In-Depth

August Inside IBM

• 08/01/1999

IBM announced technology designed to reduce advanced "system-on-a-chip" development time and cost by as much as 50 percent. Faster, cheaper availability of specialized chips can help electronics manufacturers transform standalone products into pervasive computing devices, boost the speed of Internet communications gear and provide new options for e-business applications.

Highlights of the announcement include:

• An IBM chip technology that allows pieces of chip designs (or "cores") from multiple sources to be plugged together to create entirely new chips.

• IBM’s architecture for building highly-integrated chips quickly and efficiently using this technology.

The first example of such a chip from IBM is CoreConnect, an IBM-developed "on-chip bus" standard. An on-chip bus is a communications link that provides a way for pieces of chip design to be connected together to form a whole new chip.

Online market research provider World Research Inc.’s (San Jose, Calif.) 1999 Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BI/DW) Program Competitive Analysis Report rates IBM as the 1998 worldwide revenue and market share leader in the business intelligence and data warehousing market. Big five consulting giant Andersen Consulting/Arthur Andersen was the services segment leader, capturing a 29 percent market share on revenues of $550 million.

IBM revenues grew 77 percent over 1997 to $4.25 billion in 1998, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the worldwide market. The firm led both the systems and software categories and was close to the top in the services area, as well. Other leading vendors include Compaq, HP, Oracle, NCR, Sun Microsystems, SASI, Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting.

The top eight companies accounted for nearly 43 percent of the worldwide business intelligence and data warehouse market.

Michael Burwen, Director of the BI/DW Program at World Research, commented, "The business intelligence and data warehousing market is growing at an average rate of more than 50 percent and is expected to reach $113 billion by 2002. Business intelligence is the fastest-growing segment of the enterprise IT sector, but according to our estimates, was less than $25 billion in 1998." He continued, "Many of the smaller software companies are growing at better than 100 percent annually, and even software behemoth Microsoft made it into our top ten list for the first time."

For more information on World Research Inc., visit www.survey.com.

IBM developerWorks, now in beta and ready for visitor feedback, is a free and central online resource that will allow developers worldwide to tap into information, technology and support available from IBM. Each area – including news, tools and code, standards and education – is organized into zones focusing on Java technology, XML, security and Web development zones. A Linux zone will be added soon.

Since the majority of developers are building applications in heterogeneous environments, developerWorks will focus on open standards and cross-platform technologies. Through search capabilities, such as IBM’s jCentral and xCentral, developers can search other IBM sites, all public Web sites (including technical publications), other developer Web sites and other corporate Web pages to find the latest in Java and XML. jCentral provides access to more than 360,000 Java tools, resources and source code applets, and xCentral taps into more than 100,000 XML documents, DTD schemas, news group articles, resources and tools.

IBM alphaWorks technologies also will be available at no cost through developerWorks. This resource for early adopters gives developers direct access to IBM research and emerging technologies. Visitors to developerWorks can download and evaluate, at no cost, over 85 alphaWorks technologies fresh out of IBM’s research labs. This approach involves the development community’s feedback at the earliest possible stages of a technology and in some cases offers licenses for commercial users, to give ISVs a competitive edge in bringing their own new products to market.

The IBM Megabyte (MB) microdrive’s, "the world’s smallest hard disk drive," launch is a strategic next step in the growth of IBM’s original equipment manufacturer (OEM) technology business. In the last few months alone, the company has announced $28 billion worth of OEM technology deals.

IBM announces its next major OEM technology move – its entrance into the small form factor storage arena, with a number of companies receiving shipments of the microdrive. These companies include: Casio, Compaq Computer Corporation, Clarion Sales Corporation, RioPort Division of Diamond Multimedia Systems, Eastman Kodak Company, Hitachi, IBM Personal Systems Group, Minolta, Nikon, Samsung, SANYO Electric and Trimble. The companies are expected to integrate the microdrive into their digital devices or offer it as a separate storage option.

The microdrive has a disk platter the size of a large coin and weighs less than an AA battery. The new device can hold: 1,000 digital photographs, compressed; six hours of near CD-quality audio; 300 novels; or the equivalent of more than 200 standard-size floppy disks.

IBM has enhanced its MQSeries family of messaging software, including support to use eXtensible Markup Language (XML), making the MQSeries family the bridge between the emerging XML standard and heterogeneous enterprises. MQSeries also has new Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for even greater platform independence.

This announcement helps strengthen IBM’s position in the burgeoning enterprise application integration (EAI) market, which is expected to be worth more than $1 billion by the year 2001, according to Dataquest.