Sony, Xerox, and Linux highlights

BY FAR the most interesting booth at Expocomm 2004 Argentina was the one by Sony. They were showing almost everything, from very large plasma displays, to the Centrino-powered VAIO VGN-s150F notebook (yet strangely their brochures promoted another P4-based models). Finally, they were also showing off their "Advanced Intelligent Tape" (AIT) tape backup system.

The Sony notebook(s), here the VGN-S150F, enclosed in an aquarium-like glass box (have they heard of anti-theft systems?):

Sony's AIT tape backup solution

And their big plasma screens:

Xerox had a great, product-oriented booth, showing several network laser printers, and the amazing Xerox Phaser 8400 solid ink printer. Let me tell you, the output from this printer can be easily mistaken from a page of your favorite magazine. The output is not only amazing, it's inexpensive as well. The company claims the cost per color print to be in the USD $0.097 per page. It has a maximum speed of 24 pages per minute. This one was being offered at the show for $1950 greenbacks, not too bad considering the US price is between $1000 and $1200 depending on networking features.

Finally, there was plenty of linux activity at the show, first, a local company by the name "point horizon" which was advertising several linux-based solutions, the most interesting called "pointshare", a groupware suite (collaboration, mail and shared agenda) that the company claims can replace Microsoft Exchange 5.5, doesn't need licence payments per client, and allows you to get rid of the Exchange servers, even if the users wish to remain using MS-Outlook on the client side.

Redhat was there as well, promoting their "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" distro, running on dual-xeon servers "kindly provided by Intel", one sign read. Interesting.

Finally, Thymbra was promoting the SAP ERP system on Linux. They claim 40% to 80% savings in cost compared to SAP running on RISC hardware and unix, and claim to have Cadbury Stani, ExpoFrut Argentina, Loma Negra, and Mercado Libre among their local customers running SAP on Linux.

µ