Fujitsu will stick with Unix to keep IBM in check, exec says

Doing battle in the $9 billion Unix server market is not for the timid. Designing a competitive microprocessor is a costly business, and with the Unix market seemingly in permanent decline it's easy to see why smaller players might drop out.

But Fujitsu says it's in it for the long haul. Despite its small market share, the company is committed to developing its Sparc64 chip, and it thinks it has a role to play in keeping IBM from becoming too powerful, said Noriyuki Toyoki, Fujitsu corporate senior vice president and the head of its server division.

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IBM already has one giant "cash cow" from its dominance in mainframes, he said. If IBM came to dominate Unix in the same way -- it already has more than half the market, according to IDC -- the industry and its customers would be worse off, according to Toyoki.

"Two cash cows would make IBM much, much stronger. We have to stop it. That would not be good for us and it's never good for the customer. Customers need alternatives to get the best value," he said in an interview this week at Oracle OpenWorld.

Fujitsu is a close partner of Oracle. They each develop a version of the Sparc processor, and they jointly design systems and resell each other's products.

Oracle has been finding a wider role for its own Sparc designs lately, but Toyoki said the future of Fujitsu's Sparc64 is secure. The Unix market may be shrinking, but it's still large enough to support multiple RISC architectures, he said.

He brushed off a suggestion that Fujitsu could walk away from Sparc64 and use Oracle's chips instead. "Frankly, we would not use Oracle's Sparc chips in our servers," Toyoki said.

Oracle's chips perform well, he said -- "they're very efficient, especially for throughput operations" -- but Fujitsu's customers need the RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) capabilities that bleed into Sparc64 from its mainframe systems.

Sparc64 is also important for Japan. A version is used in the country's massive K supercomputer, and Fujitsu is "the last Japanese company doing processor development. We'd like to keep doing it," Toyoki said.

Fujitsu released its new M10 Unix servers earlier this year, with its latest Sparc64 X processor. An upgrade to that chip, Sparc64 X Plus, should be available to customers in the first half of next year, Toyoki said.

It's a similar design to the Sparc64 X but boosts the clockspeed to a maximum 3.5GHz and adds on-chip accelerators to make tasks like encryption run faster. It also adds a Fujitsu technology called Coherent Memory Interconnect, or CMI, which Toyoki said will drastically reduce latency times for scale-out clusters.

CMI also helps speed up Oracle's RAC (Real Application Clusters) technology, Toyoki said, and he hopes Oracle will use CMI in its own systems. "We're now discussing that with the Oracle engineering group," he said. CMI helps relieve a bottleneck that occurs in scale-out systems even when using high-speed Infiniband interconnects, he said.

Toyoki is also looking ahead to Sparc64 XI, which will likely have more cores, faster clock speeds, and move more software tasks into hardware to speed performance, he said.

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Check (for Android)

Pros Free. Easy to setup and use. Tracks multiple account types. Scheduled payments and reminders. Pay anyone by bank account, debit card or checking account.

Cons No landscape view. No consistent one-step return to home page. Minimal online help. No categories. Bottom Line The Android version of Check lets you easily and quickly dispatch payments to anyone. Because all of your accounts are in one place with their total balances displayed, you have access to a real-time overview of your finances.

By Kathy Yakal

The concept that drives Check (formerly Pageonce) is not new. Intuit Quicken, Microsoft Money, and Yodlee were all early providers of online banking and bill-pay. Then Mint.com came along, providing access to personal finance accounts without all of the extras that the others offered. Its graphical interface and ease of use made it a hit.

All of these services worked similarly. You supplied your sign-in credentials for your online financial accounts, and you could then download cleared transactions. Services that supported bill-pay provided tools for setting up payments to creditors and other individuals and businesses.

Check does primarily the latter, but it does it pretty well. It's been around for a few years, and the company has intentionally kept the app simple. It's far from a full-blown personal finance manager like Quicken. Rather, it's about bills. You can manage your bill-paying tasks from your Android phone (also available for the iOS and through a browser). It simply lets you schedule and pay bills —pay anyone who has an email address or mobile number, in fact—and keep track of your account balances.

A Popular App
Check claims roughly nine million users, likely drawn to the app for its mobile capabilities, since there's no real advantage to using it through a browser. Its competition consists primarily of your own financial institutions' websites, which generally offer more than basic bill-paying, but which often lack Check's real draw: access to all of your money accounts: investments, bills, credit card, loans, etc. You can even hook up to the companies that hold your travel rewards and get your current balance. Check has developed relationships with the most prominent billers in each category, so you only have to enter your login credentials to create a link.

Check's home page is exceedingly simple. It displays current totals for cash, bill obligations, investments and credit card debt, from which you could get an instant—rough—estimate of your net worth, assuming you've linked absolutely every account you own. Two other links on the opening screen take you to credit card offers and to the optional credit-monitoring service ($6.99/month). Returning to this page is a challenge sometimes, as clicking the Check logo in the upper left often doesn't take you to the home page. You'll have to use the Android's back button, repeatedly, sometimes. And you can't view data in landscape mode.

Making Payments
Click on the "+" sign in the upper right corner to start connecting to banks, billers, investment accounts, etc. Find the specific company you want to connect to, tell Check how you want to pay (credit or debit card, or bank account), and enter your user name and password. That's it: You're now connected and can start viewing balances and paying bills.

When you click on the Bills icon after you've set up at least one, the screen displays your total and minimum payments due, with a list of those you've already set up and when they're due. Click on the Schedule button to set up your regular payment. You can even see your bill details, which is unusual in a bill-paying app, oddly enough.

Payments are delivered in 2-5 business days, though you can send a same-day payment for $14.99 and a two-day payment for $2.99. Standard payments sent via bank are free. Credit or debit card payments incur a service charge of 4 percent.

Little Help, But Not Much Needed
Check lets you make payments to billers who aren't included in its database, like your landlord, your health club or your brother-in-law. You enter the business or individual's cell phone number or email address. The recipients then receive a message telling them that there is money waiting for them. They have to create an account by entering a user name and password, then their bank routing and account numbers. Once they've done that, the funds are dispatched.

Check updates your accounts once daily, but you have the option of doing a manual refresh. And it offers four reports: bill history, all transactions, payment history and a pie chart that illustrates what percentage of your money is going to bills, credit card, loans, insurance and miscellaneous recipients. This chart would be more meaningful if you were able to assign categories to transactions.

Mint.com is our Editors' Choice because its apps—for iPhone and iPad, Android phones and tablets—are smarter than the competition's, both in their use of mobile technology and their implementation of financial tools. It helps you make intelligent spending decisions wherever you are, which is what you need when you're out and about. Still, there are Check has its points, too. Aside from the somewhat funky navigation, there's nothing difficult about setting up and using Check, which is good, due to the dearth of online help (phone and email support are available). It's a simple app that doesn't offer a ton of features, but it does online bill-pay as well as anyone. Even if you don't use it comprehensively, the easy mobile access to bill payments may save you some late fees.

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