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IBM Promotes Linux Partners to Highest Tier
Anonymous Anonmenon writes "Big Blue was at it again today after it promoted the two leading commercial Linux distributions to the highest level tier of its Strategic Alliance Program. From the article: '[The Strategic Alliance Program] is designed to allow independent software vendors (ISV) work through one point of contact within IBM as opposed to navigating through several relationships with representatives from different divisions. The move was billed by executives from all companies as a means to make it simpler for clients to acquire open standards-based Linux hardware, software, and services through integrated sales, distribution and services channels.' The announcement was also heavy on the Java side, with both Red Hat and Novell pledging a 'reinforced commitment' to the Java developer community and J2EE."
While it's nice to read good news like this for the Linux community, this seems more like marketing people on both sides coming up with "something" to justify their existance ... is there some "meat" behind this or am I just missing it?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Java is a buzzword marketroids know. Apache, MySQL (PostgreSQL!! get with the program, hosting providers), and PHP don't have marketing buzz in financial papers or stock analysis magasines.
So Novell wants to reinforce their commitment to the Java community while at the same time funding Mono, a project porting .NET to Linux/etc...
interesting... very interesting... (strokes soul patch)
But I think Perl/PHP/etc. will continue to gain popularity ammoung smaller companies and pure web companies. (Ie. Companies that are more progressive in nature.)
Think Deeply.
IBM can talk the talk all day but at the end of the day regardless of all the Linux lip service they really don't walk the walk, and probably never will.
I haven't been an IBM employee for several years, but the friends I still have at IBM say that IBM still isn't eating its own food. They're pretty well standardized with Windows 2000/XP across all of their internal desktops and many of their lower end servers. You'd think that a company beating the OSS drum so violently would at least get Linux working on their own desktops. As it is, the people that I know who work at IBM (sysadmins) have never even seen Linux running on any machines at IBM or otherwise. But maybe they really are pushing OSS heavily on the high end and just ignoring OSS for middle and lightweight applications. It's entirely possible.
I don't respond to AC's.
Hmm...I'm not quite sure how you'd decide that. According to IBM's latest 10-Q report, in the quarter ending 30 Sept. 2005, their software division had revenues of a little over 3.8 billion US dollars, and costs of 483 million US dollars. By contrast, their hardware division had revenues of 5.12 billion dollars, but costs of 3.2 billion dollars. IOW, they're showing a gross quarterly profit of about 3.3 billion dollars from software, and only about 1.9 billion from hardware. Looked at on a percentage basis, software looks even better for them: it constitutes almost 18% of their revenues, but only about 3% of their costs.
Their highest revenue division is services -- but even with the largest revenues, this still has slightly lower profits than their software (about 300 million less per quarter than software).
As far as sinking goes: their revenue from software is up about 200 million dollars per quarter from a year ago, while their costs are up only about 20 million dollars a quarter. IOW, their total sales are growing, and they're getting better profit margins too!
Just for comparison, Microsoft's latest 10-Q [warning: Word format, of course] shows they have about 9.6 billion in quarterly revenues (total) and costs of about 6.3 billion, for a gross profit of a bit under 2.6 billion. IOW, IBM's software division produces more profit than Microsoft!
In fairness, that comparison probably isn't entirely accurate: in Microsoft's case, it's taking essentially all expenses into account, including things like R&D (1.5 billion dollars a quarter!) which probably aren't accounted for on a divisional basis at IBM (though I didn't dig through things enough to be sure about that).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Have we forgotten already that the Eclipse foundation started with millions of lines of proprietary code donated by IBM?
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
The The announcement was also heavy on the Java side, with both Red Hat and Novell pledging a 'reinforced commitment' to the Java developer community and J2EE."
So does this mean we might be seeing a working Java implentation soon that isn't controlled by Sun?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Oh, no problem at all -- I don't really care a whole lot whether the numbers are given a lot of credence at all -- after all, they're IBM's numbers, not mine. I simply looked, and didn't quite see where the parent comment seemed to fit with reality. In all honesty, it's still possible that it might though -- just for an obvious example, as you've noted, it may be that most of their software sales are really tied to hardware sales. When I said I didn't really understand the parent comment, I was being honest -- I'm not sure it's wrong, but based on the financial data I'm not quite sure what makes it obviously right either. These are supplied to prospective investors, so I'm sure they try to put the best face on things they can, so these numbers should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, at least to somebody like me who's not a financial analyst, it's not particularly obvious that their future is anywhere close to all doom and gloom by any means.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.