On the Mark: IT Digital Dashboard to Get Face-Lift ...

Computerworld - ... and improved integration with major applications in Version 5.0 of Kintana Dashboard slated for June, sources said. Kintana Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., whose eponymous IT capacity planning and resource management product has attracted a growing number of users in the past year, will begin beta-testing its anticipated upgrade next month. The company is adding adapters for Microsoft Outlook and PeopleSoft. It also plans to improve the dashboard's integration with Microsoft Project. Expect to see some modifications to the user interface, such as approval buttons appearing at both the top and bottom of the scrolling screens. William Farrow, CIO at the Chicago Board of Trade and a user of Kintana Dashboard, said an adapter to the general ledger portion of PeopleSoft "would be something really hot" for his company because it has done little customization to its PeopleSoft application and would be able to quickly adopt the upgrade and roll IT project changes into the corporate general ledger.

• Although CRM giant Siebel Systems Inc. is getting knocked around these days by its much smaller ASP competitors, such as SalesForce.com Inc. and UpShot Inc., larger companies still prefer it. At least that's what CIOs were saying at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference last week. Even Jay Gardner, CIO at BMC Software Inc. in Houston, whose company bombed its first two attempts to install Siebel, said BMC evaluated the ASP approach after two failed Siebel installs, but "we felt the ASP model would not give us the control, agility or scalability to go where we wanted to go." Third time being the charm, BMC now has 3,500 users of Siebel 6.3, and Gardner said the company will upgrade to Version 7.05 this summer. In fact, when the upgrade is complete, the Siebel application running on an Oracle data warehouse will be the primary repository for all corporate data. Maybe "the end of software," a SalesForce.com marketing mantra, isn't so nigh after all.
  

• Hype prepares us for the future, suggests Tim Howe, CTO at Opsware Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. But what if the future is already here? Companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc., with their variations on utility computing, "are marketing their vision of what data center computing will look like in three to five years," he says. Howe doubts that it will resemble what the major vendors are betting on. That's because these Big Three vendors have all built their utility model around big iron. But Howe pooh-poohs that idea. "It's more expensive taking the mainframe approach than going down to [computer retailer] Fry's and buying another inexpensive server," he claims. "They're more reliable and just plain cheaper, too." Furthermore, he argues, a lot of what the Big Three are selling already exists, such as load-balancing and shared-server pools, and companies are already handling planned surges (Super Bowl-type events) and unplanned surges (such as 9/11) in resource demand. His view, of course, is tainted by a different sales pitch, which is that Opsware system management software lets you manage scads of small servers with far fewer resources. Howe boasts that a single sysadmin can "easily handle 100 machines" with agents called Intelligent Software Modules (ISM). These ISMs have to be written for each program running on the server. Currently, Opsware has 60 ISMs, but it will have a "couple hundred" by year's end, Howe says.
  

• You might want to get some control over all those Fry's shoppers by installing Frictionless Sourcing 3.0, a policy-based procurement package that helps manage spending that doesn't always go through the purchasing department. Available this week from Frictionless Commerce Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., the upgrade includes a handful of new modules, including spend analysis and workflow management. It can also do demand aggregation so large companies with multiple locations buying the same products can build a single large purchase order for a better deal. And global companies now can have workers review a single purchase in their local languages and currencies.
  

Get Wired Practical Sales Tools Inc. in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., this week ships the X3 release of WiredContact, which gives remote sales and field representatives access to ACT 5 or 6 central databases at $199 per user. This version adds support for Pocket PCs, integrates with HTML editors and increases the security features.

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