Microsoft entering market for Business Intelligence

Microsoft Office, the familiar toolbox of desktop computing, is a huge and lucrative business, but demand has slowed. In a new bid for growth, the Microsoft Corporation plans to announce that it is making an ambitious push into the US$13 billion-a-year market for business intelligence software, according to a report in The New York Times (24 October).

The newspaper reports that Microsoft is trying to lure new business by extending Office well beyond its well-known programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Business intelligence software is used to help workers quickly find and analyse information inside their corporations. The programs offered by a variety of suppliers range from software used to automatically retrieve hourly or daily sales results to sophisticated analytics programs used to detect fraud and money-laundering.

The company is positioning its new product, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager, as an inexpensive, easy-to-use entry in the business intelligence market, says the NYT.

The newspaper reports that Microsoft will also announce that the new version of Office, scheduled to be introduced in the fall of 2006, will have added business intelligence features. From an Excel spreadsheet, a user will be able to use web links to tap into corporate databases. And groups of workers will be able to use business intelligence features on SharePoint, a digital work space that can be shared by teams of workers.

The Business Scorecard Manager is much like a desktop dashboard for information, which the user can configure to fetch and display relevant data on sales, manufacturing, finance or other areas, says the report.

According to the NYT., the move by Microsoft is its latest step to breathe new life into its big Office business. The company's information worker group, which is mainly Office, had sales of US$11 billion in the year ended in June, and operating profits of US$7.9 billion. But revenue growth has since slowed.

The newspaper comments that Microsoft must also add new capabilities and bind them to the basic Office programs - Word, Excel and PowerPoint - to try to fend off competition from free open-source products, like OpenOffice, and free web-based alternatives, like Writely.com (a word processor) and NumSum.com (for spreadsheets).

In the business intelligence market, Microsoft will confront a range of companies, including SAS, Hyperion, MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Cognos and others, says the newspaper.

Swedish telecoms equipment giant Ericsson said on Monday it plans big investment in India as it increases its presence in Asia's third-largest economy.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (24 October) that Max Granryd, president of Ericsson's market unit for India and Sri Lanka, told reporters it would spend ``several hundreds of million dollars'' per year in the country.

Ericsson earlier said it planned to set up a research and development centre in the southern Indian city of Chennai and a global delivery center in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi in the north, according to the Reuters/NYT report.

Apple Computer faced a lawsuit that alleged the company knew its nano portable music player was defective but still decided to press on with the product's release last month.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (23 October) that the credit card-sized nano, which replaced the best-selling iPod mini and is smaller than the traditional iPod, met with rave reviews. But users quickly started grumbling on internet message boards that the device's screen scratches too easily.

According to Reuters, consumers have filed a proposed class action lawsuit in California on Wednesday, claiming the nano scratched ''excessively during normal usage'' and alleged Apple released the product knowing the problems and led consumers to believe it was durable -- forcing them to shoulder the cost of replacing defective music players.

The complaint blamed the nano's defectiveness on the film of plastic resin that covers it to protect it from damage. Previous versions of the iPod were coated with thicker and stronger resin, the suit said.

Sales of iPods account for nearly a third of Apple's total sales, and the company has a share of about 75 percent of the US market for all MP3 players, reports Reuters in the NYT.
 

There's a new player in the lucrative market of semiconductors that power everything from cars and game consoles to medical equipment and supercomputers, according to a report by Associated Press in The New York Times (24 October).

AP reports that P.A. Semi is set to emerge Monday after working the last two years in stealth mode, growing from a tiny team of big-name chip designers working out of a 600 square-foot office in to a company whose 150 employees occupy two floors in a high-rise in Santa Clara, the hometown of No. 1 chipmaker Intel.

At the Fall Processor Forum in California this week, P.A. Semi will announce how it has designed a high-performance chip it claims will consume as much as 10 times less power than today's comparable products. But because it takes an average of four years to design and produce a new chip, P.A. Semi said its processors won't hit the market until 2007, reports AP.

AP says that microprocessors that run cooler and consume less energy generally translate to cheaper costs for equipment makers. It also means devices, such as notebook computers, could draw less battery power and remain cooler while in operation.

As computing chips have become faster and more powerful in recent years, companies such as Intel have worked to combat the accompanying problem of chips getting too hot or consuming more electricity than their vendors would like.

In fact, says AP., Apple Computer's historic decision to soon switch its computers from PowerPC chips to Intel's so-called x86 chips stemmed from Apple's frustration that its PowerPC suppliers -- IBM and Freescale Semiconductor -- could not promise the same horsepower and power efficiency as Intel.

According to the AP/NYT report, in P.A. Semi's own tests, its chips deliver significant power savings because its components are more tightly integrated and smarter about turning off when not in use, a company spokesman said.

Data network company Cisco Systems on Monday announced a system that links police, fire and rescue departments' radio networks that now cannot communicate with one another.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (24 October) that hospitals, transportation companies and other businesses that use different communications systems would also be able to speak directly to each other without having to upgrade or buy new networks and handsets, the company said.

The system is a combination of hardware and software that hooks into the organization's radio communications system and then converts the two-way radio signals into digital packets that are sent across networks, Cisco said.

Reuters reports that Cisco said many systems in use today cannot talk to each other because they use different radio frequencies. Cisco calls its new system the Internet Protocol Interoperability and Collaboration Systems, or ``IPICS.''

The US Congress in 2003 appropriated more than US$150 million for local and state governments to make their public safety networks interoperable, but progress has been slow.

According to Reuters, there are some 70,000 independent public safety agencies in the United States, Cisco said, and most of them built networks that were never designed to communicate with each other.

US company, Cingular Wireless, is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (24 October) that the new service, powered by OZ Communications, is designed to adapt the look and capabilities of a web portal or e-mail program such as Outlook to the limited screen size, keyboard and processing power of a garden variety handset.

According to AP.,the Java-based e-mail application initially will be available to download on existing phones starting Monday with 5 models from Motorola and one from Samsung Electronics. It also is being pre-installed on new phones, though not immediately through all Cingular sales channels.

AP says that fetching e-mail on a cell phone has been possible for some time, generally by using a mobile web browser or a downloadable third-party application. But the process is often cumbersome: Users need to click through multiple menus, type in web addresses, sign in using a telephone keypad, and scroll about to read poorly formatted messages on a small screen.

Much of the used computer equipment sent from the United States to developing countries for use in homes, schools and businesses is often neither usable nor repairable, creating enormous environmental problems in some of the world's poorest places, according to a report to be issued by an environmental organisation.

The New York Times reports (24 October) that the report, titled "The Digital Dump: Exporting Reuse and Abuse to Africa," says that the unusable equipment is being donated or sold to developing nations by recycling businesses in the United States as a way to dodge the expense of having to recycle it properly. While the report, written by the Basel Action Network, based in Seattle, focuses on Nigeria, in western Africa, it says the situation is similar throughout much of the developing world.

"Too often, justifications of 'building bridges over the digital divide' are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines," says the report. As a result, Nigeria and other developing nations are carrying a disproportionate burden of the world's toxic waste from technology products, according to a coordinator of the group.

The newspaper reports that, according to the National Safety Council, more than 63 million computers in the United States will become obsolete in 2005. An average computer monitor can contain as much as eight pounds of lead, along with plastics laden with flame retardants and cadmium, all of which can be harmful to the environment and to humans.

In 2002, the Basel Action Network was co-author of a report that said 50 percent to 80 percent of electronics waste collected for recycling in the United States was being disassembled and recycled under largely unregulated, unhealthy conditions in China, India, Pakistan and other developing countries. The new report contends that Americans may be lulled into thinking their old computers are being put to good use.

According to the NYT., at the Nigerian port of Lagos, the new report says, an estimated 500 containers of used electronic equipment enter the country each month, each one carrying about 800 computers, for a total of about 400,000 used computers a month.

Despite all the talk about an increasingly connected world, the proportion of American adults who have never used the internet and do not live in an internet-enabled home has remained almost unchanged since 2002, according to a study recently released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The New York Times reports (24 October) that Susannah Fox, the author of the report, said: "There's a group of Americans who are really hard-core offline, truly disconnected." Ms. Fox said that the truly disconnected were mostly over age 65, and less educated than the rest of the population. Their lack of access to the internet means, for example, that the federal government has relied heavily on mailings to get the word out about the new Medicare drug benefit.

The newspaper says the report revealed that, as the influx of new internet users has slowed, America's online population has become proportionately more experienced. The study found that 79 percent of internet users have had access for four years or more, compared to 52 percent in 2002.

Swiss content security firm Kudelski is teaming up with T-Mobile, the mobile telephony arm of Germany's Deutsche Telekom, to deliver a mobile TV service in the Czech Republic.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (24 October) that Kudelski said on Monday it will provide content protection for T-Mobile's new planned service, which will allow customers to receive TV broadcasts on their mobile phones.

T-Mobile will launch a pilot operation in the second half of 2006, the company said in a separate statement.

Though Kudelski said the pilot should be operational by 2006, analysts said the service would probably not be fully launched until 2007, and there will likely be no commercial value for the firm until 2007 or 2008, reports Reuters in the NYT.

AMD has taken the axe to its desktop and mobile processor families, chopping up to 26 per cent off what it charges for its chips.

The Register reports (24 October) that the company reduced prices for its mobile Turion 64, dual-core desktop Athlon 64 X2 series, Mobile Athlon 64 products, and both mobile and desktop Sempron processors.

Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX prices remain unchanged, though AMD took the opportunity to drop its two bottom-most Athlon 64 parts, the 3000+ and 2800+, reports The Register.

Novell is preparing to lay off as many as one in five of its staff, according to reports.

The Register reports (24 October) that about 20 per cent of Novell's 5,800 staff could lose their jobs. An announcement is expected before the end of its financial year - 31 October.

The publication says that Novell's non-core products are likely to be hit hardest, with ZDNet predicting Novell's Extend product, based on SiliverStream Software, is likely to suffer. The company is also predicted to pull out of regions where it is underperforming and leave sales to resellers.

The Register says that Novell has struggled to reinvent itself after seeing market share for its network products disappear. Sales and profits for the last quarter were both down. In 2004 Novell paid US$210m for SuSE Linux to help buy itself a slice of the corporate Linux market.