: Internet, interactive TV CD's aimed at black community
Notes & Comments: In move to court minority community Microsoft
turns BET Holdings TV subsidiary into a joint venture that also
targets the Web
Terms: Joint Venture
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.16.96Company: Vermeer Technologies
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: Web page publishing tools
Notes & Comments: Vermeer's FrontPage becomes Microsoft FrontPage.
Vermeer development team moves to Redmond
Terms: Acquisition -reportedly $130M in Microsoft stock.
Date Acquisition Disclosed:12.14.95
Company: Interactive News MSNBC LLC & MSNBC Cable LLC
Year Founded:
Technology: MSNBC on-line news site & MSNBC Cable news channel
Notes & Comments: Joint ventures with NBC
Terms: Joint Ventures - 50/50. Microsoft to invest $220M over 5-
year period for cable venture + pay half of operational cost of each
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.12.95Company: Bruce Artwick
Organization
Year Founded: 1984
Technology: Developer of Microsoft Flight Simulator
Notes & Comments: Most of company's 30 employees move to Redmond.
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.6.95Company:
Year Founded: Netwise Inc
Technology: Interoperability technology
Notes & Comments: Technology acquisition
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 10.16.95Company: The Blue Ribbon
SoundWorks
Year Founded:
Technology: EasyKeys Win-based interactive music authoring software
Notes & Comments: OS/2 & Amiga versions of software discontinued
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 10.11.95Company: Individual (Now part
of NewsEdge)
Year Founded:
Technology: Customized electronic news delivery
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets board seat. Plans, never
implemented, were to sell a personal news feed service via MSN
Terms: Minority investment -reportedly 10%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.2.95
Company: Digital Equipment Corporation
Year Founded:
Technology:
Notes Comments:
Terms: Investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: .7 31.95
Company: Dare to Dream Intertainment
Year Founded:
Technology:
Notes & Comments: No one at Microsoft can remember the technology or
what happened to it
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 7.10.95Company: Network Managers
Year Founded:
Technology: SNMP technology
Notes & Comments: Redmond gets developers, UK company becomes a
service outfit
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.12.95
Company: Wang Laboratories
Year Founded:
Technology: Image viewing software
Notes & Comments: Wang sues claiming OLE violates its IP. As part of
settlement Microsoft licenses Wang image viewer built into Windows.
Wang software unit later acquired by Kodak
Terms: Minority investment -$90M (10%)
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.22.95
Company: DreamWorks SKG
Year Founded: 1994
Technology: Interactive & multimedia entertainment software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft & DreamWorks SKG form DreamWorks
Interactive to produce entertainment software. Microsoft also takes
minority stake in DreamWorks SKG
Terms: 50/50 Joint Venture and Minority Investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.20.95
Company: Vanstar
Year Founded: 1980
Technology: Outsourcing of design and building of PC networks.
Notes & Comments: Microsoft provides funds to pay for NT training
program.
Terms: Minority investment
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 2.23.95
Company: RenderMorphics
Year Founded:
Technology: Real-time 3D imaging software
Notes & Comments: Company: has market-leading 3D games API
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.13.95
Company: Spyglass
Year Founded:
Technology: Browser technology
Notes & Comments: Spyglass, one of two licensees of original Mosaic,
provides code for the first Internet Explorer. Deal leads to 1997
lawsuit over royalties.
Terms: Technology license, $8M lawsuit settlement plus previously
paid royalties.
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.13.95
Company: UUNET
Year Founded:
Technology: Internet backbone provider
Notes & Comments: UUNET (these days part of WorldCom) to provide
backbone for Microsoft Network. Microsoft gets board seat
Terms: Minority investment - 15%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.21.94
Company: TCI Technology Ventures
Year Founded:
Technology: Online service deal
Notes & Comments: TCI gets 20% of MSN (then called Marvel).
Microsoft gets TCI stock worth $120M
Terms: Equity Trade - worth $120M
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.15.94
Company: One Tree Software
Year Founded:
Technology: SourceSafe
Notes & Comments: Microsoft's competing product, Delta control/
configuration management system a flop. One Tree's SourceSafe
becomes Visual Source Safe
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 11.1.94
Company: NextBase
Year Founded:
Technology: Digital mapping
Notes & Comments: Autoroute eventually becomes Microsoft's Streets
Plus
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 9.27.94
Company: Altamira
Year Founded: 1991
Technology: Desktop color imaging software & technology
Notes & Comments: Developer of Composer
Terms: Acquisition - reportedly worth $8M in stock
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.28.94
Company: Softimage
Year Founded: 1986
Technology: Animation & 3D modeling software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft's first acquisition of a publicly traded
Company: Ports market-leading Unix software to NT. Eventually
becomes Microsoft's first divestiture.
Acquisition -$79M
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 6.16.94Company: Stac
Year Founded:
Technology: Compression software
Notes & Comments: Stac sues Microsoft, awarded $120M in IP damages
less $13.6m awarded to Microsoft for Stac IP violations. Microsoft
gets Stac equity as part of final $82.9m settlement.
Terms: Minority investment - $39.9m (15%) plus $43m for technology
license
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1993
Company: Webcorp engineers
Year Founded:
Technology: Web peer-to-peer NOS
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys rights to software, hires engineers
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.24.92
Company: Fox Software
Year Founded:
Technology: Database
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets FoxBase, renames it FoxPro
Terms: Acquisition (stock deal) - 1.36M shares of Microsoft stock
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 12.91
Company: Citrix
Year Founded:
Technology: Multiuser NT
Notes & Comments: Microsoft makes series of preferred stock
investments prior to 12.95 IPO, gets board seat
Terms: Minority $2.4m investment (6.8%, decreased to 6.0% after
IPO). The investment is worth $218m at current market prices, a 98%
CAGR.
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1991
Company: Cooper Software
Year Founded:
Technology: Basic
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys rights to Ruby, which becomes
foundation for Visual Basic
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 3.18.91
Company: Dorling Kindersley Ltd
Year Founded:
Technology: Book publisher
Notes & Comments: Microsoft gets rights to use Dorling content in
future multimedia software
Terms: Minority investment - 26%
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1990
Company:
Year Founded: Zsoft
Technology: Graphics software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys Paintbrush, which becomes part of
Windows
Terms: Technology Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1989
Company: 3Com
Year Founded:
Technology: Communications networking hardware & software
Notes & Comments: Deal to develop LAN Manager for OS/2. A total
failure.
Terms: Joint Venture
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.13.88
Company: Ashton-Tate
Year Founded:
Technology: Database
Notes & Comments: Deal to co-develop SQL Server, ends in acrimony.
Terms: Joint Venture
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1.13.88
Company: Sybase
Year Founded:
Technology: Database
Notes & Comments: Microsoft licenses code that becomes SQL Server
Terms: Technology license
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 4.2.87
Company: Forethought
Year Founded:
Technology: PowerPoint presentation software
Notes & Comments: Forethought becomes Microsoft Graphics Business
Unit
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1986
Company: Dynamical Systems
Year Founded:
Technology: Multitasking technology
Notes & Comments: Nathan Myhrvold, founder CEO of Dynamical, now
Microsoft's CTO
Terms: Acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 1983
Company: Lattice
Year Founded:
Technology: Programming language
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys Lattice C code compiler, the basis
for Visual C++
Terms: Technology acquisition
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.12.81 (The Date IBM PC Intro'd)
Company: Seattle Computer Company
Year Founded:
Technology: Disk operating system
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys Q-DOS, which becomes MS/DOS.
Seattle Computer later sues over terms and wins.
Terms: Technology acquisition, originally $50,000
Date Acquisition Disclosed: 8.25.80
Company: AT&T
Year Founded:
Technology: Operating system software
Notes & Comments: Microsoft buys Unix license, announces Xenix
Terms: Technology license
CSN 280-11 Cambridge Technology, the Unix Integrator, Joins
Redmond's Team
Microsoft has added Cambridge Technology Partners Inc, pretty much a
Unix house, to its growing stable of consulting and systems
integration partners. It's counting on Cambridge, a $600 million
company with 4,300 employees and 53 offices, to help drive NT
upmarket and into corporate data centers and the glass house.
Redmond's pact with Cambridge covers the joint sale and marketing of
a broad sweep of business-critical solutions Cambridge will offer
using Microsoft technology and its own hallmark fixed-time/fixed-
price implementation guarantee.
As part of the deal Cambridge will increase the number of certified
Microsoft engineers on its staff from 150 to at least 1,000 over the
next three years. 120 of those currently on its staff were picked up
when Cambridge acquired NT integration specialist Excell Data
Corporation of Bellevue, Washington not long ago. Cambridge will
also standardize on the Windows desktop as its own corporate
standard, putting Microsoft Office on all 4,300 of its desktops. It
will also use NT Server, Exchange, Internet Information Server and
Site Server.
In return Cambridge gets both technical help and, acccording to
Cambridge president Jim Sims, access to a huge market it couldn't
reach before.
Sims said that about 20% of his business is now pure NT, with
heterogeneous NT-Unix installations representing another 40%. The
last 40% is still pure Unix. He said Cambridge's existing Unix
customers would continue to be supported, but ducked questions about
just how hard Cambridge would pitch Unix solutions to new customers.
Microsoft group vice president of sales and support Jeff Raikes came
to his aid with magnanimous comments about how wonderful it was for
Microsoft to be doing business with a mission-critical systems
integrator that's savvy in heterogeneous solutions.
The Microsoft-Cambridge alliance grew out of a handful of
integration contracts that the two have already cooperated on and
some work Cambridge did for Microsoft itself. Sims and Raikes said
it took more than six months to structure the deal. Neither would
disclose any of the financial terms, but no equity investments or
formal joint ventures are involved.
The specific NT-based solutions that Cambridge will offer start with
business-to-business e-commerce solutions, which Cambridge and
Microsoft called "New Business Ecosystems" (NBEs). NBEs, to be built
on the Microsoft Commerce suite of Site Server, Internet Information
Server and SQL Server, were described as a way for multiple
companies to integrate their businesses.
Next come data mart and enterprise data warehousing offerings, built
on top of SQL 7.0. Cambridge also said it would put together an NT-
based financial trading solutions framework as part of its existing
Money Management and Trading specialty practice.
Cambridge's Customer Management solutions practice will likewise get
into the NT game, with a family of product offerings built on NT
Server and BackOffice that includes sales force automation, sales
effectiveness, customer relationship management, customer service
and support, enterprise marketing, customer self-provisioning and
computer telephony solutions.
The final product area will be COM+ rapid application deployment
(RAD) services.
CSN 280-12 Softway Adds COM to Interix
Softway Systems, inventors of the Unix-on-NT system Interix, say
they will have COM support in their system in January. As the first
part of an esoteric three-pronged COM program, Interix users will be
able to put a COM wrapper around old Unix apps. Ditto Linux apps,
Softway's new pet. Less than 1% of older apps use any object model,
the company said. The Unix apps will require no modification to
provide COM services on NT. Developers will follow standard COM
programming methodologies to access Unix apps via COM DLLs. Windows
developers will not need to know Unix programming or even be aware
that it's a Unix app providing the services via COM.
Meanwhile, Softway has extended the cut- rate $99 offer it made on
its Interix Personal Developer Edition at Comdex until the end of
the year. It says it's because of demand and may be because it's
been trying to appeal to the Linux crowd. The stuff usually costs
600 bucks. It includes Interix Workstation Lite with its complete
software environment and the Interix SDK. See www.interix-store.com.
CSN 280-13 AOL, Sun Will Gain, but Netscape's Dead Meat, Meta Group
Says
The AOL-Netscape-Sun deal will benefit AOL and Sun, but not
Netscape, Meta Group analysts predict. Along with Netscape's
NetCenter, AOL's own site will become one of four "Überportals" on
the web, the other two being Microsoft's and Yahoo!'s, one of the
Meta experts said. But its other rivals don't go away. Meta expects
Infoseek, Lycos and Excite to evolve into "vertical" portals - or
"portlets" - aimed at smaller, more targeted audiences such as
business and finance. "It's very expensive [for an online service]
to get on as an Überportal," Meta pointed out. Moreover, portlets
will give advertisers a lot more bang for the buck for the hordes of
products and services not geared to mass markets. By acquiring
NetCenter, AOL will garner "stature and presence in the Internet
community" and a bigger customer base, Meta thinks. So where does
that leave Sun and Netscape? Well, Sun for one expects to exit its
three-year agreement with AOL with a bunch of technology it's
getting on the cheap. Netscape, however, should continue its steady
erosion as an intranet solution provider, eventually emerging as a
"software factory" for AOL and Sun.
CSN 280-14 HP Remains Schismatic
Sun's so-called overhaul of its Java licensing practices and the
Java process hasn't gone very far in getting HP to abandon its
separatist ways and return to the fold. The folks in HP's Embedded
Software Operation who produced ChaiVM, the schismatic Java virtual
machine, are bound and determined to go their own way. Whatever
changes Sun has made are still too nebulous. HP - and this goes for
its loyalist side, the HP enterprise group who's a Sun licensee - is
still trying to figure out what it all means and how it's going to
be implemented like how extension will really be handled. The
embedded people especially don't want to make any assumptions about
what is real and what is not and they're unwilling to spend a lot of
time right now figuring things out. After all they're working on
Chai 3.0 while Sun's still back at 1.0. Meanwhile, HP, the licensee,
believes the changes Sun made merely make things easier and cheaper
for Sun not its followers particularly. For instance, putting in
royalties rather than up-front license fees saves on lawyers, it
said, as do the other changes.
CSN 280- 15 Linux Watch: Free WordPerfect-on-Linux Is One Big Baby
Corel on Thursday posted the free download of WordPerfect for Linux
and it turns out the thing is a tedious 23.6 megs. The download's so
big that Corel busted it up into seven files. There are even another
five files of 6.5MB each for users who want any of the additional
language tools for French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch. The
only alternative, of course, is to pay the $70 Corel's going to
charge for the shrinkwrapped version that ships early next month.
The shrinkwrap also adds a bunch of functions, files and tools not
available in the free code, including drawing and charting
capability and a set of electronic manuals. The paying public also
gets 130 fonts, plus photo, clipart and texture libraries and copies
of the Adobe Acrobat reader and Netscape browser. Although Corel's
going to have a support knowledge base, FAQs and newsgroups for
Linux, any real support for WordPerfect-on-Linux will cost, whether
by e-mail or phone. The WordPerfect 8 server, not a free download,
will cost $495, $249 for upgrades, and be released early next month
for HP-UX 10.20, AIX 4.1.4, SCO OpenServer 5.0.0 and Solaris 2.5.1
on Sparc and x86 as well as for Linux.
CSN 280-16 Informix Gift Wraps Dynamic Server For Linux
Informix, making itself out to be Santa Claus, will post the free
Linux version of its Dynamic Server suite on Christmas Eve. As a
stocking-stuffer it's adding 30 days of free technical support by e-
mail. Besides Dynamic Server, the suite includes Informix Client SDK
and Informix Connect along with guidelines to integrate Dynamic
Server with the free Apache web server.
CSN 280-17 Compaq Offers Up Linux Disk Array Driver
Compaq has crafted a prototype Linux driver for its Smart-2 PCI disk
array controller. The prototype driver's an Open Source offering
that Compaq's releasing under the GNU license. Compaq, which gave no
indication that it plans to do any more work on the driver, said
that if anyone wants to use it they're welcome to develop, test and
support it.
CSN 280-18 BSD/OS To Run Linux Apps
Berkeley Software Design Inc is adding Linux application support to
its own BSD/OS operating system. The way Berkeley tells it one of
the big barriers to running Linux apps is the "lack of a reliable,
commercially supported operating system." Ahh, yes, well, Linux
support on BSD/OS, scheduled to beta in Q1, will show up first in
Berkeley's Internet Super Server.
CSN 280-19 Judge Sides With Microsoft About AOL/Netscape, Trial
Recesses
Before recessing the Microsoft antitrust trial until January 4 for
the holidays, the federal judge presiding over the case agreed with
Microsoft that AOL's planned acquisition of
Netscape - a deal that also involves Sun - could impact the way the
trial goes.
Acknowledging that the AOL-Netscape-Sun pact "could very well have
an immediate effect on the market," US District Judge Thomas
Penfield Jackson granted Microsoft the right of access to all the
documents that the Justice Department gets in vetting the proposed
merger. Microsoft is hoping to leverage the AOL-Netscape pact to
prove it's not a monopoly and that its position is constantly
tenuous because of the very nature of the industry.
The court's decision capped another week of accusations, counter-
accusations and self-defense by partisans of Microsoft, the "gang of
four" and the US government.
CSN 280-20 Hyperion & Arbor Programs Mate
Hyperion Solutions, the merged Hyperion Software and Arbor, said
last week that it's completed the integration of the former Arbor
Essbase OLAP server and Hyperion software.
The company had promised to get the job done before the year was up
when Hyperion and Arbor merged back in August. The job consisted in
the main of putting together some back-end integration services and
adding Essbase API support to Hyperion's Enterprise, Pillar,
Reporting and Spider-Man applications. Reporting, an end-user
financial reporting application, and Spider-Man for delivering OLAP
reports over the web had previously been available only as part of
Hyperion's flagship Enterprise multi-source financial consolidation
and reporting program. As part of the integration of the Arbor and
Hyperion software the two applications have now been broken out as
separate offerings, Reporting at $1,000 per user and Spider-man at
$12,500 per server plus $100 per named user.
Meanwhile, Hyperion marketing VP Daniel Drucker says Hyperion's yet
to see any market effect from Microsoft's entry into the OLAP market
with the Plato server in SQL 7.0. It was Plato's potential to become
a serious competitor in the high-end OLAP market where Hyperion
commands a 50% share that drove Arbor into Hyperion's arms (CSN No
252). For a while at least Plato's simply too new to be accepted at
the mission-critical level where Hyperion targets its business,
Drucker said. Then, too, the combined Arbor-Hyperion offering now
melds the OLAP engine and applications while Plato is only the
engine piece, depending on third-party ISVs to come up with the
applications.
Drucker said Hyperion's keeping its options open to eventually
support Plato, and possibly Oracle Express, in its applications
suite. For now, though, the applications run only on Essbase and
IBM's DB2 OLAP server, which is a customized version of Essbase
designed to mate intimately with DB2.
CSN 280-21 IBM Readying LDAP Products For '99
IBM will roll out a series of LDAP-enabled system, security,
networking and middleware products of its own in 1999, Phyllis
Byrne, IBM's VP of distributed system services, disclosed during a
teleconference held this week to announce LDAP partnerships with
Allot Communications, Dascom, enCommerce and Netegrity.
IBM's upcoming products will use LDAP "on an enterprise scale,"
running on platforms that will include Windows NT and Unix as well
as OS/400 and OS/390, Byrne said. Technologies to be integrated with
IBM's eNetwork LDAP Directory will range from VPNs to DB2, MQSeries
middleware, IBM's Windows NT Suites, WebSphere, Corba and Tivoli.
Also in the works from IBM are new meta-directory products for use
in conjunction with subdirectories from other vendors' systems.
Meanwhile, IBM is also teaming with Novell to integrate its Tivoli
management system with Novell's NDS directory. Byrne told reporters
during the teleconference that the Tivoli/NDS integration will take
place at the LAN rather than enterprise level. IBM's AIX operating
system is already being bundled with built-in NDS, she said.
Netegrity is eyeing January as the release date for SiteMinder 3.1,
an edition of its Web access control system that will add native
support for the IBM LDAP directory, according to Netegrity exec
Sumner Blount.
CSN 280-22 Novell Puts Money into Five Concerns, But Not Caldera
As anticipated, Novell has announced new funding recipients for its
Internet Equity Fund (IETF). Orbital, Oblix, enCommerce, ObjectSpace
and NetObjects were all on the roster, although Caldera - a Linux
partner widely considered to be a candidate - wasn't among those
that got the IETF nod, at least not yet.
The five selected ISVs garnered a grand total of over $9 million in
equity capital in exchange for minority stakes by Novell. They were
chosen for their ability to "accelerate the growth of NDS," said
Blake Modersitzki, Novell's director of strategic investments.
Why, then, is the program known as the Internet Equity Fund?
"Excellent question. NDS is the natural back-end for the Internet,"
Modersitzki responded.
Two of the IETF recipients named this week - ObjectSpace and
NetObjects - were really funded earlier, but were not formally
announced till now. Oblix, Orbital, and enCommerce are entirely new
to IETF. Other IETFers previously selected include Net-Vision,
Evergreen, GlobalCast and NetPro.
Oblix also announced investments this week from 3i, Scottish Equity
Partnership and Nat-West Fund for a total of $5.1 million in equity
from all four sources.
Caldera, a Ray Noorda start-up also rumored to be a possible
investment for Novell, has already ported NDS to its OpenLinux
operating system.
CSN 280-23 Kingston's Startling Discovery: More Memory Makes NT Work
Better
After-market memory add-in house Kingston Technology says it's
discovered that NT Server works better with more memory. Doh.
Kingston, which of course is simply trying to come up with numbers
to help it hawk its memory upgrades, went out and hired Mindcraft
Inc to run tests on a Compaq ProLiant 5000 stuffed with various
amounts of memory up to 512MB. It discovered that with 256MB of
memory NT Server, used as an applications server, could support five
times as many users than with 64MB of memory. Results were similar
in tests of NT as a web server and directory server. It's like
getting off a 747 at JFK and claiming to have discovered America.
CSN 280-24 Vinca Buys Rights to NT Service Monitor
Vinca Corporation has gone Down Under to buy all rights to an NT
services monitoring utility created by Australia's Graphic
Technologies Pty Ltd. The utility, called Service Monitor, polls
selected NT services at predefined intervals to see if they are
alive and functioning. If needed, it then initiates pre-defined
actions like restarting the service, rebooting the system or
notifying the system administrator. Vinca didn't disclose how much
it paid Melbourne-based Graphic Technologies for the rights to
Service Monitor. It's offering the program at a special introductory
price of $99-per-server for the next 90 days, after which it goes
back to its regular price of $299 per server.
CSN 280-25 IBM To Release Java 1.1.6 For Mainframes
IBM's OS/390 Division will move into general availability with Java
1.1.6 within the next week, according to Michael Oliver, program
manager for the division. In a story last week, CSN said that IBM's
OS/390 Division is "just now" moving to Java 1.1. Actually, the
first iterations of Java 1.1 for mainframes became available about a
year ago. Also in that story, CSN quoted Oliver as saying that
OS/390 upgrades to Java 1.1.8 are expected in 1999, and to Java 2 in
the year 2000. Clarifying these predictions this week, Oliver said
his estimates had been "on the conservative side." Probably, OS/390
with Java 1.1.8 support will become generally available in mid-1999,
and a Java 2 edition will enter general availability in the year
2000, with a beta release of the Java 2 version likely to appear at
the end of 1999.
CSN 280-26 New Reback Lawsuit Portrays M'Soft as The Grinch That
Stole Christmas Cards
Microsoft nemesis Gary Reback has found yet-another way to jerk
Redmond's chain. He's representing a Colorado greeting card
publisher called Hartford House Ltd that claims Microsoft is trying
to run it out of the electronic greeting card business. Hartford,
which does business as Blue Mountain Arts, claims that the junk mail
filter in the Outlook Express beta in Internet Explorer 5.0 sends
Blue Mountain e-mail cards directly to the trash bin. WebTV Network
e-mail filters allegedly do the same thing.
In a Reback-authored suit, filed in the Santa Clara California
Superior Court, Blue Mountain says there was no problem with its
greeting cards until shortly after Microsoft started offering cards
of its own. The cards are free from both companies, paid for by
advertisers and admittedly a sideline for the 20-year-old Blue
Mountain.
In its suit, which is classic Reback, Blue Mountain claims the
greeting card issue is simply another facet of Microsoft's antitrust
activities. The suit repeatedly references allegations and testimony
from Redmond's antitrust trial. Blue Mountain also claims that
Microsoft folks told it the problem was no more than a bug in beta
software, but it's furious that Microsoft allegedly told it that it
won't correct the bug until the next rev of the current IE beta.
Meanwhile, it claims that untold thousands of its electronic
Christmas cards were never delivered. It wants the court to
immediately grant an injunction prohibiting Microsoft from
distributing IE 5.0 or any other software that filters out Blue
Mountain cards. It's also demanding unstated monetary damages and
punitive penalties.
CSN 280-27 Holland Group Studies Java Embedded Apps Compiler
Holland's Ace Associated Compiler Experts has forged what it's
calling a consortium of four European companies plus Ericsson and
Philips to research new compiler technologies to create highly
efficient code for Java embedded systems. The group's work will be
based on Ace's CoSy compiler development platform. The goal of the
research is to create enabling technologies that let Java be used in
highly parallel, heterogeneous, real-time embedded systems. It's
also planning to develop a JVM interpreter tuned to embedded
applications. Ace's consortium, which hasn't named itself yet, is
aiming at next-generation telecom and consumer electronics.
Universities joining the group are Delft in the Netherlands,
Linkoping in Sweden and Germany's Karlsruhe and Saarland.
CSN 280-28 ComPort To Resell Opalis NT Automation Code
Toronto-based Opalis Software has franchised ComPort Distributions
to resell it line of NT automation software including the
OpalisRobot program used to automate repetitive tasks in NT and
OpalisRendezVous file/database transfer and mirroring program.
CSN 280-29 CD Anti-Piracy Start-up Lands World's Biggest Replicator
TTR Technologies Ltd, the little Israeli-born outfit that came up
with a way to put a digital signature on a CD to prevent illegal
copying, has grabbed the brass ring and landed contracts with
Germany's Sonopress, France's MPO and the UK's Nimbus. Sonopress, a
Bertelsmann AG subsidiary, is the largest CD replicator in the
world. All three of TTR's new customers make CDs for Microsoft. It
declines to say, however, whether Redmond's finally decided to use
its DiscGuard technology although Microsoft is known to have been
playing with it since 1997 (CSN No 197). Meanwhile, TTR's Israel-
based CEO and VP of international business development Arik Shavit
has left the company rather than move to New York, where TTR is now
handling all of its sales and marketing. The Israeli unit has
morphed into an R&D subsidiary, with business development reporting
to US-based CEO Steve Barsh.
CSN 280-30 Sylvain Faust Readies SQL-Programmer Upgrade
Sylvain Faust International last week took the wraps off a new
version of its SQL-Programmer client/server programming tool for
Microsoft's SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase. SQL-Programmer IX, due
out by the end of Q1, will support SQL Server 7.0 and significantly
expand Oracle8 features including the addition of PL/SQL profiling.
The new version will also include the first cut of a Microsoft SQL
take on the Transact-SQL Server Debugger module, matching the module
already available for Oracle. SQL-Programmer is $799. The debugger
module for SQL Server and Oracle PL/SQL are another $500 each.
CSN 280-31 Microstate Rejoices Over Reaction
Microstate, the folks who released the world's first Java-based Open
Source application server (CSN No 278), say that 1,000 copies of
their code were downloaded in the first 10 days it was available.
While it's not a lot for a big company, it's a heck of a lot more
attention than the little 13-man outfit's ever gotten before in its
history - 2,000% more by the company's own estimate.
CSN 280-32 Seagate Repackages Vinca's Open File Backup
Seagate Software is about to release an Open File Option for its
Backup Exec Windows NT backup software. Open File, essentially Vinca
Corporation's SnapShot Server integrated with Backup Exec, lets
Backup Exec back up active e-mail, database and other data files
even as the information is being entered or changed by the user. The
$795 Open File Option works only with Backup Exec 7.2.
CSN 280-33 New Gartner Service Measures IT Alignment with Business
Goals
The Gartner Group's GartnerMeasurement unit has gone to market with
a new service to measure IT support for a company's strategic
business objectives. The service, called Alignment Strategy
Assessment, covers IT infrastructure, applications and operations.
CSN 280-34 NT Security Scanner Gets Hacker Simulator
Internet Security Systems has added another 85 security weakness
detection tests to its flagship Internet Scanner for NT. The point
upgrade to the Atlanta company's software for detecting security
holes in corporate NT networks gets 10 new DCOM checks, a set of
default NT account checks and a routine that simulates human hacker
activity to test a company's defenses. The hacker emulator, called
Smart Scan, is almost as sneaky as a real person. It uses the
results of previous network scans to build simulated attacks based
on previously found weaknesses. Internet Scanner 5.6 pricing remains
unchanged at $2,795 for a 30-device license and $4,995 for a 254-
device license.
CSN 280-35 NEC Unveils NT-based IVR Call Center System
NEC America has released a turnkey NT-based interactive voice
response system (IVR) for telephone call centers, built with Edify
Corporation under a pact the two signed in February. Edify supplied
its Electronic Workforce application development and run-time
platform to build NEC's IVR system, called QueWorX, which runs on
NEC's NEAX 1000/2000 and 2400 PBXes. Edify, by the way, is preening
over a report from consulting house Frost & Sullivan that says it
has jumped from number six to number two in the US IVR market, and
that the company's been growing at 10 times the IVR industry
average. Edify, it will be recalled, ditched OS/2 and moved
Electronic Workforce to NT back in October 1997.
CSN 280-36 Accelerator Speeds VPNs
Chrysalis-ITS has released a virtual private network cryptographic
accelerator that supports both Internet Protocol Security (IPSec)
and Internet Key Exchange (IKE). The widget, called the Luna VPN,
sits in either an NT or Unix server and takes the computation-
intensive task of cryptographic processing off the hands of the
server's CPU, freeing it up for more mundane tasks like routing,
switching and packet filtering. Luna, which is also going to be sold
by firewall vendor Check Point Technologies under its own brand
name, is $4k for NT servers, $5k for a Solaris version with
additional platform support planned for Linux, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD,
VxWorks and QNX.
CSN 280-37 Open Text Eschews New Bid For PC Docs
Rather than offer a sweetener or mount a hostile bid, Open Text
Corporation has simply walked away from its attempt to buy PC Docs
Group International. PC Docs rejected Open Text's $118.4 million
offer, calling it "woefully inadequate" (CSN No 279). The way Open
Text does the math the bid represented a 35% premium. The way PC
Docs figures it the offer is barely 10% higher than its shares were
trading at earlier this month and far less than prices earlier this
year.
CSN 280-38 DPI Bundles ISO 9000 Code with IBM's NT Suite
DPI Services has put together a bundle of its QMX quality management
software and IBM's Windows NT Suite and MQSeries. QMX is a set of
workflow-enabled Lotus Notes applications used for ISO 9000-
compliant quality management.
CSN 280-39 Citrix Nabs Merisel for Mega Distribution
Citrix has added Merisel to its list of distributors that already
includes fellow mega-resellers Ingram Micro and Tech Data as well as
a couple of smaller distributors. Citrix adheres to a two-tier
distribution system, selling to VARs only through distributors. As a
new member of the Citrix Solutions Network, Merisel intends to
resell MetaFrame along with WinFrame server software. Needless to
say, Merisel is also a leading distributor of Microsoft products
like NT Server and Terminal Server. Meanwhile, Citrix is hawking two
new SDKs, one for ICA clients and the other for virtual channels,
that formalize ICA's adoption by OEMs to individual products.
CSN 280-40 Quark To Bundle Corel Draw
Quark Inc is going to bundle Corel's Draw 8 with its $1,095 NT and
Power Mac versions of the QuarkXPress 4.0 publishing system. Quark
has been under increasing pressure from lower-priced publishing
programs in the Windows market and the addition of Draw 8 gives it a
more attractive bundle to hawk. Draw is the most significant and
successful product Corel's got left in its arsenal.
CSN 280-41 Amiga Diehards Get Amiga Forever - On Windows
Las Vegas-based Cloanto Corporation has come up with a take on the
Amiga operating system that sits on top of Win32. Amiga diehards of
course bemoaned the fate of their beloved OS, to say nothing of
their applications. Even though Amiga International is going to try
for a comeback, it's planning to do so with a new hardware
architecture and an OS that won't be backward-compatible. The last
vestige of Amiga's market power evaporated when NewTek ported its
potent Video Toaster video production software, a direct competitor
to Softimage, to NT back in 1996 (CSN No 135). Cloanto's Amiga
Forever program, partially crafted out of Open Source code, doesn't
emulate the Amiga operating system. Instead, it includes Amiga OS
1.3 and 3.0 under license from Amiga International. Amiga Forever
works by getting Windows to emulate the Amiga CPU, BIOS and other
widgetry in order to run the OS. Amiga Forever also supports Active
X and Direct X, which was enough to win Cloanto kudos from
Microsoft. For now Amiga Forever is going to be sold only by
download - the first time any Amiga software has been sold by
download - at $20 a shot.
CSN 280-42 Like the Boy who Cried Wolf; Packard Bell Says It'll Be
Profitable in '99
Packard Bell NEC president Alain Couder told the Wall Street Journal
that he expects the company, in the red for the past 14 quarters, to
return to profitability in the second half of '99. This is a tale
that's been told before especially by founder and ex-CEO Beny Alagem
who was finally shown the door when he couldn't deliver a
turnaround. Couder, brought in from France's Groupe Bull, a minority
owner of Packard Bell, figures the thousand layoffs he's made and
the plants he's closed, he can slash overhead 50% by sometime in Q1.
On the other hand, he admits that being overcautious resulted in
inadequate inventory for the Christmas season, leaving the company
to turn away 20%-30% of its orders. Couder seems to be basing his
turnaround prediction on the belief that customers will take
delivery of those machines in Q1.
CSN 280-43 Billygrams
There's gossip that Compaq might spin out DEC's old OEM unit, that
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts-based catchall for things that couldn't
other wise find a home, stuff like single-board computers, terminals
and printers. It's said Compaq could structure it as an independent
subsidiary and use it for products that don't meet its volume
thresholds like Tandem's ServerNet cluster interconnect and some of
DEC's assorted technologies. Compaq reportedly started kicking the
idea around back around Labor Day with a goal of doing something by
the end of the year. The OEM operation used to bring in something
like $500 million a year.
-
How poetic. NT Server 5.0 hit build number 1941 on December 7.
December 7, 1941 was of course Pearl Harbor Day. You know, sometimes
there's even wisdom in fortune cookies.
-
There's been a top-level reorg at NCR. Given the departure of
company golden boy, service chief Gary Cotshott, to Dell to oversee
Dell's service providers a couple, few months ago, NCR has sent
veteran Bill Eisenman back to running its sizeable services business
where he hid out during the demoralizing Stead administration.
Marketing chief Mark Hurd has moved into Eisenman's job as EVP of
the newly rechristened National Accounts Solutions Group, NCR's old
computer operation. Hurd gets the reins for sales, marketing, R&D
and marcom reportedly directly to NCR CEO Lars Nyberg. As a result
of playing musical chairs, the computer unit finally has a VP of
marketing, Dan Harrington, formerly director of scaleable data
warehouses. Dell was very nice about poaching Cotshott. Right after
it hired him, it made NCR one of its service providers together with
Wang and Unisys.
-
Despite its public bravado about Linux saving its lunch there's
still "a lot of skepticism surrounding Linux" inside Corel, reports
one of the legion who have left the company this year, adding "It
seems to be an ongoing debate as to how much longer it can survive,
especially with so many people leaving and 24-year-olds with little
or no experience being promoted to director positions." Meanwhile,
Acer thinks it has to add Linux and Dell is prepared to do it
quietly.
-
Sun CEO Scott McNealy got off his immortal phrase "big hat, no
cattle" when the doomed ACE Initiative got organized. Gartner Group
Java ace David Smith would like to turn the tables on McNealy now
and say the same thing about Sun's latest Java licensing scheme (CSN
No 279). Smith reckons Sun concocted an Open Source veneer merely to
avoid opening Java up, but he's convinced Sun is going to have to
relinquish more control in 1999. It may even have to spin JavaSoft
out as a separate company as a way to "separate church and state,"
he said. Issues still to be grappled with include branding,
trademark and the fact that the final decisions about where Java is
going still rests with Sun.
-
Well, the Wall Street Journal stumbled across an interesting little
fact. It seems Intel has replaced one of the co-managers of the
engineering team developing the delayed Merced chip. Gary Thomas has
been transferred to the graphics chip division and Gadi Singer, who
headed a group making chip design tools, has been brought in instead
to work along side co-manager Stephen Smith. An Intel spokesman told
us not to make a goat of Thomas but the Journal said Intel CEO Craig
Barrett called the delay "embarassing" and said "we've changed
management and we are getting back to the Intel basics."
-
In January, IDG is supposed to go live with a web-only weekly NT
magazine called Windows TechEdge that will focus on the nitty-gritty
technical side of integrating NT into the enterprise. Web Publishing
Inc, the three-year-old IDG unit producing TechEdge, also turns out
SunWorld, JavaWorld and LinuxWorld.
-
Microsoft is going to release beta version of Internet Explorer 5.0
for HP-UX on Monday, December 21.
-
Hewlett-Packard's Kayak worldwide marketing manager Boris Elisman
estimates that the NT workstation market will grow by more than 50%
in 1999, propelled by growth in MCAD, 3D animation and even the
gaming market. Meanwhile, we're waiting for the shoe to drop over at
IDC and for it to say that Compaq is losing it as far as
workstations go. It's believed that it's been nosed out of the race
by Dell, HP and IBM, who are all ahead of it and in that order too.
-
Brocade Communications Systems technology VP Kumar Malavalli has
been named chairman of the key Fibre Channel standards T11 Technical
Committee of the National Committee for Information Technology
Standards (NCITS).
-
Dell, which wasn't even on the list back in June, has jumped to the
number one spot on Merrill Lynch's "Financial Scorecard" of high-
tech companies. Network Appliance retains its hold on the number two
slot, but Sun has fallen from number one to number three. Unisys,
number seven last time Merrill calculated its scores, dropped off
the 14-company list entirely. Merrill, which looks at things like
income, balance sheet and cash flow in calculating its list, said
that Dell's direct sales model was directly responsible for its
rapid ascent to the top spot.
-
How's this for ironic. Ray Noorda, Novell's largest single
stockholder, is now on the board of Timpanogas Research Group, the
start-up that Novell desperately tried to make road kill.
-
Analog Devices and Information Resource Engineering next month will
unveil a jointly developed DSP-based single-chip VPN encryption
system for corporate network and e-commerce use. Current VPN
hardware encryption uses fairly pricey boards compared to the cost
of a single chip. The partners expect their widget to be built right
into routers.
-
Fujitsu Personal Systems has circled January 18 to debut a pair of
pen tablet computers aimed at mobile enterprise apps. Both will be
Pentium-powered, sport what Fujitsu says will be "multi-gigabyte"
capacity and have what was described as universal communications
capabilities. One of the widgets will come with a new color
technology Super VGA display that's supposedly bright enough to be
used outdoors. Betcha it's pricey.
To see this week's headlines in: The Online Reporter and Unigram.X
http://www.g2news.com
To see next week's headlines: Call 516-759-7025
ClieNT Server NEWS - Intelligence for Decision Makers.
Editor: Maureen O'Gara ogara@g2news.com
Senior Editors: Stuart Zipper zipper@g2news.com , Denver, Colorado;
Tel: 303 759-9256; Fax: 303 782-7706; John Day day@g2news.com,
Stone Mountain, Georgia; Tel.: 770 469-8230; Fax: 770 469-8292;
Jacqueline Emigh; jacqueline@g2news.com; Boston, MA 617-254-4109
Associate Editors: Susan Mael mael@g2news.com , Natick, MA; Tel:
508 655-4506; Fax: 508 655-4639; Associate Editor: Raga Rao
rao@g2news.com 516-759-7025
North American Subscriptions: Marie D'Ambrosio marie@g2news.com
Subscription price: $595 / £395 e-mail single reader. Available at
quantity discounts to groups, departments and companies.
(c)Copyright 1998, G2 Computer Intelligence, Inc. No portion of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, posted
on an Internet/Intranet site, forwarded by e-mail or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without prior written permission of G2
Computer Intelligence Inc.
This is the best and very informative post.
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing
If you are facing problems with Hotmail, then just talk to expert Dial Hotmail Support Phone Number 1877-269-4999.
Nice post this post is giving knowledgeable information.
ReplyDeletethank you for sharing with us.
Outlook Technical Support Number
This is superb and awesome post, Keep posting
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Commercial Photographer In Delhi
Professional Product Photography