Rudedog - This was in today's NY Times, do you have any idea if NASDAQ is replacing the Tandem stuff with Compaq NT servers or going another route???
Thanks,
John
Microsoft Sets Push for Corporate Market
By STEVE LOHR
ill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., put the matter succinctly
while speaking in New York last week. The next battleground for
the personal computer industry, he said, is industrial-strength corporate
computing -- the lucrative province of hardware and software suppliers
like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Oracle.
The outcome of that battle, according to Gates, is not much in doubt. He
spoke of the supremacy of the "PC model" -- hardware and software as
separate businesses (Microsoft, of course, dominates the software side).
"The PC model will take over the rest of the industry," he declared.
The personal computer forces, led by Microsoft, are already moving up
the computing food chain from their desktop stronghold. In the last couple
of years, Microsoft's hub software for feeding information to and from
many users at once -- called Windows NT Server -- has captured the
market for corporate networks that span a few hundred desktop
computers.
Yet Microsoft has not really cracked
the sizable market for heavy-duty
computing chores, like securities
trading or travel reservations systems,
in which workers typically use
powerful work stations running Unix
software or terminals connected to
mainframe computers. The standards
of performance, availability and reliability for these systems, which must
handle millions or billions of transactions a day, have been regarded as
beyond Microsoft's reach.
That assumption, however, may be challenged by an announcement
planned for Monday that the Nasdaq stock market intends to move one
of its key systems from a mainframe onto a cluster of powerful PC server
computers, running Windows NT. The system monitors trading and feeds
the data to Nasdaq's in-house regulators and, if necessary, to the
Securities and Exchange Commission. It tracks trades as they occur and
crunches the data to spot trades that appear to be errors or suspicious --
and must recognize them within 90 seconds.
Nasdaq has decided to move its market-monitoring system off its
Tandem Computers mainframe mainly because its proprietary software
tended to make the system inflexible, said Gregor Bailar, chief information
officer of the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc. To analyze
fast-moving markets and the proliferation of new securities, he explained,
Nasdaq felt it needed a more open technology in which many third-party
developers were making software tools for the securities industry.
Nasdaq took bids from both Unix and Windows NT suppliers, and Bailar
said he had some qualms whether Windows NT would be up to the task.
"This is a mission-critical system for us, and I wanted to be convinced,"
Bailar said. The leading Windows NT proposal was put through 30
different benchmarking tests, including handling up to 4 billion daily
transactions. "I was a bit surprised by NT's performance," Bailar said.
David Osborne, chief technology officer for Micro Modeling Associates,
the lead consultant on the project, predicts that Nasdaq's move will
attract a lot of attention on Wall Street. Many Wall Street firms use
Windows NT as a desktop operating system, said Osborne, whose
consultancy works for many investment banks.
"But the major Wall Street firms have been watching closely to see if
Windows NT is really going to work on the server side for big,
high-transaction systems," he said. "The Nasdaq project is a bellwether
for NT."
Still, industry analysts note that winning a single showcase project, like the
one at Nasdaq, scarcely means that the markets for large Unix systems
and mainframes are facing an imminent threat of Windows NT.
"This is a notable milestone for NT, but it has a long way to go before it is
widely deployed across the top tier of corporate computing uses,"
observed Dwight Davis, an analyst for Summit Strategies, a research firm.
Even Microsoft, which has been criticized in the industry for making
inflated claims about Windows NT, which was introduced in 1993, is
speaking carefully these days. "We're not saying there isn't a lot more
work to be done at the high end, but we've come a long way," said
Edmund Muth, marketing manager for the Microsoft group responsible
for so-called enterprise, or corporatewide, customer networks. "In that
context, the Nasdaq project is directional."
In the server business, Microsoft is pursuing its tried-and-true formula of
focusing first on the high-volume, less-costly end of the market as its
launching pad. From there, it gathers a primary community of users,
software developers, resellers and consultants -- and moves up toward
higher tiers of the corporate computing market.
Last year for the first time, for example, computer systems running
Windows NT Server software passed Unix server systems in terms of
units sold worldwide, according to International Data Corp., a market
research firm. In the first half of this year, IDC reported that sales of
server machines running Windows NT reached 472,505, compared with
258,320 for all Unix suppliers.
When measured by revenue, however, the Unix leadership in heavy-duty
corporate computing remains intact. In the first half of 1998, sales of Unix
servers were $11.6 billion, compared with $3.3 billion for server
machines running Windows NT.
At the upper end of corporate computing, a supplier's services and skills
often matter as much or more than the cost of hardware and software.
And increased competition has brought sharp declines in the price of large
Unix systems and mainframes. One result is that even the mainframe, once
seen as a technological dinosaur and a corporate albatross for IBM, has
made a comeback.
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