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News Snippets

August 1999 News

  • Mainframe NT arrives
  • Has RSA had its day
  • DG takes fibre diet

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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