• Agilysys Hires JPMorgan for Possible Sale

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a vaguely worded statement released by server reseller and application software provider Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the i ecosystem, the company indicated that it might be putting itself up for sale. The company, which is based in Boca Raton, Florida, has also deferred its annual meeting until the bankers at JPMorgan Chase finish up doing the financial analysis and laying out a strategy for the company. On June 16, the board of directors at Agilysys released a statement that said they had voted to expand the advisory role of JPMorgan Chase to work with the

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• How Long You Been in The AS/400 Game, and Are You Winning?

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I reminded you–as if you needed to be reminded–of the AS/400’s impending 20th birthday, which hit on June 21. It has been a long and sometimes wacky journey to get here, and it occurs to me as IBM is celebrating the AS/400’s birthday at the Rochester, Minnesota, lab and factory today on Monday, with Bill Zeitler and some customers flying out to the site, that many of us have long and interesting histories with the AS/400. As I was talking to some ISVs last week, I asked them their stories, which some of them told. Some people, as

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• IBM Releases CPW Ratings on Power 595 for i 6.1 Early

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the 20th birthday celebrations for the AS/400 platform today in IBM‘s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, the company will be announcing the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) performance ratings on the top-end Power6-based Power 595 running the new i 6.1 operating system. While the i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 operating systems are not going to be supported on the Power 595s, which span from eight to 64 cores running at either 4.2 GHz or 5 GHz, until September 9, the company wants customers to start planning their acquisitions now, since the Power 595 iron started shipping on May 6,

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• Looking for AS/400 Work? Check Out This Site

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of my word cloud stories based on data ripped out of the major online job sites, I got wind from one intrepid reader of The Four Hundred about a Web site that is expressly dedicated to categorizing and indexing jobs for the AS/400 platform and its progeny. So I thought I would tell you about it, as this reader suggested, just in case you haven’t heard of it. The site, as you might have predicted, is called Get AS400 Jobs, and it is located at www.getas400jobs.com. The site is run by Get It, a company located

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• IBM Says SOA Deployments Will Rise in 2008, But What About SMBs?

  June 23, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A new survey commissioned by IBM indicates that the deployment of service oriented architectures (SOAs) is on the uptake compared to previous years, and remains a top business priority for 2008, despite the tough economy. While large companies are moving forward with their SOA strategies, there is little evidence it is trickling down to the vast majority of IT shops that are small and midsized businesses. Results of IBM’s study, which was conducted by the Link Group, indicate that 50 percent of customers are currently deploying SOAs, while another 27 percent are piloting some sort of SOA project. More than

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• Ex-IBM Exec Takes Over as Bsafe CEO

  June 23, 2008 Dan Burger

  Bsafe Information Systems, a security software company that makes products for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, announced last week that Avi Cramer is the company’s new chief executive officer. Bsafe’s chairman of the board, Charles Benchabat, praised the selection of Cramer, saying the new CEO will benefit the company with his abilities to “forge strategy and strategic relationships.” Cramer comes to the Israeli-based company from IBM where he was vice president of sales, in charge of large enterprises in Israel. Prior to that, he was CEO and chairman of IBM Global Services Israel and was a member of the

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• Happy 20th Birthday, AS/400!

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, and probably into next, IBM, its partners, and its customers will be celebrating the 20th birthday for the AS/400 system, which came to market on June 21, 1988. It has been an incredible–and sometimes unbelievable–two decades for the venerable OS/400 platform, whose roots go back a decade earlier to the System/38, the first integrated system in the world with a relational database and easy-to-use programming language designed for people who speak business, not assembler or C or some other alien computer language. I am not sure how much celebrating Big Blue will be doing, particularly since a

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• The Power 595 Takes the Top TPC-C Benchmark Ranking

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a goal of all the makers of big iron boxes to push the performance envelope, and not just because vendors have big egos–oh, they certainly have those–but because their customers are always pushing them to push the performance envelope a little further. Sometimes, a lot further. For the past six years, the cold war in the big iron space has been especially intense between IBM, the Unix upstart and proprietary system leader, and Hewlett-Packard, the Unix stalwart and Windows and Linux upstart with a smattering of proprietary big iron. The two server makers have been leapfrogging

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• The World Can’t Get Enough Disk Array Capacity

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over. According to the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: iPhone Home

  June 16, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn’t distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there’s a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals. In a sense, Apple helped

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