The Bloor Perspective: User groups name and shame, safe PDAs, and IBM's Linux gamble

This week, Robin Bloor and his colleagues take a look at those vendors letting users down, how to make PDAs secure, and why IBM's Linux bet may just pay off...

A key advantage of cross-vendor user groups is that they can reveal comparative information on users' experience of a range of vendors. The Infrastructure Forum (TiF) is such a group and it's been dishing the dirt on top suppliers. Guess who's bottom of the heap? CA. A couple of years ago the signs were that CA was beginning to notice its poor reputation among users and was trying hard to do something about it. Forcing users into its market base by buying up all their suppliers (and making a lot of money while doing it) was all very well but its own user group conferences were becoming more than a might painful. Much worse from CA's point of view is that users also voted CA one of the least important of the big vendors. Admittedly, CA's forté is systems management software, which isn't as high in the priority list of most IT managers as it should be, but that ranking implies a number of decent alternatives. And that's not the case in systems management. CA's appetite for acquisition has left only Tivoli Systems as a main competitor, with perhaps HP as a reasonable alternative in many cases too. Lack of flexibility vis-à-vis the customer was at the core of user complaints, a charge similarly levelled at BT, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP; in other words, all the big and arrogant vendors. Plaudits for flexibility went to Cisco, Computacenter, Dell, EMC and ICL. Why the difference? Pretty obviously, apart from Cisco perhaps, the latter five don't have the same dominant position in their markets, so they try harder. The worst news from users was what can be called the 'over the barrel factor'. It's when you feel you are being screwed by a vendor but don't have much choice about staying with them because they are too important to your operations. Vendors who were considered the most important but least flexible were BT, Microsoft and Oracle. 'Nuff said. *Secure PDAs* A combination of fierce price competition between PDA vendors and a growth in applications and software targeted at the enterprise may well make the PDA more attractive to the enterprise. It was the industry downturn that set the ball rolling on this - or, more correctly, started the unsold inventory stock pilling in the warehouses. Attractive though the huge inventories of cut-price stock look on paper, a cheap PDA has the same kind of relationship with the enterprise consumer as one of those discounted chrome razor units you buy in the supermarket. In each case, buying a cheap handset commits you to an expensive future of either triple-bladed cartridges or wirelessly delivered applications. Before they even begin to roll out a PDA fleet, enterprises need to establish clearly defined user policies that map applications to business processes. The applications will need to be transcoded or delivered as a thin client solution across a negotiated GSM contract. Most importantly, the device will have to be secure. It will need to be secure when logging on to the intranet and the applications, secure in transmission and, critically, secure when it falls into the hands of anyone who doesn't own it. The people driven to steal briefcases or handbags are usually content with getting £20 for a piece of shiny hardware. The fence that buys the PDA, however, will want a bit more for his money. Increasingly this involves turning the device over to someone who is a specialist at looking at data and working out how to exploit it. This has proved a serious deterrent for enterprise-wide adoption of PDAs. However, solutions are starting to hit the market. For the Palm there is movianCrypt from Certicom, which encrypts the Palm DB with 128bit AES. The product takes 98KB of storage and decrypts only the record that a user requests, which suits it to the limits of PDA hardware. F-Secure's FileCrypto works in a similar way, but has a series of policy administration tools which hand control of what gets encrypted to the IT manager. Both these products are initially available for the Palm platform, but PocketPC versions are apparently in the works. *IBM Linux success?* A recent IBM analyst conference in Stamford Connecticut last week saw a confident IBM parading some of its successes. One of these - although it has to be said, only one of several - is its continuing success with Linux. As far as IBM is concerned, Linux has become mainstream and is doing mainstream business. It sells Linux-ready Intel-based hardware into major corporate sites. Big adopters include Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Shell. It is also selling mainframes (the zSeries) to replace Linux server farms in ISP sites. This amounts to a collection of Linux virtual machines running within the mainframe in a very manageable way (saving floor space, operational effort and money too). IBM quotes a cost of $500 per Linux image, although admittedly that is for a system costing around $1,200,000 and running 2500 Linux instances. IBM is also doing as much as it can to stimulate the Linux market. It is running a programme to provide independent software developers with free access to a zSeries mainframe. Developers get access to their own free (virtual) server running in its own partition along with access to a Shark storage subsystem. Developers from Korea, India and New Zealand are already taking advantage. The programme provides Linux developers and the open source community access to technology that would otherwise be out of their reach, and will probably result in the creation of new applications that can help IBM sell mainframes. A "straw in the wind" that IBM mentioned at the conference was the rate of Linux adoption in China and India - where the OS now dominates. In both countries there is a nascent software industry that is largely ignoring Microsoft primarily because of cost. This might not seem significant in the current scheme of things, but it is. Operating systems are infrastructure. They need to be well built and they need to be very capable, but they don't deliver any direct business benefits. It is applications that do and therefore it is the applications that will win the market. The business world will not care much which operating system runs under the business applications that it does care for. There are now only two obstacles standing in the path of Linux dominance. One is a lack of applications and this is being addressed faster than most people realise. The second is the adoption of Linux by major corporates. And this too is happening. Linux is slowly winning the crucial battles in the operating system war and must be causing serious concern for both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. At the end of the day it is applications that sell the OS and it is the OS that sells the hardware. With its major investment in Linux, IBM has asked a difficult question of the other hardware vendors and has, in the process, pushed Microsoft onto the back foot. Linux is beginning to look unstoppable.