March/April 2002 News
- Your project has landed five years late
- Merger saga doesn't help the future
- e-Procurement raises efficiency
- Will iPlanet continue to spin?
Your project has landed five years late
The new air traffic control centre at Swanwick went live in January only five years late and £180m over budget. Flights were delayed whilst software was upgraded last week. Seems that even though it was late, nobody thought about non-intrusive upgrading of the software. Lets hope the system doesn't use too many COTS products otherwise flights will be delayed with increasing frequency as the patches and upgrades are released. I wonder if they are thinking about a PAUSE button that will stop the planes in flight as the changes are being made. It works on the X-box.Merger saga doesn't help the future
The on-off-on-off uncertainty of the HP-Compaq merger gives the competition time to exploit the FUD. When the assimilation is complete the new organisation will have economies of scale advantages over many of its competitors. The areas where the consumers will benefit are:
- Management software (Openview / Insight)
- Servers (PA-Risc goes in favour of Itanium, Alpha and Tru64 go)
- PC/Laptop (Volumes and increased channel capacity)
- Services (Digital skills with HP skills could be a potent force)
- Imaging (HP printers/scanners with Compaq digital cameras)
- PDAs (iPAQ versus Journada)
It will be interesting to observe the change management process when the decision has been ratified. It must be swift, decisive and focused otherwise the metal will have cooled and will be too brittle to be worked.
e-Procurement raises efficiency
Cost savings can be achieved through improved procedures during the procurement process.
- 80% Sourcing of goods
- 73% Raising purchase orders
- 55% Placing order
- 33% Goods received process
- 12% Payment process
Will iPlanet continue to spin?
With the end of Sun and Netscape (AOL) alliance comes the dilemma of which Web platform to use. One of the advantages of the iPlanet offering was its multiple platform capabilities. Sun have pledged that they plan to continue this but their track record does not project any confidence for the future. iPlanet still runs on W2K and NT. What will happen when these operating systems become obsolete and the only option is XP, is still unsure.
With only 14% of
the iPlanet users running on a Microsoft platform the future does not
look rosy.
Shorties
- Sun has changed the way that they plan to handle the free StarOffice desktop productivity suite. They intend to take charge of the product from release 6 and charge £30/user annually for the privilege.
- Oracle expanding their definition of a named user. The consequences are it will cost more to have a licence. This should raise some much needed revenues or cause clients to use different software.
- BT Ignite is offering Lotus software as a hosted service for companies that cannot afford their own infrastructure. Strange that BT is a large MS Exchange user or do they plan to move to this new service themselves.
- Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) hope to save $1m by introducing a portal-based Novell environment. The aim is to shift 80% of the 1500 staff to a browser-based world at a planned £500/user saving.
- E-mail encryption has not become as popular as the pundits predicted. This is highlighted by Network Associates' recent axing of PGP.
- US startup Pulsent has a new video compression method that claims to provide 400% bandwidth and storage improvements over MPEG-2 compression.
- Rising cost of PCs will stretch the budgets of anybody intent on a technology refresh programme. The price increases are caused by rising memory and liquid crystal display costs and could be as much as 10-20%.