... by not filing for product vouchers from the settlements won in states' courts. In California, for example, up to 15 million businesses, organizations and individuals qualify, but a mere 300,000 have applied so far to get the reimbursement, says Howard Yellen, CEO of Settlement Recovery Center LLC in San Francisco. Companies that negotiated contracts directly with Microsoft are excluded from the agreement.
But most companies bought through manufacturers, value-added resellers or down at the local Office Depot, and they all qualify. The settlement [QuickLink 40158] covers Microsoft operating systems and applications sold from 1995 through 2001. While Yellen says he can understand that an individual might not want to dig through his files to find a receipt for his Windows 95 upgrade, which the courts figure Microsoft overpriced by $29, it's just plain silly for "IT to sit on their hands" when they can collect. And big, in some cases. Yellen estimates that companies that barely upgraded at all during the seven-year period can still average $100 per user. For those that went through a steady upgrade process, it might be as high as $250 per user. The average, he says, runs about $165. The vouchers are good for most high-tech gear, not just more Microsoft products. Routers, Macintoshes, Sun workstations and even Linux laptops -- you can go shopping. But the right to file a claim expires on March 15, giving you less than three months to get in line. Microsoft doesn't believe you'll bother. That's why the company has allocated only about $800 million to cover the California agreement, and it's doubtful that all of it will be spent. Why? "IT managers think it's a pain in the neck," explains Yellen. Naturally, his company is willing to come to your rescue, but as Humphrey Bogart's cynical Rick told Peter Lorre's character in Casablanca, "For a price, Ugarte, for a price." In Yellen's case, it's 30%, but presumably without the dead German couriers. What that 30% gets you is a guarantee that your claim will be filed on time and correctly. And Settlement Recovery Center doesn't get a nickel unless, and until, you do. Even if you don't use its services, Yellen says you had better get off the dime. "It's nuts not file a claim," he concludes. "It's free money."
• While I'm on the topic of money, Silicon Valley start-ups think next year might be a good time to cash in. Salesforce.com Inc. has filed SEC documents stating its intent to go public next year. The San Francisco-based online CRM provider may be the second-most-anticipated initial public offering in 2004 behind Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc., which is rumored to be considering offering its stock directly to buyers over the Internet. Another IPO in the new year may come from security appliance maker ServGate Technologies Inc. in nearby Milpitas, Calif.
• No word on whether Covalent Technologies Inc. thinks going public is in the cards for 2004, but the San Francisco company has found a way to make nice bundles of money - selling proprietary software to manage open-source technologies. Marketing Vice President Jim Zemlin says 130 of the Fortune 500 so far have bought the Covalent Application Manager, which uses lightweight agents to report on the health of everything from Linux and MySQL to JBoss and Apache. Covalent will add Postgres, a popular open-source database, in the first half of next year, and it's also taking a close look at adding support for Bricolage, an open-source content management product. Zemlin says he's bullish about the near future because "it's only after IT builds out all the open-source that they realize it's got to be managed." D'oh!
• Jeff Silva, co-founder and vice president of Maxxan Systems Inc. in San Jose, says there are two hot areas in SAN management at the moment: data replication and virtual tape libraries. And that's just what Maxxan will offer its SAN management product users beginning this week with Version 4.0 of IPStor, which it resells from from FalconStor Software Inc. in Melville, N.Y. Silva says data replication demand is being driven by companies under the Sarbanes-Oxley gun; the virtual tape libraries offer a way to transition data from disk to "tape" without losing the speed of data recovery that disk-to-disk gives you. And you still get to use your current tape-backup program.
NetWeaver Plug-in Due
LogicLibrary Inc. in Pittsburgh has inked a deal with EPAM Systems Inc. in Princeton, N.J., to port its Logidex developer tool for application life-cycle management to SAP AG's NetWeaver development framework. Logidex already runs in the Visual Studio .Net and Eclipse programming environments.
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