August
1999
News
- Mainframe NT arrives
- Has RSA had its day
- DG takes fibre diet
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Mainframe
skills needed to make NT fly
ICL's "Scaling
Windows NT for the enterprise" white paper argues that the biggest
barrier to Windows NT acceptance is the lack of datacentre skills to manage
the "mission critical" corporate applications. It is accepted
that it requires a less entrepreneurial mind-set found in the disciplined
mainframe environment to effectively manage these sorts of environments.
An ideal organisation should have a healthy balance of MS NT & mainframe
skills - It is interesting to note that Bill Gates does not have much of
a mainframe background. Could this be the problem with MS products?
RSA
protection may be protection
New technology could
make RSA encryption (which protects 95% of e-commerce transactions) "very
vulnerable" according to RSA developer - Adi Shamir. Twinkle - the
Weizmann Institute key locating engine - still to be developed, would drastically
reduce the time needed to find the key to a time of 10ms.
DG
goes on a fibre diet for next three quarters
DG is betting on fibre
channel SANs and is prepared to take a loss for the next three quarters
as it prepares to pitch its Clariion FC products directly to IT departments
for the first time. Available immediately SANBackup allows companies to
backup and restore servers over IP separately from the LAN with needs up
to 1TB / hour. It comes with Legato's Networker central management console.
Shorties
- MS DNA is gaining
support from Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft.
- SUN abandons full
ISO accreditation for JAVA and goes the European Computer Manufacturers
Association (ECMA) route.
- The Gartner Group
warns against early adoption of the MS Transaction server or COM until
the back end of 2000. The technologies to track are COM+ and Enterprise
Java beans.
- HP abandons its
EMC relationship and heads for the SANs. HP are now working with Hitachi
and integration with their fibre technologies.
- SAP is dabbling
with thinness. The objective is to speed-up deployment and simplify
the implementation. In parallel SAP are offering an IBM mainframe solution,
replacing Oracle with ADABAS. Is this the empire striking back as SAP
returns to its roots?
- Fore systems gets
swallowed by GEC. Nobody seems to know why. Cisco & 3Com will not
lose any sleep - yet!!!!
- Almost 75% of
ERP implementations have failed to deliver the projected business benefits.
Between 50-75% of UK ERP implementations were unsuccessful. Its all
a bit like client / server revisited.
- Day rates dwindle
for SAP experts as the millennium approaches. Many of these highly skilled
experts are coming off projects with nowhere to go - lets hope they
have been saving a lot of their daily fees for a rainy day.
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