Plus: Nextel announces wireless VPN service; AT&T CEO says wireless biz must start generating bucks; Relational database market shrinks; Java backers propose standards changes; Web services spur hardware costs.
A U.S. House subcommittee has approved a bill that would permanently extend a moratorium on some Internet taxes, including Internet access taxes, despite Democrats’ concerns over the effect on mom-and-pop businesses and whether the bill ensures a tax ban on DSL access.
The Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act prohibits the 7,500-plus taxing jurisdictions in the U.S. from creating taxes unique to the Internet, including bit taxes, which tax Internet information as it moves across servers in many taxing jurisdictions. A current moratorium on such taxes, first passed in 1998, expires Nov. 1, and the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law voted to send the bill on to the full committee with a recommendation of passage.
Subcommittee Chairman Chris Cannon (R-Utah) pushed for the bill by saying an Internet access tax would hurt ISPs and hinder the growth of e-commerce, which makes up about 1% of U.S. retail sales, during a time when the Internet sector is struggling.
Nextel last week announced a mobile VPN service for companies that want to set up secure wireless connections. Nextel is teaming with IBM to offer VPN support with IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Connection Manager software. Nextel users that want to make their corporate networks available to wireless users can deploy the WebSphere software to interface with Nextel’s IDEN wireless network. Users can connect to their corporate network via Nextel’s backbone with a wireless modem or a handheld device that acts like a modem and is connected to a laptop. Nextel’s Wireless Business Solutions works with 40 software and equipment providers, but IBM is the wireless carrier’s first VPN software partner.
The challenge facing companies in the wireless technology industry is to stop talking about whiz-bang futures and start generating cash, AT&T Wireless CEO John Zeglis said last week during an opening keynote presentation at the Global Wireless Summit conference in New York. His own company has struggled with profitability since spinning off from AT&T in 2001: AT&T Wireless posted a $2.3 billion loss in its most recent fiscal year.
“Today’s wireless capabilities already surpass most peoples’ wireless reality,” he said. “The main thing all of us in the wireless industry have to demonstrate now is an ability to execute to create real value.” AT&T Wireless sees landlines as its main competition. Zeglis’ goal is to drive per-minute wireless costs down low enough to undercut the prices of fixed-line access, which he expects to help in persuading customers to adopt wireless service as their primary phone-communications method.
Worldwide revenue from new licenses of relational database management systems fell 6.9% last year, to $6.6 billion, Gartner said last week. Despite flat revenue, IBM overtook Oracle as market leader with revenue of $2.4 billion. It now holds a 36.2% market share, Gartner said. Strong growth on IBM’s DB2 for the zSeries compensated for a double-digit decline on DB2 for the iSeries.
Oracle’s 2002 revenue from its relational database management system was $2.2 billion, down 20.5% from 2001, and its market share slipped to 33.9%. It did, however, remain the market leader in the relational DBMS market on distributed systems (Unix and Windows servers), with 40% of the market compared with IBM’s 24%, Gartner said.
Several major backers of Java have proposed changes to the Java Community Process, the Java standards body, in a move designed to speed the development of Java standards and increase the transparency of the process. The proposal calls for opening future Java standards to public scrutiny earlier in the development process, and pushing back a vote on proposed standards until after a second review period, Onno Kluyt, director of the JCP Program Management Office at Sun, said last week.
A Java Specification Request goes through several review phases and has to be approved by the JCP executive committee at various stages in the process. Currently, the first review is carried out by JCP members and is followed by a vote by the executive committee. Under the proposed new system the first review will be open to the public, and the vote will be pushed back until after a second review period, which also is open to the public.
As organizations move to adopt Web services, IT managers will end up spending more money on hardware than on software, an IDC analyst said last week. Speaking at IDC’s Enterprise ServerVision conference in San Jose, analyst Vernon Turner predicted that the move to Web services would create a $4.3 billion hardware market by 2007. Software spending will reach $3.4 billion, he predicted, while spending on services will account for $7.5 billion, nearly half of the $15.2 billion IDC expects to be spent on Web services four years from now.
IDC estimates that total spending on Web services will approach $3 billion this year. The IDC analysts had expected to find that Web services would typically be deployed on existing hardware, Turner said, and that the Web services hardware market would not be significant. “In fact, the data has shown the exact opposite,” he observed. “We were actually surprised when we saw the hardware numbers.”
