Briefs: April 17, 2006

LETO: GTSI WEATHERED ERP 'STORM'

Leto said he is confident the company's auditing firm, Ernst and Young, will amend its opinion on the company's future prospects once GTSI receives its new revolving credit facility. GTSI said that it has received a commitment letter from a lending syndicate for a $125 million senior secured revolving credit facility.

Leto took the helm in February and said he has met with the company's vendor partners to assure them of GTSI's ability to continue going forward. He said GTSI encountered a "perfect storm" in 2005 including a "Katrina" like ERP implementation that strained customer relations and led to 100 percent turnover in GTSI's purchasing group and a 55 percent attrition rate for the entire company. That ERP system is now stable, he said, and the worst is behind the company.

The solution provider announced a loss of $5.6 million for its fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, 2005, compared with a profit of $2.75 million in the year-ago period. Sales fell 15 percent to $279.2 million from $327.9 million.

INGRAM INCREASES CREDIT FOR 600 VARs BY TOTAL OF $6.5M
Ingram Micro has increased the credit lines of more than 600 solution providers by a combined $6.5 million, according to the distributor.

The VARs selected for the increase primarily sell to SMB customers and are considered small or midsize businesses themselves, according to Ingram Micro.

About 100 solution providers with credit lines of less than $25,000 will have their credit lines doubled. More than 500 will receive an increase of $5,000 or $10,000, according to Jim Manley, area vice president of VAR sales.

Meanwhile, Nimax, a division of Ingram Micro focused on auto ID/data capture (AIDC), point-of-sale (POS) and radio/frequency identification (RFID) products, has signed a deal to distribute bar-code and wireless data capture products from AML.

SALESFORCE.COM TO ACQUIRE BIZ-APP DEVELOPER SENDIA
Salesforce.com said last week it is acquiring Sendia, a wireless business application platform company, for $15 million in cash, and plans to use the new technology to "mobile-enable" third-party applications in its environment.

The hosted software provider said it's already using Sendia's technology to bring in-house and third-party applications to a wide range of mobile devices, including BlackBerries, Treos and PocketPCs.

The Sendia technology promises to bring full Web 2.0 functionality, including "mashups," even to tiny screens, said Kendall Collins, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com, which previewed the capability last Tuesday.

The goal is for developers to offer one definition of their application and not worry about the target device. All of the transcodingthat is, the fitting of key information into the display at handwill be done on Sendia/Salesforce.com infrastructure, Salesforce.com executives said.

In theory, that means all Salesforce.com AppExchange applications from partners such as Bluewolf Group, CRM Orbit, Ascendus Technologies, eCredit, Remend and Visual Mining will be able to take advantage of this capability.

To leverage this capability, developers and users must pay an additional monthly fee unless they are Salesforce.com unlimited customers. In that case, the mobile access is included in their $195 per-user, per-month payment. Users on the Team, Professional and Enterprise versions will be charged $50 per month extra if they want to use this capability.

SUN TO SUPPORT WINDOWS THIN-CLIENT ARCHITECTURE
Sun Microsystems this quarter plans to ship new software for its thin-client architecture that will include support for Windows applications.

The new offering, slated to ship at the end of May as part of the Sun Ray Software package, will offer full-screen access to Windows applications, said Alan Brenner, senior vice president of the Client Systems Group-Software at Sun.

Access to Windows Terminal Services is possible thanks to a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that Sun developed in-house, Brenner said. Sun licensed Microsoft's RDP specification last year after the companies pledged to work together more closely on interoperability, he said.

Sun's thin-client architecture currently supports Solaris and Linux applications. The addition of Windows functionality will open up a variety of options for companies relying on thin clients, according to Brenner.

"With Sun Ray [Software], you can now do full-screen Windows, Linux and Solaris," he said.

Sun Ray Software is priced at $99 for a single license, $1,780 for 20 seats and $7,900 for 100 seats. A beta of the software with Windows support is available for download on Sun's Web site.

Also last week, Sun unveiled two new thin clients. The Sun Ray 2 is billed as a low-cost option, and the Sun Ray 2 FS includes support for dual monitors running at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and a built-in fibre port for increased security. Pricing is $249 and $499, respectively.

Both models are about the size of a typical router and include a smart-card slot, USB slots and a SIM card slot. Brenner said the units draw about 4 watts of power, considerably less than a typical PC. The products are expected to ship in late May or early June.

NETCONTINUUM FIREWALLS, GATEWAYS INCREASE TENFOLD
NetContinuum this week is launching a new lineup of Web application firewall and gateway products, offering 10 times the performance of their predecessors.

The new NC-1100 family also brings improvements in deployment and manageability compared with NetContinuum's first-generation NC-1000 series, said Varun Nagaraj, president and CEO of the company, which was founded in 1999.

The new products act as application proxies and aim to protect Web applications and the data they use. "When customers expose their custom Web applications to the outside world, they inadvertently expose all kinds of sensitive data," Nagaraj said. "There is a growing recognition of the risk."

In addition, caching and compression features in the NC-1100 product line help speed up performance and improve application availability, he said. The new products are scheduled to ship in May starting at $30,000.

AMD 1Q EARNINGS LED BY STRONG SERVER, MOBILE CPUs
AMD easily exceeded Wall Street expectations for its first-quarter earnings as company executives touted strong sales in server and mobile CPUs.

AMD reported earnings for the period ended March 26 of $184.5 million, or 38 cents a share, compared with a loss of $17.4 million, or 4 cents a share, in the same period last year. AMD's loss last year was largely blamed on trouble in Spansion, its flash memory business. The company spun off Spansion in December.

Analysts had expected earnings of 29 cents per share, according to Thomson/First Call.

Revenue in the first quarter was $1.33 billion, up from $780 million in the first quarter of 2005. The 2005 numbers exclude $450 million in revenue from the Spansion flash business.