Lawrence Harvey Search & Selection – IT Recruitment / SAP Recruitment & Datawarehousing Recruitment

Sun Microsystems has sold its mainframe rehosting software business to migration specialist Clerity Solutions. The move will add to Clerity’s portfolio aimed at firms looking to rehost, migrate or modernise applications to meet new business demands.Sun is undergoing a restructuring exercise that is set to see 2,000 jobs axed as it battles to cut costs following a series of poor quarterly results.Clerity has acquired the business’s intellectual property assets and taken on Sun’s mainframe rehosting staff. It will now directly sell and license Sun’s Mainframe Transaction Processing, Mainframe Batch Manager, 3270 Pathway and Migration Toolkit software packages.Following the sale, Sun will continue to support users while their current service contracts last, but new service contracts will be only available from Clerity.

Transitive, a start-up known for its Apple Rosetta software, will soon release software that lets programs written for Sun Microsystems Sparc chips also run on Intel Xeon and Itanium chips. When using Linux, Transitive's software also lets customers run their own scripts, not just commercial-quality applications. There's no word yet on pricing but the Xeon version will launch this quarter and the Itanium version should be ready later this year, officials said. Transitive also has Silicon Graphics and IBM as partners, so it's quickly becoming the little start-up that could. But is there enough demand for this sort of thing?

Microsoft isn't the only company offering a near-complete application stack. Oracle is pitching its own stack, as is SAP and -- to an extent -- IBM. These companies insist that partners and buyers want the ease and integration of a software stack from one company. Some corporate buyers might hesitate to put so much of their IT budget into one vendor, however. Oracle's purchase of PeopleSoft, then Siebel Systems and, to a lesser extent, its buyout of smaller players like Oblix and Retek are part of its aggressive attempt to build a soup-to-nuts stack. Microsoft's acquisition roster includes small security and e-mail companies like FrontBridge, GeCad and Sybari SAP’s acquisitions include A2i, Khimetrics, Praxis and others. IBM has likewise been on a multiyear buying binge to bolster its information management and network management portfolios.

According to new data from AMR Research, Oracle has done a much better job keeping acquired applications customers and winning new ones than many early critics expected. According to the numbers, Oracle made impressive gains in one of the fastest growing categories of applications: Human capital management, or HCM. HCM includes software for human resources departments that automates tasks like performance reviews and handles paperwork around hiring new employees. Oracle took over the top market share slot for the first time, thanks to its PeopleSoft acquisition, according to AMR. By the end of 2005, it had 25 percent of the market, while SAP had 23 percent -- though the lead will narrow in 2006, when SAP's share will rise to 24 percent as Oracle's holds steady, AMR says.PeopleSoft had been the gold standard for HCM, so the gain isn't entirely surprising. But the jump was larger than if PeopleSoft and Oracle's pre-merger revenues were lumped together. In 2004, Oracle sold US$324 million of HCM software, and PeopleSoft sold $864 million. But in 2005, the combined company sold nearly $1.4 billion in HCM software. "One plus one actually equaled two-plus," says Jim Shepherd of AMR.

Can SAP leverage its dominance in ERP into other areas? Can Microsoft ride its Windows/Office juggernaut into ERP/CRM and other enterprise apps for big companies? It's a race. And don't forget that Oracle has bought its way into the second largest enterprise apps company on the planet. Watching these guys duke it out should be interesting. Should IBM rethink its self-proclaimed infrastructure status and move more into applications itself, it could be a real battle royale.

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