IBMs On-Demand Conversation Getting Stale

Titan was released just a few months before the show and it is already in use at customer sites with DB2 in the back end. Their goal is to make compliance a newly off-the-shelf issue.

Also on the data security track was a new offering in secure collaboration. Cerebrums Chandra Pendyala asserts that his company has built software to Department of Defense standards while leaving the work of maintaining that security on a scale where businesses can use it.

Building on an AJAX model, the software allows for spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentations to be built in a way where any change can be audited, rolled back or built upon by others.

Resource Library:

Nothing in Cerebrums product is new, strictly speaking, but the sum is greater than the parts. The company announced the product at the show and have just begun to roll up a few beta sites. If it can deliver on all its promises, it will certainly bear consideration.

With Craigs comments about data warehousing still buzzing in my head I sat down with Dennis James of On Demand Strategies (the company formerly known as Diversified Computer Strategies). I expected to talk about his companys longstanding involvement with DataStage. Instead, he wanted to talk about Solospect, which is their new Customer Retention system.

When I asked him how this was different from existing CRM (customer relationship management), he told me that Solospect does what CRM does, plus extremely strong data mining to help manage sales planning and other event-based activities.

The sales and event planning, what he characterized as "Activity Based" customer management, is also done within the software. His first target is the retail market and his release date is imminent.

When I got Dennis back around to discussing DataStage, he spoke to me, not about the product, but about big changes for the developer community. In the past five years, their free discussion forums have grown to support over 19,000 members.

As a result, On Demand Strategies is opening up the site to third-party involvement so that his members can get help with a wide range of related products, even ones that compete with his company on some levels. "Its the right ting to do and the right time to do it," he said.

I rounded out my visit to the show with a stop at Novell (SUSE Linux) and Canonical (Ubuntu Linux), to see whats new there. Ubuntu was spreading the word about release 7.10, which was less than 24 hours away when I spoke to them. It features a tickless kernel—which should result in a meaningful speed improvement, as the operating system is now using fewer CPU cycles.

Other features include a new version of Gnome and better support for virtualization.

The company is nearly ready to release a strip-down version, which will make VMware appliance building easier by reducing the footprint of the resulting virtual machines.

On the Novell side, it was talking about its own VMware improvements. Barely 30 days ago, they announced that they had implemented specific tuning to make SUSE work better with VMware. The other big thing the company was promoting was "Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition," which is both a product and an initiative to further their inroads into the small business market.

On the whole, it was not as flashy and exciting a show as I expected, but provided excellent classes, and just walking the exhibition floor was highly educational.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, views and analysis on servers, switches and networking protocols for the enterprise and small businesses.