IBM Eye

Information Week has a nice article about the IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition. It gives paints a favorable picture of the alliance from the perspective of both firms.

IBM is hoping that users of its free software will like what they see and want to add to more sophisticated tools that deliver more substantial revenue. “We actually believe that search is really only the start of the value proposition for enterprises,” says Andrews.

Yahoo, meanwhile, hopes to increase awareness of its services among businesspeople. “We haven’t been in the enterprise business space per se,” says Eckart Walther, vice president of product management for Yahoo! Search, “but our products are used in the enterprise.” He points to Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Small Business, and Yahoo HotJobs as examples.

IBM has continued fleshing out Tivoli with its fat wallet, purchasing Vallent Corporation, a privately held company that makes software allowing Cell Phone providers to granularly monitor its network quality for a purported $200 million. Consolidation has been happening fast in the OSS space and it looks like convergence is playing out such that there will be half a dozen or so major players in a year or two:

• Amdocs
• HP
• IBM
• Oracle
• Telcordia

Smaller, independent players such as Vallent and Intec ripe for being brought into the fold of a larger company. So far this year, Oracle has bought MetaSolv, Amdocs - Cramer, CA - Wily and Syndesis picked up CoManage.) And Telcordia, who I described above as a survivor, is rumored to be for sale and in talks with SAP.

Anyhow, with the merger, IBM becomes the leader in quality of service tools for the wireless side of the telecom industry. Vallent Corporation specializes in wireless network and service performance management to help mobile operators forestall network outages and gauge the real-time quality of service being experienced by customers connected to their networks. Network failures are costly from a lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction standpoint so the QoS tools Vallent sells are indespensible. Vallent was formed by the mergers of Watchmark, Comnitel and Metica and, as such, nearly every carrier in the world uses their products. The private company is thought to have annual revenues of aroung $70 million with a sales price of $200 million.

Most notably, the Vallent acquisition will enhance IBM’s partnership network by adding many deep relationships with big names around the world the world. Per telecom industry pub Light Reading:

The move will bolster IBM’s position as one of the OSS industry’s biggest players, as Vallent, which has more than 200 mobile operator customers, will give the IT giant a wealth of wireless carrier contracts and wireless service assurance capabilities.

This seems like a great acquisition (Don’t they all? What’s a couple hundred million to us?). As they have demonstrated with contracts with Telstra Corporation and Bharti Airtel, IBM seems to be one of the few players with whom companies feel comfortable inking major dollar, many year deals. IBM gets a major arrow in its quiver with the QoS tools and the added (primary?) benefit of a huge rolodex ripe for the upsell.

I’m just a little late for the ’06 political season, but IBM seems to is getting into the surveillance game with here.

The Smart Surveillance System (S3), available in conjunction with IBM’s digital video surveillance services, can analyse real-time video while it is being digitally recorded and stored over an IP network. Video stored both online and offline can also be retroactively searched for certain characteristics.

and

In a field test, S3 was used in the self-checkout line of a grocery store to identify different types of fruit and their corresponding prices. IBM has also been in talks to possibly manage an S3 system in places along the US-Mexico border.

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IBM and Apple, the two who have been in the business the longest, make the most reliable computers.

It’s interesting that IBM, who is no longer really in the PC business, makes the most reliable PCs. Twice, I’ve talked to business people (not techs) who remember fondly how great their IBM PCs seemed to work a few years ago before they switched to a new vendor (Dell). I don’t know if a PC with the IBM name on it really does work better, but I do think the name IBM still connotes quality to the over 30 crowd, even if it is a by-the-way hardware offering from a services company.

There was a blog post complaining about IBM stripping functionality out of a blog platform for Lotus that they bought to keep the source code closed. The author laments that IBM is inconsistent in its support for open source.

I was unfamiliar with the software, so I scanned through IBM’s technote on the release to get a feel for how many features were stripped out and why.

IBM listed 5 reasons why they had to make changes:

• remove Open source code
• ease support of the template
• simplify use of the template
• change the user interface to fit in with IBM standards
• make Language translation easier

Of the dozen or so features removed or amended in such a way as to prohibit backwards compatibility, two were admittedly due to open source restrictions:

• Trackback
• Web Rich Text Editor

Of the others, several were purportedly removed because they were little used and would be too much trouble to port the code. I’d probably be disappointed if I’d been using a blog platform that was acquired by a company and then had features stripped from it. To quote from the aforementioned post:

… it’s a compelling illustration, I think, of the fact that IBM is
only going to use open source where IBM deems it strategically useful
for competitive purposes (i.e., to compete with Microsoft).

But to all the activists who are continually trumpeting about how IBM
has embraced open source software, well, guys, it’s not quite as
ideological as you would like people to think. Most of IBM’s code is
proprietary, especially the stuff they think they can make money at,
such as Websphere. If you really look at IBM’s products, they are going
with open source in those cases where they think they can’t win the
competition with Microsoft.

Those are stinging words. It does seem that IBM’s open source initiatives align well with their strongest competitors. One shouldn’t get too idealistic when trumpeting the virtues of a publicly traded company. IBM’s loyalty and commitment necessarily lie in maximizing shareholder’s wealth. Corporate officers get in trouble when they lose site of that. IBM is a benefactor to the open source community but it is necessarily to their own benefit, both in developing in-house expertise and in altering the competitive landscape. Perhaps they
should at least be consistent across all their divisions so as to not deflate the goodwill they build up through billions of dollars in commitment to the open source community. That would keep criticism like this from ringing so true. I guess IBM has made the decision that they
are more profitable long term by keeping some products and systems closed while opening others and embracing open platforms as needed. Profitably trumps technical ideology even if the closed and proprietary systems don’t get trumpeted by the PR dept.

IBM’s RFID solutions just got more robust, offering a new clipped tag, allowing users to prevent the chip from broadcasting details about the item to which the chip is affixed.

IBM’s “Clipped Tag” is giving consumers the ability to simply “opt out” and protect their privacy by tearing or scratching off the RFID antennae, eliminating the tag’s ability to communicate with other devices or systems.

I’ve included a diagram of how the RFID “Clipped Tag” Works (is there any length to which this blog wont go to bring you the best yada yada yada). One noteworthy feature is that the clipping doesn’t render the RFID tag unusable… it merely disables the antenna severely limiting its range. This allows the chip to still function at very close range for things like a warrantee return or for legal evidence in a piracy or bootlegging type case. I think this is a good compromise.