BI gives fashion jeansmaker a leg up

CHICAGO - True Religion Apparel Inc. sells 4,000 different styles of jeans at prices starting at $200 and running up to $350. For some of Computerworld 's non-fashion-victim readers, the question may be, "Why would anyone spend that much money on denim pants?" For John Dohm, vice president of IT for the Los Angeles clothier, the question is: "What makes a customer buy this pair instead of that one?" For the first couple of years, True Religion answered that question through the founders' instinct and taste. But with more than 62 True Religion stores supplying copious point-of-sale data, True Religion has embraced business intelligence software to help it reach its goal of $1 billion in annual sales. That was enough to bring the company from zero sales in 2002 to its current run rate of $300 million in revenue per year. Dohm shared his experience deploying BI tools at True Religion during a speech Tuesday at Computerworld 's Business Intelligence Perspectives conference.

For another, IT tends to over-invest in BI projects, resulting in a "weak value proposition." That's more problematic for BI than similar-sized ERP projects. A former Deloitte & Touche director, Dohm said, "BI is a good idea, but almost never done right." For one, companies rarely do a strong study of their business processes before embarking on their BI deployment, he said. While ERP usually has a strong ally in the chief financial office, BI projects usually don't enjoy any "organizational air cover," he said. Before Dohm's arrival, the company used a small order management system. Dohm sayid he was lucky, because he was hired by True Religion not only to roll out a modern BI system, but also to understand the business processes beforehand to make sure it was done right.

Since he's taken over, the company has replaced it with Oracle Corp.'s E-Business Suite version 12, along with a tool called Aris created by Software AG. Preferring to run the "lowest footprint data center humanly possible," Dohm has just three employees in his IT team. "The goal is to have no more than eight in IT as we grow to $1 billion in revenue," he said. The key to that, he said, is to outsource wisely and to be disciplined enough to say no to his bosses when they demand some ad hoc report right away. "The service mentality that most of us in IT have is dangerous," he said. "Infinite flexibility doesn't usually come with an infinite checkbook." Dohm also doesn't believe in fighting users who go around IT's approved reporting and dashboarding tools in favor of the tried and true. "If everyone is doing things in Excel, then Excel is your BI strategy," he said. "Let them use Excel to the point where it runs out of gas, because then they will switch to your higher-end product." With Oracle E-Business Suite deployed, Dohm said he's finally been able to answer mysteries such as why "every Easter, our Dallas store sells out of white denim."

13 geeky 13th anniversaries for Friday the 13th

2009 marks the 13th anniversary for a slew of seminal tech industry events, so here on Friday the 13th, is a brief look back at developments both lucky and unlucky. (For our annual Geekiest 25th Anniversaries, click here) 1. Motorola introduces the StarTAC Wearable Cellular Telephone, the smallest and lightest mobile phone at the time at 3.1 ounces.  2. IBM's Deep Blue chess computer beats world champ Garry Kasparov for the first time, though Kasparov came back to win the best of the 6-game match. 3. Telecommunications Act of 1996  – the first overhaul of telecom law in 62 years - threatened to introduce competition in the local loop, improving upon the original breakup of AT&T. Things didn't quite work out though, as a slew of venture backed competitive local exchange carriers largely took a beating by the established Bells, who mostly wound up merging with each other. Juniper was reborn this year, introducing the concept of "The New Network," which involves the further opening up of the JUNOS operating system, among other things. 6. The first version of the Java programming language debuts, introducing the concept of write-once, run anywhere. 7. On May 18, 1996, under the Arch in St. Louis, the creation of the first X Prize (now called the Ansari X Prize) competition was announced.  The $10 million-plus prize competition focuses on such innovations as private space flight.  8. Nintendo 64 game system is released, with Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 the first two games released outside Japan.  9. Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, is born in Scotland. Of course, years later technologies such as VoIP and wireless took the market in an entirely different direction. 4. Speaking of the Bells, SBC Communications and Pacific Telesis Group merged in a $16.7 billion cash/stock deal back in 1996, one in a string of deals that essentially led to most of the Bells being reunited in one way or another. 5. Juniper Networks is born, resulting in a routing and switching company that has proven to be a thorn in Cisco's side. Less impressive: She dies at the tender age of six-and-a-half, about half that of many sheep.   10. The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law in 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson.

NeXT never was very commercially successful, but its software has been influential, even working itself into Mac OS X.  12. A slew of network infrastructure companies got their start in 1996. Some, like Extreme Networks, are having a rough time of it, while others, like F5 Networks, are sailing along. Thirty years later, President Bill Clinton signed off on the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments, bringing the FOIA into the electronic age.  11. Apple buys Steve Jobs' other company, NeXT Software, for $400 million-plus, bringing Jobs back into the fold, where he's done OK for himself. Others, such as Foundry Networks, have been bought out.  13. Dot-coms started to emerge, including Sabre Holdings subsidiary Travelocity, which has outlasted so many others. Follow Bob Brown on Twitter

SAP earnings rise as revenue continues to slip

SAP's revenue fell in the third quarter, but earnings rose - although neither figure was as high as analysts had hoped. Revenue totalled €2.51 billion (US$3.66 billion) for the third quarter, down 9 percent on the year-earlier figure, the company reported Wednesday. The company said it expected the decline in software and software-related service revenue to continue.

Net income rose 12 percent, to €435 million, yielding earnings per share of €0.37 (US$0.54 as of Sept. 30, the last day of the period reported). Analysts had expected earnings per share of $0.58 and revenue of $3.84 billion. The company's increase in enterprise support charges has been a sore point with customers over the last year. Software revenue saw the sharpest decline, slipping 31 percent to €525 million, while support revenue rose 14 percent to €1.33 billion. Overall, software and software-related service revenue fell 3 percent to €1.94 billion. The decline in revenue from software and software-related services will continue, and may accelerate, for the rest of the year, SAP said. At constant currency rates, the fall would have been 5 percent, SAP said.

At constant currency rates, it expects such revenue to decline by between 6 percent and 8 percent. Software and software-related service revenue fell 13 percent in Germany, but rose 6 percent in the rest of SAP's Europe, Middle East and Africa region, the only area to see a growth in such revenue. Consulting revenue fell 22 percent to €484 million, and training revenue dropped 43 percent to €60 million. Performance was particularly disappointing in emerging markets and Japan, SAP said. The company's cost-cutting program is proceeding apace, and it has shed staff faster than planned.

The nature of deals is changing: SAP saw a trend towards more smaller deals, but is also signing longer-term contracts, it said. It originally announced its intention to reduce headcount to 48,500 by the end of 2009, a reduction of around 3,000 posts over the course of the year, but by the end of September the company had only 47,804 staff, it said Wednesday. The company cut just over 4 percent of research and development staff, but slashed professional services and sales and marketing staff by around 11 percent. SAP has cut around 539 jobs in Germany since the start of the year, or 8.4 percent of its workforce there, and 3,732 jobs worldwide, or 7.2 percent of the workforce.

US company burned by China Web filter plans rival product

A U.S. company whose software code was allegedly stolen in China by a controversial, government-backed Internet filtering program will hit back by launching a rival product for a low price in China, the company said late Sunday. The Solid Oak program, called CyberSitter and targeted at parents, will be offered in languages including Chinese in a version due out next month. Solid Oak Software, which has said its code was copied in a program that China ordered be bundled with all new PCs, is exploring ways to offer its own Web filter for free or at a very low price in China, company President Brian Milburn, said in an e-mail. A Chinese version of the product would compete with Green Dam Youth Escort, the program that Solid Oak says copied its code and that China originally ordered PC makers to include with all new computers sold in the country from July this year.

But under heavy pressure from foreign PC makers and the U.S. government, China indefinitely postponed the mandate just hours before it was set to take effect. The Chinese government had paid the program's developers to allow all PC buyers to use the software for free for one year. Major PC makers including Lenovo and Acer began bundling Green Dam with new PCs until this month. The program also used blacklists apparently lifted from Solid Oak's software, according to the company and a group of U.S. researchers. The program, which China said was meant to protect children from online pornography, was also found to block politically sensitive material such as negative references to a former Chinese president. One file found in the Chinese program contained an encrypted version of a years-old Solid Oak news bulletin, according to the researchers.

Green Dam came under fire for concerns about system stability in addition to user privacy and freedom of speech. Solid Oak, which is based in Santa Barbara, California, is preparing legal action against PC makers that shipped Green Dam, though an update to the program in June removed some of the allegedly infringing elements. One Beijing high school recently removed the program from its computers after finding that it conflicted with software used for grading and attendance tracking. Bryan Zhang, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, one of the designers of the Chinese software, declined to comment on the allegations of code theft. Green Dam "is a conglomeration of whatever components [the developers] managed to steal ... or otherwise appropriate from various sources, and duct tape together in the form of an alleged piece of software," Milburn wrote in his e-mail. "They should be utterly humiliated, not just because they stole much of the core functionality, but even more so because they intentionally inflicted such a miserable product on a population of innocent computer users," Milburn wrote. The new Solid Oak product will have a Chinese user interface available and a filtering function that the company reworked after much of its old proprietary code appeared online.

That is the ultimate goal," company spokeswoman Jenna DiPasquale said in an e-mail. The filtering will be entirely URL-based, avoiding the need to translate keywords into Chinese. "We are working on a way to release it for free.

64-bit Windows safer, claims Microsoft

Windows users running 64-bit versions of the operating system are less likely to get infected by attack code, Microsoft's security team said yesterday. According to Microsoft's data, the 64-bit version of Windows XP was 48% less likely to be infected than the 32-bit edition during the first half of 2009; PCs running Vista 64-bit, meanwhile, were 35% less likely to be infected than Vista 32-bit. But that doesn't mean they won't, countered an outside security researcher. "64-bit Windows has some of the lowest reported malware infection rates in the first half of 2009," said Joe Faulhaber of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center in a post to the group's blog yesterday. "64-bit malware is still exceedingly rare in the wild." Faulhaber cited statistics gleaned from Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRC), a free malware detection and deletion utility the company updates and pushes to users monthly. Windows 7, which was not included in the data for the first half of this year because it had not been released in final form, also is available in both 32- and 64-bit editions.

Windows 64-bit is safer to run, he argued, in large part because malware, which is written for the much more widely used 32-bit versions of Windows, is "confused by 64-bit." That's not necessarily true, said Alfred Huger, formerly with Symantec and currently vice president of engineering at security start-up Immunet . "There's a lot of 64-bit malware," said Huger. "They can run their code in compatibility mode, or they can compile it for 64-bit. Faulhaber noted that Windows 7 64-bit is the dominant flavor of that new OS as he touted its security. "Most PCs shipping with Windows 7 come with the 64-bit versions of Windows," he observed. The reason they're not is that there's still not a lot of 64-bit deployment. But right now, [64-bit] is just not as opportune a target as 32-bit." It's relatively simple for criminals to customize their attacks against 64-bit systems, Huger maintained. "We almost never see just one [piece of malware] on a machine. There's 64-bit malware out there, just like there's Mac OS malware out there.

It's almost always eight or ten or a dozen," he said. "Most malware gets on your system because you put it there, and one of the things most attacks do is download a bootstrapper that then downloads other malware. PatchGuard is included in the 64-bit versions of XP, Vista and Windows 7. He also mentioned WOW64 (Windows On Windows 64), the lightweight emulation mode that lets 64-bit versions run 32-bit code. "The additional protections built into 64-bit Windows will make it harder for malware to make the 64-bit jump," Faulhaber said. It's easy for attackers to have their bootstrapper check whether the OS is 64-bit, then grab 64-bit malware to download onto the PC." In the end, said Huger, there just isn't a "compelling reason" for hackers to bother with 64-bit, but there's nothing inherently more secure about a 64-bit operating system. "Malware is just software," he observed. "It can execute on 64-bit just like other software." Faulhaber argued that 64-bit Windows was safer by design than the less-powerful 32-bit version, ticking off such measures as PatchGuard, which makes it more difficult for malware to tamper with the operating system's kernel. While Faulhaber trumpeted 64-bit XP's and Vista's - and by extension, Windows 7's - ability to sidestep more malware, the bi-annual Microsoft Security Intelligence Report he cited said that some of the lower infection rates might have nothing to do with the OS, and everything to do with the user. "Infection rates for the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista are lower than for the corresponding 32-bit versions of those platforms, a difference that might be attributable to a higher level of technical expertise on the part of people who run 64-bit operating systems," the report concluded. "This difference may be expected to decrease as 64-bit computing continues to make inroads among mainstream users." Nor did Faulhaber go so far as to claim that 64-bit Windows, even Windows 7, was stout enough to do without security software. "64-bit Windows needs 64-bit anti-malware software like Microsoft Security Essentials to protect the whole computer," he acknowledged, touting his company's free security suite, which shipped in late September .