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August 08, 2005 (Computerworld) --

Damian Smith, a vice president at Hitachi Consulting Corp.

... their creaking technologies burden IT's maintenance budgets. Worse, argues Damian Smith, a vice president at Dallas-based Hitachi Consulting Corp., keeping mainframes and even client/server systems limping along chews up so many IT resources that many of the companies using them will be bypassed by more nimble competitors that adopt the flexible systems favored by younger IT workers. Smith warns that if your maintenance cost for aging technologies is more than 50% of your IT budget, "you are pretty much dead." (Perhaps that's why the consulting unit's parent company, Hitachi Ltd., used to sell mainframes.) But most IT dollars now should be spent on new systems in order to retire the old ones, Smith says. "Lots of companies are now consuming 70% to 90% of their budgets on maintenance and support," he claims. "And when you're doing that, you can't do new things to support high-demand users." The situation is compounded by a generation gap as well. Older technology is generally maintained by more experienced workers who have higher salaries "and are less likely to work longer than 40 hours per week," Smith observes, adding that he thinks efforts by IBM and others to boost interest in mainframes among young whippersnappers are futile. "Do I invest in new, young blood to train on old technology," he asks, "or get new technology to attract lower-cost, younger workers who are willing to work longer hours?" The answer is obvious, he thinks. It's vital to shift off old platforms now before all those gray heads putter off to senior centers and take their knowledge with them. If you don't, he warns, "the baby boomer bomb could blow up and destroy a few companies in the near future."
Flashier Web sites are possible ...
... with the imminent arrival of Studio 8. The upgrade of Macromedia Inc.'s flagship software suite includes new releases of Dreamweaver, Flash Professional and Fireworks but replaces the Freehand illustration program with products called Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. Jim Guerard, vice president of product management and marketing at Macromedia, says the San Francisco-based company will continue to sell and update Freehand as a separate application. Guerard says Contribute lets business users update Web pages themselves without having to pester Web designers, although the designers get to control what's included in updates and where, when and how they take place. FlashPaper can convert documents, such as Word files, into Flash files for easy export to Web sites. Among other updates to the products already in the suite, Dreamweaver 8 has improved cascading stylesheets and new guides that let designers precisely position objects on a Web page down to the pixel level. Macromedia, which is due to be acquired by Adobe Systems Inc. under a deal signed in April, plans to ship the $999 suite in September.

John Sebes, chief technology officer at Solidcore Systems Inc.

Solidify your server security ...
... by preventing all but approved code from running on systems. That's the approach advocated by Solidcore Systems Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. According to John Sebes, its chief technology officer, an upcoming security module for Solidcore's S3 Control software will inventory all the binary files, scripts, Dynamic Link Libraries and other forms of executable code that you want running on your computers and permit only those programs to execute. Anything else gets stopped in its tracks, Sebes says. Even sysadmins with root-level privileges can't slip in a favorite script without the permission of the person who oversees S3 Control. The S3 Security module even protects systems from "being tricked by things like buffer overflows," Sebes says. S3 Security will ship next month for Linux, Solaris and Windows servers. Solidcore will add support for AIX and HP-UX servers and Windows XP workstations in Q4. Pricing starts at $2,000 per node and decreases with volume.

	T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa Systems Inc.

Back up your e-mail backup copies ...
... in case disaster strikes. This week, Mimosa Systems Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., will add a disaster recovery option to its NearPoint archiving software for Microsoft Exchange servers. The new module lets you keep a near-real-time archive of your e-mail outside the data center on a LAN or even elsewhere on a WAN. T.M. Ravi, Mimosa's CEO, claims that because NearPoint doesn't use agents on Exchange systems, it helps make them more stable. The No. 1 reason for Exchange server failures is third-party software running on them, Ravi says. NearPoint begins at $9,995, and the Disaster Recovery option starts at $2,100.

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