Computer Associates Launches Usage-Based Pricing
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As the program name suggests, Computer Associates&#39; new Measured Workload Pricing bases licensing costs on how much the system is sued rather than on total potential hardware capability.
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The PC company will sell a unit targeting education, midsized sized business, and government users.
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Sun adds several business partners to a plan to offer supercomputing centers that customers can pay to use according power consumed.
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It has been a busy few days at Computer Associates (CA) as the company first announced the acquisition of Netegrity and has now released details of a new licensing schema available on the company&#39;s large portfolio of mainframe software products.
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat has changed the pricing model for its SaaS-based system monitoring and added support for more software packages, the company said on Wednesday. The Red Hat Command Center service provides remote system monitoring for systems running operating systems including Solaris, Windows and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. VMware also is monitored. With the upgrade, Red Hat has changed to a price of $192 per server, annually, said Donald Fischer, Red Hat vice president of online services. Previously, pricing involved a complicated model based on usage after the fact and factoring in the number of services. "Now, it's just a basic annual subscription per server. We got a lot of feedback that that's just a simpler way to consume this kind of service," Fischer said. Also added to the service is basic system monitoring of all servers in a network when service is purchased for just a single server. Command Center will ping other servers just to make sure they are functioning. But additional capabilities, such as monitoring of FTP services and application servers, are restricted to the server monitored for the $192 price tag. Red Hat also has updated which software it can monitor, adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the JBoss 4 application server, the Oracle10g database and VMware ESX version 3. At IT outsourcer ITresources, the company is using Command Center as a network operations tool competitive to how it would use CA Unicenter, HP OpenView or Tivoli, said Chad Decatur, senior manager of IT infrastructure for ITresources. Command Center has been very affordable and reports for SLAs are easy to run, he said. "It doesn't seem to have a lot of latency," Decatur said. Also, it is easy to learn. "Somebody doesn't have to devote their career to learning the product," said Decatur.Â  Technology leveraged in Command Center was acquired from NOCpulse in 2002, Fischer said.
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Microsoft and Dell launched a new initiative program for their enterprise consumers that promise to be productive and cost efficient.
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Officials at Computer Associates (Quote, Chart) announced the availability of an application aimed at simplifying and strengthening Wi-Fi networks.
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The personal finance software will be offered as a service for $3 monthly.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  Inc. AMD.N has introduced a low-cost Internet access device  that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time  technology users in the developing world.
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ParAccel, a new company based in San Diego, this week released a database for midsize companies that combines a number of BI-oriented features at a low price point.The company is targeting the middle of the midmarket, not smaller businesses, according to vice president of marketing Kim Stanick. &quot;You have to have a certain amount of data before our product becomes compelling for you,&quot; she said.The software does not provide radical new technology, but ParAccel is touting its database&#39;s columnar orientation and MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities. The company argues that columnar databases are more effective for&#160;BI applications because users can query just the desired columns of a given row, saving bandwidth.&quot;That itself is a nice product set, especially with the price point,&quot; Stanick said.ParAccel is offering the database as a software package or incorporated into a hardware appliance. It can also be deployed as a &quot;drop in&quot; accelerator for existing SQL Server and Oracle databases. The company said the database is compatible with all major brands of hardware.A number of licensing options are available. All-in-memory systems cost $1,000 per gigabyte, beginning at 100GB. Disk-based systems cost $40,000 per node plus $10,000 per terabyte, starting at five nodes. Subscriptions cost $5,000 a month and up.ParAccel counts some notable names among its management team. One of Oracle&#39;s co-founders, Bruce Scott, is vice president of engineering.The startup originally positioned its product as an accelerator for SQL Server, but in response to market interest widened its focus to include data warehousing and Oracle&#39;s platform. This week&#39;s announcement doubled as the official company launch for ParAccel, which joins an increasingly crowded market for data warehousing.ParAccel also announced benchmarking figures for its database running on Sun Fire X4100 and Blade 6000 servers. According to the company, the combination set TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support) records for performance in the 1TB category. Sun and ParAccel are also partnering on a data warehousing product.
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Sun Microsystems yesterday introduced what it claims to be the industry&#39;s first pay-per-use pricing model for grid computing architectures.
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Intel and Motion Computing have developed a new tablet PC specifically for healthcare workers, with built-in protections against harsh chemicals and frequent drops. The C5 tablet is priced at $2,199 and has been dubbed a "mobile clinical assistant," particularly geared toward hospital environments.
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US chip maker Advanced Micro Devices has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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Google announced new pricing for its Postini hosted e-mail security and compliance management package on Tuesday in hopes of pushing more customers to consider a move to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering.Since adding expanded message filtering, encryption, and archiving tools to Postini's traditional anti-spam services in Oct. 2007 -- and parceling the same features into its Google Apps Premier hosted productivity suite -- the company has been able to convince a significant number of customers to begin working with the SaaS applications, according to Scott Petry, founder and CTO of Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million last July.However, in a move to make the tools more attractive for use in heterogeneous IT environments, and to encourage both enterprise and smaller customers to consider the offering as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise technologies, the company has revamped the product packaging and cut its overall pricing.In addition to pushing pricing for its flagship hosted anti-spam filtering service to $3 per user per year, Google-Postini has moved the price for its hosted virus detection, outbound processing, and content policy management services to $12 per user per year.For its compliance-oriented message data archiving, retention, and e-discovery services, which previously cost $100 per user per year, the firm has drastically cut pricing to $25 per year with the option to extend e-mail archiving at a cost of $10 for every additional 12 months of storage."We've got a healthy number of our existing customers running the newer content management, archiving, and discovery services, but we think that by adjusting pricing, we can get even more people get off their existing infrastructure and get onto managed services offered by Google," Petry said. "We won't be an acquisition that withers and dies; we're focused on expanding our reach and integrating the product line."The combined package of services is meant to compete not only with Postini's traditional rivals, including mail filtering capabilities offered by MessageLabs and Microsoft, but also with security and compliance products marketed by industry stalwarts like Symantec, Petry contends.A customer might have to buy Symantec's standalone anti-spam, anti-virus, messaging security, DLP (data leakage prevention) and policy management technologies to gain the same collection of filtering, archiving, and compliance automation capabilities offered in the Google-Postini SaaS package, according to the executive.By driving down pricing and tying the tools tightly together, Google should be able to convince some large customers to make a shift to SaaS and be able to help smaller companies gain access to tools they may not have been able to afford previously, he said."More than a battle against any of these other guys, this is about getting more companies off of the traditional model of deploying software and appliances to address these problems," Petry said. "We think that time is on our side, and more people than ever are ready to move to thin, in-the-cloud services; we're not trying to get everyone converted overnight, but we have set of technologies to help those who are ready augment their current infrastructure."Google plays up POstini's security benefits As with other security SaaS services, Google-Postini also maintains that its expanding set of message filtering tools can offer customers a unique advantage in terms of protection via the company's ability to see new threats arriving on the networks through its individual users and then leverage intelligence about any emerging threats across its entire client base.In addition to being integrated directly with Google's Apps technologies, Petry also stressed that the company remains dedicated to providing its messaging security services to users of other vendor's e-mail and collaboration infrastructure, including Microsoft's Exchange platform and IBM's Lotus Notes architecture.Some industry watchers may still question the abilities of hosted services providers like Google-Postini to handle complex security tasks such as DLP, but the executive maintains that the SaaS model actually gives his company a major advantage."This is about the democratization of these tools, making them cheaper and allowing more people to use them and protect their investments in existing appliances," he said. "Financial services companies have spent billions trying to do DLP, but now other companies without the same level of internal sophistication or budget can get us for less; we can minimize the amount of hardware necessary for DLP and allow them to use their existing appliances to integrate with us via API."Google-Postini partners said that it may still be early in the game in terms of selling the message filtering, archiving, and discovery tools to enterprises, but they contend that SMB customers should view the pricing move positively.Joe Vaccone, president of Excel Micro -- which resells Google-Postini to other services providers that cater largely to SMBs, said that many customers are both looking for new features to address issues like compliance and to move away from other e-mail filtering vendors who may be getting squeezed from the market."A lot of the older anti-spam vendors are getting clobbered and looking to exit, so I think we might see a lot of companies coming over to Postini because they can get a lot of functionality at a single price point that they may not have been able to obtain before," said Vaccone. "We already see a lot of people looking for new alternatives in this space based on the performance of what they've been using."Vaccone said that Excel Micro's reseller customers are also seeing more of their own clients inquire about Google's Apps platform as licenses to older products, namely Microsoft's Exchange and Office technologies, run out. "We do see some migration to Google Apps going on and believe it will continue," he said.Industry analysts agreed that Google-Postini's revamped pricing and integrated SaaS tools should find favor with SMBs first but said that the work necessary to convince enterprises to buy-in will likely take longer.The Google-Postini marriage carries a lot of credibility in terms of the involved technologies, but large customers will need to be convinced that the company is serious about growing its enterprise footprint, said Rebecca Wettemann, analyst with Nucleus Research."Google-Postini is definitely looking to grow into the enterprise, and spam and e-mail security services like this are ideal for delivery on-demand, but there remains a real challenge for them to gain the trust of enterprises and make them confident that they are a serious player," Wettemann said."The more they can highlight references to existing Postini customers who have moved into the new services, or point to new enterprise customers, the easier it should become," she said. "But they need to show how these innovations they claim deliver value, that it's more than Google throwing cash at some interesting technologies."
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  has introduced a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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A new 24-hour help desk will cover non-Dell or non-PC problems--for a charge.