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RTS Realtime Systems Group has announced that it now offers full connectivity to Instinet Chi-X Limited, the first order driven, pan-European equity alternative trading system.

By Staff Writer

The direct electronic access broadens RTS’s reach into the European equities markets and further builds on the growing distribution of the Chi-X system.

“With the addition of Chi-X and our smart order routing capability, customers can enjoy best execution in the European equity markets, helping them to satisfy their MiFID obligations,” commented Steffen Gemuenden, co-CEO of RTS Realtime Systems.

“By accessing Chi-X from RTS screens, customers can enjoy reduced market impact by spreading their orders across several liquidity pools, and they can identify new arbitrage opportunities by trading the same instruments between different venues.”

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Healthcare IT specialist Ardentia has announced that its Pathway Manager product has now been ordered by two further English National Health Service trusts to ensure compliance with new 18-week wait rules.

By Staff Writer

Pathway Manager will enable the National Health Service (NHS) trusts to monitor patients’ progress against the 18-week ‘clock’ and ensure compliance with the new rules.

Morecambe Bay NHS Trust and Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust have both chosen Ardentia’s Pathway Manager in order to meet national reporting requirements and manage patient pathways from initial GP contact to acute or other hospital treatment.

Pathway Manager, which has been developed with support from Microsoft, gives trusts a tool to monitor their compliance with the 18-week patient pathway rules. Fully implemented at Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust, with three further pilots at different stages of implementation, it is claimed to be the first successfully trialed solution of its kind within the NHS.

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Intel has posted a 44% jump in quarterly profit, despite continued microprocessor pricing pressure, and promised a stronger second half and beyond thanks to its new 45-nanometer chip-making technology.

By Rhonda Ascierto

While average selling prices for microprocessors “held up a little better than expected” during the second quarter and pricing pressure from Advanced Micro Devices would continue, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini was notably upbeat about the rest of the year, on a conference call with analysts.

Higher unit sales offset lower prices for the company’s main microprocessor business. Intel CFO Andy Bryant said the microprocessor pricing environment would continue to be fierce in the current quarter.

But Intel hopes to deflect that by continuing to focus on high-end servers and notebook products where large enterprise sales are driven not by price but rather by performance and energy efficiency. “You will see us extend our lead in power efficiency from where it is today, as we bring out 45-nanometer products,” he said.

Indeed, Intel’s move from the larger 65-nm manufacturing node to 45-nm will likely prove significantly beneficial. It promises a 15% to 45% boost in microprocessor performance, Otellini said, depending on the application and product type. It also promises about a 25% reduction in silicon die size, which means Intel can get more chip die on a single silicon wafer - and that translates into lower costs.

Otellini noted that Intel was already sampling all versions of its 45-nm products, including notebook, desktop and server chips to OEMs, which he said was “a good sign” of the readiness of its forthcoming product line. Expect announcements at the company’s annual develop forum in September. “You’ll see a bit more of the product line there,” he said. AMD only recently moved to the 65-nm node.

Intel posted a profit of $1.3bn, or 22 cents per share, for the second quarter, which was up from $885m, or 15 cents, a year ago. Sales rose to $8.7bn from $8bn. The numbers beat average analysts’ expectations.

However, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker disappointed Wall Street by posting gross margin for its second quarter at 46.9%, lower than its forecast of 48%. The execs said weak demand for NOR flash memory was the main culprit. “We’re more comfortable about second-half margin,” Bryant said. For the current third quarter, he forecast gross margin of 52% and revenue of between $9bn and $9.6bn.

Shares in the company fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading to $25.05 on the Nasdaq yesterday.

Our View

On yesterday’s call, Intel said it was hurt, again, by lower prices for low-end notebook chips. And until it ships its higher-end 45-nm products in volume, expected in 2008, the company won’t have a much of product line for the lower end of the market and will continue to struggle against AMD.

ADM, however, has its own problems. On yesterday’s call, the execs said Intel had sorted out its inventory issues in the current quarter but that there was excess inventory sitting elsewhere in the channel. That translates to AMD’s excess inventory. AMD reports its results tomorrow.

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The Salesforce.com Summer ‘07 release is all about the platform, with software-as-a-service evolving to platform-as-a-service, a move that will antagonize and incentivize big league players Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle.

By Angela Eager

“We are looking to push the next wave of on-demand…we are launching platform as a service, which is mainly about the ability to build any application on our platform,” said Tim Knight, technical director AppExchange EMEA. “You can build any complex business process on the platform and deliver it as an application service.”

“We are looking to push the next wave of on-demand…we are launching platform as a service, which is mainly about the ability to build any application on our platform,” said Tim Knight, technical director AppExchange EMEA. “You can build any complex business process on the platform and deliver it as an application service.”

With this release, due in August, the company is shooting straight for the large enterprise market. “It is all aimed at enterprise IT organizations who want to build applications for their users,” said Knight.

While the application development potential of Apex itself is the most obvious enterprise-enticing addition, support for multiple sandboxes as opposed to a single sandbox that allow organizations to develop, test, and train in a non-production environment is also a key extension. Organizations that wish to take advantage of this feature will have to pay an additional fee but the price tag has not been revealed.

Another significant addition is Enterprise Intelligent Workflow which allows customers to create complex rules and approvals by building formulas into workflows. This capability is important in terms of enabling complex back-office operations, for example, because it allows actions to be fired off on the back of workflow rules for anything from complex case assignment to price discount approvals.

The use of rules also means operations can be completely customized. “Balancing the books to currency conversion in ERP lends itself to Apex-style coding,” said Knight. Intelligent workflow is not an alternative to Apex but it does provide choice in terms of workflow creation and the point and click environment is aimed at business analysts who do not have coding skills.

Although the platform was the core of the Summer ‘07 release, the company did pay attention to its roots by adding further CRM functionality. The CRM service is still the means by which the company drives up its subscriber numbers, so it has to keep relevant new functionality flowing.

The new release introduces the search-based Mobile User Interface that allows users to search for contacts, accounts, and opportunities, plus other information from the main screen. Results are delivered in a navigable list grouped by category. In addition, users can access reports through Salesforce Mobile for the first time.

There is also support for rich content. Using the solution knowledge base in Salesforce Service & Support, users can illustrate solutions with diagrams, pictures, and other rich content by creating solutions using HTML. A custom report wizard enables users to create custom reports rather than tinkering via the standard report wizard.

The last major CRM functional addition is a collaborative customer portal that enables organizations to deliver a branded 24×7 self-service portal that can be customized for different users.

Our View

Salesforce.com’s services have always been front-office-heavy and that is one of the reasons it has been considered less strategic and more functionally limited than Oracle and SAP. One of the proof points for Apex will be whether partners use it to develop back-office applications, such as heavy-duty ERP or real-time transactional e-commerce applications, rather than just CRM extensions.

Although the on-demand platform and programming language puts back-office on-demand applications within reach, it remains to be seen how and when they will be taken up at the large enterprise level.

The move into the enterprise market, especially if back-office Apex-built applications take off, will put Salesforce.com into direct competition with SAP and Oracle. Although Salesforce.com has eaten into their sales, it has been in the highly fragmented small and mid-sized business sector, an area where they are still developing their strategies and where there is no clear leader. With this release Salesforce.com is trying to enter their core market of large enterprise and that is not something SAP or Oracle will take well to.

Salesforce.com might be the first to deliver an on-demand platform but it certainly will not be the only one, and the on-demand specialist is starting to feel Microsoft’s breath.

Releasing snippets of information about the forthcoming Titan offering at its partner conference last week, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer said Titan referred to a CRM application-development platform on which developers would be able to build customized applications that could run on their servers or on Microsoft’s own servers.

Although the Microsoft offering is not yet available, and even after launch it will take time for some of the planned functionality to be available such as running custom user applications within the Microsoft data center, it will be a direct challenge to Salesforce.com. With similar platform offerings, users will have a choice for the first time, which has the potential to cut into Salesforce.com’s growth.

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Oracle has announced the first big-name software vendor to support its Unbreakable Linux support program with the news that Symantec is certifying its Veritas software to Oracle Enterprise Linux.

By Matthew Aslett

While Oracle has announced vendor support for OEL in the past, including EMC and Hitachi, Symantec is the first of the big independent software vendors to certify its products with OEL, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with additional patches and bug fixes.

Specifically, Symentec announced that six Veritas software products have been certified with OEL and will be supported by both vendors via Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux support program. The six products are Storage Foundation 5.0, Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System 5.0, Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, Veritas NetBackup 6.0 Client, and Veritas i3.

Symantec also announced that it has worked with Oracle to certify Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System with Oracle Real Application Clusters on OEL as well as RHEL and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux.

Oracle unveiled its Unbreakable Linux program in October 2006, promising to match Red Hat support at half the price with its own enterprise-level patches and bug fixes. While Red Hat has largely shrugged off the impact and Unbreakable was slow to get moving, Oracle has demonstrated signs of success in recent months. In March the company named 26 customers for the support program, including IHOP, Timex, Diebold, Yahoo, GlobeCast, ABC Stores, Stuart Maue, Replacements, Mutual Materials, and Hays Medical Center.

Then in April the company announced the names of its first Unbreakable hardware and software partners, including heavyweights such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and Network Appliance, as well as 170 Systems, AppWorx, Egenera, Emulex, LSI, Patchlink, Pillar Data Systems, QLogic, and Synoran.

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By Kevin Murphy

Google has added to its portfolio of subscription-based services with the launch of Custom Search Business Edition, a hosted search engine for companies with large web sites.

While Google has always offered site-specific search, the CSFB gives customers a greater level of customization, such as the ability to brand the search page and remove Google’s ads.

The service can also be configured to better reflect how the customer’s site is organized, such as grouping by section or limiting which pages are indexed, the company said.

The service, which runs on Google’s existing infrastructure, is very reasonably priced at $100 a year for 5,000 pages, and goes up to $500 a year for 50,000 pages. Bigger sites need to call Google for pricing.

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By Matthew Aslett

The European Court of First Instance has confirmed that it will announce its ruling into Microsoft’s appeal against European Commission antitrust findings on September 17.

Europe’s second-highest court confirmed reports from early June that it will report its findings following Microsoft’s appeal against the EC’s record $613m fine and other remedies.

The court heard Microsoft’s appeal in April 2006 when the software giant argued against the sanctions imposed against it by the Competition Commission after it was found guilty of violating European competition laws in March 2004.

The commission originally imposed the $613m fine, as well as other remedies, including disclosing interface documentation to enable non-Windows servers to interoperate with Windows-based PCs, and offering PC manufacturers a version of the Windows operating system without Windows Media Player.

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