• IBM Tweaks Power System 595 Upgrades for System i 570 CBU Shops

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Capacity BackUp variants of the iSeries and System i kickers to the AS/400, which were initially launched in September 2003 to cut the price of a hot standby server in a high availability cluster, were one of the bright spots in the product line as HA software became gradually more commonplace among OS/400 and i5/OS shops in the past five years. Cutting the price on redundant hardware helped boost HA adoption, which is great. This is all good. But apparently there are some customers with i570 CBU machines who want to move to real Power 595s, not the Power

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• Lawson’s Q4 Profits Slammed by Investment Writeoffs, Sales Up Though

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to hedge your bets in this world is a tricky business, and in the global economy, it is also unfortunately a necessary business, too. But those hedges, as we are all learning once again as we watch the news each day, don’t always pan out. Sometimes they fall flat. And so it has been with some auction-rate securities that application software maker Lawson Software invested in to try to make the most of its money. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 ended May 31, Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Lawson was able to boost its sales by 9.5 percent to just

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• Micro Focus Acquires Liant for COBOL and PL/I Tools

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, from the looks of things, the market for COBOL compilers and related tools to extend COBOL applications to the Web is coming down to three big players–IBM, Micro Focus, and Fujitsu and a few smaller ones–Envyr, Infinite Software, LegacyJ, and Veryant. We’re down to six players because late last week, Micro Focus continued its acquisition binge and bought Liant Software. Liant, which is based in Austin, Texas, is the creator of the RM/COBOL compiler and toolset, which allows mainframe and AS/400 COBOL applications to be ported over to Unix, Windows,

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• IBM Adds New Power Systems to AS/400 and iSeries Removal Program

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a deal that I think has been running since 1988, when the AS/400 was launched. (Well, maybe not that long, but sometimes it feels like it.) To help encourage customers first with vintage AS/400s and then iSeries gear as time rolled by to move to newer machinery, IBM has been offering customers a no-charge service to remove the older gear from your site when you get a new box. Of course, this is not always about altruism. IBM–and its former IBM Credit Corp and current Global Financing unit, which sells refurbished iron as well as features for vintage gear–has

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• IBM Lowers and Then Raises Ultrium Media Prices

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, I think that IT vendors are just trying to drive us all crazy. On July 1, IBM put out an announcement letter (308-800 to be precise) that showed the company had significantly lowered the price of its Ultrium tape media for various tape drives in the TotalStorage family of products. As usual, I went through all the feature codes, explained what they are, and built a table that explains how deep the price cuts were. This is why you keep me around, I suppose. Anyway, that table looks like this: IBM’s July 1 Ultrium Media Price Cuts Machine Feature

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• Agilysys Appoints New Board Member, Selects Special Committee to Weigh Options

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In mid-June, server reseller and application software provider Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the i ecosystem and is a significant driver of Power Systems and Modular Systems sales for IBM, said that it had hired JPMorgan Chase to explore the possible future strategies of the company, including the possibility of selling some or all of the company. Those plans are moving ahead. The Boca Raton, Florida, company that they are all focused on has shifted away from IT distribution and toward supplying IT solutions to end users, hoping to go where the profits are higher. What

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• The Power Systems 550 M50 Versus Its Predecessors

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM said that it was mostly concerned with preserving the price points of its i-class machinery as it made the transition from the System i to Power Systems i Editions, the company wasn’t kidding. With the user-priced entry Power 520 M15 and M25 editions, customers are seeing some price/performance improvements, but with the larger Power 550 M50 machine, the bang for the buck is not appreciably different from its predecessor System i 550 boxes. You can debate for yourself whether or not this matters all that much, but I think it does matter. With every successive generation of systems

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• IBM Rejiggers Development Tools on Entry Power 520 i Editions

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At the prices that IBM has historically charged for the AS/400 and its successor systems, you’d think that the compilers and related application development tools would just come as part of the system, much as the DB2/400 database did–and still does in the most recent DB2 for i incarnation inside the i 6.1 operating system. But, when Software Group was created more than a decade ago, the former system product groups started losing control of the software stacks that ran on their systems–that were for all intents and purposes the systems. That is why the i platform has been

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• Job Word Cloud Redux: The AS/400 Sees Some Improvement

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, in a story entitled Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs, I gathered up some job posting data from three of the big job sites in the United States–Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster–as jobs related to programming languages and operating system platforms. Some readers offered me some suggestions for improving my searches, and I requeried the data to see what effect those suggestions had. As it turns out, using a simple “AS400” query with no slash mark does indeed find a few more jobs on some of the sites

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• As I See It: The Digital Leader

  July 7, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Remote management, like remote viewing, is a specialized skill with a small practitioner base and an even smaller number of players who can actually do it successfully. Leading a tightly knit group of people, all of whom work in the same facility–and with whom you can directly interact–is one thing. Leading groups in a distributed world, where people are separated by continents and cultures, and with whom you have no personal contact, is quite another. And although management schools and how-to theories abound, there is really no place to learn the complexities of managing people who aren’t there. So what’s

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