Staff Writers

ASUSTeK has entered the wireless race at a blistering 240Mbps with its WL-566gM router and WL-106gM adapter.

The 240Mbps MIMO data transfer rate translates to an actual throughput of up to 100Mbps, according to the company and the coverage area from the access point is eight times the range of standard 802.11g WLAN devices and equals the sort of specificcations from Netgear’s RangeMax.

This sort of throughput makes possible wireless multimedia for the homes or for businesses applications such as retail, notes the company.

Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) enhances wireless transfers of multimedia contents, providing wireless network users an improved experience for sharing audio and video files. The Wi-Fi Alliance defined WMM as a profile of the upcoming IEEE 802.11e Quality of Service extension for 802.11 networks.

QoS and multimedia support are critical to wireless home networks, which require video on demand, audio on demand, voice over IP and high-speed Internet access. WMM defines four access categories – voice, video, best effort, and background – that are used to prioritize traffic to provide enhanced multimedia support.

The access point doesn’t sacrifice anything for this speed and QoS, the WL-566gM router employs WPA2, which is based on the IEEE 802.11i standard and coupled with the WEP firewall protocol, the router provides advanced encryption mechanism and security without the sacrifice of physical distance.

Recommended Retail Price on the WL-566gM router is $329, while the WL-106gM adapter is $219.

www.asus.com.au

Not a company known for growing through acquisition online direct hardware supremo Dell has confirmed it will buy cult game computer maker Alienware.

As foreshadowed on SmartOffice News last week Dell has made the curious acquisition of a small but highly-regarded PC gaming maker Alienware.

The acquisition won’t make much difference to the hardware goliath’s bottom line in the short term. Dell reported revenues of US$55.9 billion last year compared to Alienware’s US$200 million, but the purchase will certainly add a lot of cache to the black box maker’s product list.

Alienware is highly regarded in the lucrative computer gaming market and although Dell’s first foray into that market, the XPS line, has received okay reviews, it has failed to ignite the enthusiasm of the style and power conscious gamers.

The Dell XPS line of gaming platforms is not available locally.

Alienware will continue to operate as a separate unit and keep its product development, marketing, sales and technical support staff as well as its brand, Dell said in a statement.

“This is good news for Dell’s consumer market,” said Ted Schadler of Forrester Research Inc. “It is kind of re-upping Dell’s commitment to that market.”

The acquisition is notable is as the first time Dell has sold computers powered by AMD processors, Dell has remained a stalwart Intel supporter to date and pundits have speculated that the number one PC player would mark a significant coup for AMD.

AMD made significant in-roads against Intel, particularly in the Server and desktop markets through 2005 due to a widely acknowledged price performance advantage of the CPU leader. While this performance edge may be lost this year in the game of leap frog Intel and AMD have played out over the past five year’s AMD’s plans for 2006 are still a closely kept corporate secret.

However, Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn told Reuters that the acquisition was not an indication that the company was contemplating switching chip suppliers. “Our strategy in terms of suppliers that we work with is unchanged,” Blackburn said. “This doesn’t signal that we are changing that.”

 

 

Dell’s consumer business accounts for just 15 per cent of its revenues and with growth at the company slowing, Dell sees the consumer market as its next market segment to conquer. As a result, the company has entered into a significant discounting war over the past six months that have forced competitors like HP and Acer to fight a sticker price battle.

While Dell’s volume and direct-to-market business model give it significant advantage the company posted slower-than-forecast growth last year as it lowered prices on entry-level PCs too aggressively.

But Dell Chairman Michael Dell, knows that 20 per cent of consumer PC users are hard core gamers looking for souped up machines and willing to pay a high price for the privilege.

Now we await news that Acer is buying Gateway for much the same reasons.

 

Terms of the Dell/Alienware transaction were not disclosed, but we are sure it was small change to the global No. 1 PC vendor.

 

(Additional reporting by Reuters’ Philipp Gollner & Scott Hillis)

Global server sales declined in the fourth calendar quarter, but revenues for 2005 were at their highest point for five years, says IDC.

The worldwide server market grew to USUS$51.3 Billion in 2005. Factory revenue declined marginally by 0.2 per cent over the prior year’s fourth quarter to US$14.5 billion, but this was the first sequential decline since the first quarter of 2003.

Unit shipment growth slowed modestly to 10.6 per cent in 4Q05 when compared with the year-ago period.

Volume server systems continue to grow strongly adding 7.3 per cent year on year with both Enterprise and SMB buyers taking the punt. Midrange enterprise servers didn’t do so well posting a 11.5 per cent year over year decline after four consecutive quarterly increases. Similarly, revenue for high-end enterprise servers showed a 1.7 per cent decline over the prior equivalent – the fifth consecutive quarter of declining revenue.

“The volume server market continues to evolve as richer server configurations driven by both scale-out cluster implementations and scale-up server virtualization initiatives continue to drive increased customer spending,” said Matthew Eastwood, program vice president of IDC’s Worldwide Server Group. “However, even in the volume segment, the quarterly unit shipment growth of 11.5 per cent was two-thirds the year-over-year unit growth rate observed in 4Q04, illustrating a transition towards more richly configured systems in the market.

“This evolution is driven by IT managers increased desire to consolidate and virtualise their server infrastructures as they seek to maintain balanced and manageable IT growth in the future.” 

Factory Revenue By OS
Windows Servers continued growing in the fourth quarter adding another 4.7 per cent year on year to now account for 33.6 per cent of the market. Windows server revenues for the whole of 2005 US$17.7 billion, which means that for the first time the Windows server segment modestly exceeded spending for Unix servers as customers deployed more fully configured Windows servers in support of scalable enterprise workloads and server virtualization projects.

Just better than a third of the market looks pretty healthy when you consider than Unix servers declined by 5.9 per cent in factory revenues in the final quarter. But the real star performer is the Linux segment which continued its fourteenth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 20.8 per cent.

Linux servers generated US$1.6 billion in quarterly revenue (US$5.7 billion for 2005) so have a long way to catch up, but looking like a promising bet.

This result placed Linux in the third spot for the first time ever, behind Windows and Unix in the first and second spot.

Unix server sales represented US$5.0 billion for Q405 at the factory level representing 34.3 per cent of the market by revenue. Totals for the year were US$17.5 billion shunting it out of first place for the first time in more than ten years.

“IDC continues to see end users utilizing a mix of operating systems in their infrastructures,” said Jean S. Bozman, vice president of Worldwide Server research at IDC. “Each platform offers its own advantages in terms of workloads and customer preferences, and there is substantial overlap in terms of ISV applications that run on many of these server platforms. Although the trend is towards volume systems, we do not believe that any one platform will be in a position to force another platform out of the marketplace for many years to come.”

Vendor Shares By Factory Revenue
From the vendor perspective, IBM retained the number 1 spot in system sales with a 38.4 per cent market share in factory revenue. This was only up slightly (0.8 per cent over the year ago quarter). But HP, despite growing faster at 3.8 per cent over 4Q04 it still trailed IBM significantly coming a distant second with 26.8 per cent share. HP picked up 1 point of market share overall, says IDC.

No prizes for guessing Dell is in second place, again a distant third with 9.6 per cent factory revenue market share. Another big gainer though, Dell leaped 7.3 per cent over the prior equivalent quarter leaving Sun in its dust with a major decline.

Exemplifying Sun’s problems the company’s factory revenues slumped 10.9 per cent compared to the last quarter of 2004. In fourth place though, with an 8.2 per cent market share, Sun is only slightly better off than Fujitsu/Siemens.

Starting to look like an ‘also ran’ Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens in fifth with a 4.3 per cent market share suffered a 10.9 per cent factory revenue decline year over year.

Vendor Share By Unit Shipments
In terms of unit shipments, HP maintained the number 1 position worldwide with 30.2 per cent server shipment share, growing shipments 8.8 per cent year over year. Dell maintained the number 2 spot in terms of worldwide server shipments with 23.3 per cent share, up from 21.3 per cent.

x86 Industry Standard Server Market Dynamics
The x86 server market continued to experience strong growth, with revenue of US$6.8 billion worldwide for the fourth quarter of 2005. Factory revenue for x86 servers grew 6.7 per cent, while unit shipments grew 13.7 per cent to 1.8 million servers. HP led the market with 33.4 per cent revenue share due to strong revenue growth of 10.1 per cent year over year. The fierce competition between Dell and IBM for the second position in the x86 market ended in a statistical tie, with IBM and Dell each holding approximately 20 per cent revenue share for the fourth quarter.

Rackable Systems solidified its fourth place position in the U.S. with year-over-year growth of 268 per cent. The rapid transformation of the x86 marketplace into a segment that is 64-bit enabled continued with x86-64 based systems accounting for 78.8 per cent of all x86 server spending, with factory revenue for x86-64 systems more than doubling year over year.

“The number of AMD and Intel-powered dual core systems each grew by more than double on a quarter-over-quarter basis,” said Jed Scaramella, research analyst, Worldwide Server research. “Given customers’ intense focus on performance as well as power, heat, and cooling issues in their datacenters, the move to incorporating dual core processors is a natural move as users look to lower costs and increase computing capacity.”

Blades Show Strong Growth
The server blade market showed continued growth in the quarter, with shipments increasing by 49.3 per cent year over year and factory revenue gaining 56.9 per cent year over year. Overall, blade servers, including x86, EPIC and RISC blades, accounted for US$667 million in the fourth quarter, representing 4.6 per cent of quarterly server market revenue. IBM maintained the number 1 spot in terms of server blade revenues, with 42.7 per cent market share, while HP maintained the number 2 position with 35.1 per cent share. Dell holds the number 3 position with 11.2 per cent share of factory blade revenues.

“Market momentum in the blade market continued in the quarter with blade volumes up 50 per cent year over year,” said Kelly Quinn, senior research analyst, Worldwide Server research. “Blade shipments increased more than 60 per cent year over year in 2005 as IT managers began to adopt blades as a standard building block in their virtual IT infrastructures.”

Worldwide Server Systems Factory Revenue, Q405 (Revenues in US Millions)

Vendor	Q4 2005 Revenue	Market Share	Q4 2004 Revenue	Market Share	Revenue Growth 4Q05/4Q04
IBM	US$5,555	38.4 %	US$5,510	38.0 %	0.8 %
Hewlett-Packard	US$3,885	26.8 %	US$3,745	25.8 %	3.8 %
Dell	US$1,390	9.6 %	US$1,295	8.9 %	7.3 %
Sun Microsystems	US$1,185	8.2 %	US$1,330	9.2 %	-10.9 %
Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens	US$606	4.2 %	US$680	4.7 %	-10.9 %
Others	US$1,857	12.8 %	US$1,952	13.5 %	-4.9 %
All Vendors	US$14,478	100.0 %	US$14,512	100.0 %	-0.2 %

IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, February 2006

Full Year 2005 Worldwide Server Systems Factory Revenue, (Revenues in US Millions)

Vendor	2005 Revenue	Market Share	2004 Revenue	Market Share	Growth 2005/2004
IBM	US$16,889	32.9 %	US$16,316	33.2 %	3.5 %
Hewlett-Packard	US$14,183	27.7 %	US$13,028	26.5 %	8.9 %
Dell	US$5,258	10.3 %	US$4,642	9.4 %	13.3 %
Sun Microsystems	US$4,879	9.5 %	US$5,129	10.4 %	-4.9 %
Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens	US$2,901	5.7 %	US$2,888	5.9 %	0.4 %
Others	US$7,178	14.0 %	US$7,135	14.5 %	0.6 %
All Vendors	US$51,288	100 %	US$49,138	100 %	4.4 %

IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, February 2006

Microsoft has announced partnerships with Vodafone and US mobile network Cingular, to delvier Blackberry-style push email solutions.

Targeting business customers in the first instance, the new Windows Mobile Direct Push E-mail solution was announced at the 3GSM World Congress in Spain.

Based around the Microsoft Windows Mobile version 5.0 operating system the Direct Push solution will initially kick off in France, Germany and the UK with Vodafone, though the solution is likely to be brought to Australia in good time.

The companies say the service will also be available to corporate and SMB customers in other countries during this year.

The system will allow emails and tasks to synchronise directly from Outlook, and Microsoft Office Excel Mobile and Word Mobile attachments can be viewed, edited and returned.

The service will integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

The Mobile v1240 and Vodafone v1640 will support the service and local countries can offer alternative handsets based on local availability.

The system will have a major advantage over the RIM Blackberry service which is currently in danger of a US shutdown due to a patent lawsuit. Rather than routing all emails via the RIM servers in Canada for re-processing, the proposed Microsoft service will work directly from corporate exchange servers.

The potential for mobile email services is widely seen as in the early adopter phase with senior managers already hooked up with access, the market believes widespread adoption to all levels of the enterprise has already begun.

At the server end, the push email capabilities were built into Microsoft Exchange server at its last update in October 2005, so many corporate email systems will only need to be switched onto the new service.

Linksys added Power over Ethernet to its latest Wireless-G access point designed for the great outdoors. The company also released an internal version also fitted out with PoE.

The access points can also be used as a bridge, a kind of “cable-less cable” to connect remote areas together, forming a single network with shared resources.

For businesses with both confidential and public access, the Access Points can be configured with multiple SSIDs and VLAN settings, keeping network traffic separated.  The access points are ideal for small businesses where there are multiple work areas separated by a short distance, or where new wiring would be difficult to install.

“Many of our VARs and small business customers were asking for wireless solutions that had PoE capabilities so they could extend their wireless access to more areas throughout their business,” said Allen Powell, director of channel sales for Linksys.  “These access points provide our customers with the capabilities they need to help make their businesses more productive. Linksys currently has over 70 wireless products in its portfolio and these are the first to provide POE capabilities.”

Both the indoor and outdoor access points support Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and the industrial-strength wireless security of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) which uses advanced encryption to protect wireless transmissions. WPA2 support will be available via a firmware download on the Linksys website by the end of Q1.

The internal version is priced at $469.95 while the external edition, the Wireless-G Exterior Access Point with PoE  is $1079.95.

For more information, visit www.linksys.com.