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gartner3.txt
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1993-03-30
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Gartner Group on DEC
---------------------
On February 22nd, Lynn Berg and Wes Melling of Gartner Group held a
phone conference regarding DEC's new storage product announcements and
some directions they saw DEC taking with their middleware, operating
system, software development, and system and network management
strategies. Highlights from the phone conference are outlined below:
DEC's Storage Business: New Product Announcements
--------------------------------------------------
DEC will continue to grow as a commodity player in the storage business. It
has created a separate business unit as a profit center and will aggressively
recruit other system vendors to OEM their disk products. It is acting as a
merchant disk supplier. Underlying these developments was a February
22nd OEM announcement regarding new storage products that we can
expect end-user shipments for within 6 months. The new products include:
1. 2 GB 3 1/2" half-height SCSI disk which can be mounted in a storm
cabinet. Evaluation quantity price is only $1/MB which means we should
expect that DEC will be lowering its current $2.60/MB end-user price.
2. A family of 1" high SCSI drives ranging from $1.50 to $1.00/MB in price
and with a capacity range of 535 MB to 1.33 GB.
3. 20 GB digital tape cartridge with a an option of a 7 cartridge stacker which
means the capability of unattended operation up to 140 GB and can be
mounted in a STORM cabinet.
Note on STORM Cabinets: These are general purpose storage cabinets
designed so that you can put a mix of 1, 2, 3.5, 5.25 inch disks in it as well
as other storage components such as CD ROM, cartridge tape, etc. Everything
that goes into the cabinet at a component level is SCSI, but because of a
SCSI personality board can come out looking like a CI, DSSI, or SCSI disk.
In the future, expect an FDDI board direct attachment onto DEC's
Gigaswitch or any other FDDI device. There were also 2 STORM cabinets
included in the Feb 22nd announcement:
1. A desktop cabinet which can hold up to three 2 GB drives which sits
underneath a desktop VAX or deskside Alpha or PC.
2. A deskside cabinet which can hold 56GB with RAID O,1,3 or 5. Finally
there is a solid state drive with either 107 MB or 267 MB that fits into the
same deskside cabinet.
Expect to see DEC storage attachment to non-DEC systems driven through
DEC partners. Do not be surprised to see an AS/400 version by the end of
this year.
DEC has basically abandoned their old disk strategy of building proprietary
technology, charging a premium for it, and suing any clone vendors that dare
to reverse engineer it.
DEC's High-Level Software Strategy
----------------------------------
Just as DEC is strategically becoming a commodity market player in the
areas of storage, PC, and memory, it is thought that software will soon follow.
However, Gartner feels that DEC's software strategy will not be stable for
about a year.
As with hardware, Palmer will be streamlining DEC's value chain in
consideration of the company's core competencies, commodity business and
where they need to buy. Its high level vision includes the following key goals:
. Attempt to refocus on highly reliable distributed computing and multi-
vendor integration.
. Refocus on the Scientific/Technical marketplace which DEC feels they
have lost due to neglect.
. Focus on current capabilities and short-term deliverables.
In re-examining its value chain and these goals, DEC is expected to reduce its
internal development of end user applications and therefore users should
question DEC's long term commitment for products such as All-In-One,
DECwrite, DECpresent, etc.
DEC's Software Strategies
-------------------------
DEC's software architecture can be best visualized in layered boxes with
hardware at the bottom, with the Operating System on top of that, followed
by Networking, System and Network Management Tools, and a big box
labeled 'Middleware". In the Middleware Box you would see product
components for database management, TP monitor, application development
environment, interprocess communication facility, graphical user interface,
security, object broker, naming service, and mail service. Gartner shared the
following insights:
Operating System Strategy: DEC understands its growth opportunities will
not be coming from OpenVMS. Potentially the biggest area for growth is
a short-term UNIX focus. This strategy utilizes OSF/1 as the core UNIX
operating system and will be DEC's initial vehicle to regain the technical
and scientific market. NT appears today as mostly a client OS and a VMS server
client strategy may be pushed. However, overtime NT will scale up to the
server platform and may become the major implementation of server
platforms from DEC.
Networking Strategy: DEC's differentiation in networking is becoming
blurred and they can't really explain why they are leaders in
this area outside of saying that they have years of experience
as a vendor and user. DEC is realizing that the main role of
networking is becoming the glue to piece together multiple LANs throughout
the enterprise. DEC would like to position itself as an integrator solving
these issues. Pathworks has grown up to be more than a slow
implementation of LAN Manager to something on a higher level which can
run on multiple protocols including Netware, NetBIOS, TCP/IP, etc. DEC
would not only like to integrate the network but to provide the network
management as well. However, DEC will also have to allow its systems and
networks to be managed in an open system environment by another vendor.
System/Network Management: DEC is taking a pragmatic approach to its network
management that started out with DECmcc, which is its network management
workstation environment built to DEC's Enterprise Management
Architecture (EMA) specifications. DEC's system management framework
called Polycenter actually evolved from DECmcc. DEC is expected to fold
many of its diverse system management products underneath this Polycenter
framework.
Middleware: The two most important middleware considerations that users have to
make regard what database manager and TP monitor they will use.
Users have to decide whether to use Rdb, with will run in the future
over VMS, OSF, and NT , or go with a portable database manager, such as
Sybase or Oracle. Gartner believes users should consider ODBC, a standard
which will get very strong support by DEC, Microsoft, and foreign database
managers.
Users should also question what TP monitor they should go with or
if they need a TP monitor at all. Many functions that were once part of the
domain of the TP monitor are performed in other areas. Examples include
presentation management which is now a client function and multithreading,
journaling, two-phase commit, and recovery management which are now part
of the database management function. Gartner suggests that if there are less
than a 1000 clients on any server or server cluster, you may not need a TP
monitor.
When you need one, Gartner recommends to base the choice on the
aspect of application portability. All of DEC's four largest competitors have
mainstream TP monitors that leave the application code portable. Examples
include IBM CICS now on 18 multi-vendor platforms, HP with Encina and
Tuxedo, NCR's Top End, and Unisys' Open OLTP which is a derivative of
Tuxedo. This leaves DEC as the only major vendor with a flagship TP
monitor, ACMS, which only runs on DEC servers, irregardless of its multi-
vendor client support.
The only alternative to ACMS on VMS platforms is DEC's Reliable
Transaction monitor, which again only runs on DEC servers. An OSF
alternative is TP Frame, which means if you insist on a portable TP monitor
from DEC you are confined to DEC's UNIX environment. This means that
you are left with considerably less functionality than with the ACMS and
Reliable Transaction Router alternatives.
DEC's Application Development Strategy
--------------------------------------
Cohesion is DEC's application development strategy for the OpenVMS,
Ultrix, and OSF/1 environments. Gartner expects DEC to be more focused
on what components are in Cohesion rather than focus on the strategy itself
in the months to come.
Basically, COHESION is a framework for the integration of multiple
software development tools such as compilers, editors, code management,
etc. from DEC. It also provides a framework for third party tools. Overtime,
DEC is expected to emphasize object interfaces and linking and repository
capabilities for tool integration. Porting priority for these tools across
DEC's various system platforms is expected to remain high, with a heavy emphasis
on language compiler technology.
In regard to compiler technology, DEC will continue to invest heavily in
debuggers and editors. In regard to specific end-user development tools such
as GLs, code generators, etc. expect less investment commitment from
DEC. DEC will try to manage heavier third-party involvement in this area.
DEC's Middleware Porting Strategy
---------------------------------
DEC initially committed to port its NAS packages, containing various OSF
DCE components, to other non-DEC platforms as part of its middleware
porting strategy. Gartner no longer expects this to happen. Instead, Gartner
thinks that where DEC sees a tactical opportunity to make money because
they "got there first" with a middleware functionality, they will go after the
money and port the software to non-DEC platforms. An example of this is
DEC's ACA Services which is an implementation of the CORBA standard.
DEC has aggressively ported it to the RS/6000, HP 9000, and SUN in
addition to its own platforms.
------- end of report -----------
Hope the information proves helpful to you.
Regards,
Lou Petrella
CSO Competitive Team
1-447-4651