• Albert Simon Barsa, Jr., 1953-2008

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the AS/400 community has been shocked to learn, Al Barsa, one of the strongest if not the strongest proponent of the OS/400 platform, died while attending the COMMON midrange user group meeting that he was also a staunch supporter of. His death came as a shock, and the timing and location were nothing short of ominous. And ironic. Al was born in New York City, and lived outside of the city in Rye, nearby IBM’s Westchester County stomping grounds, and that means he was destined to have a certain kind of humor that those of us on the East

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• Reader Feedback on Goodbye, AS/400, Old Friend

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Brian Kelly’s historical tribute to the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform last week, Goodbye, AS/400, Old Friend, was a cathartic experience for a lot of us, especially those who were around during the System/3X days before the AS/400 came to market. As you might imagine, plenty of people do not agree with IBM’s merging and homogenization of its server platforms, which they see as detrimental to the AS/400 and its ecosystem. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback we received on that story, including one reader who was moved to poetry. I wrote this back in 2000

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• New Customer Sales Pump Up Lawson Software’s Q3

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application industry juggernaut Oracle maybe have given Wall Street a scare a few weeks ago when it reported application software sales that were lower than expectations, but over at Lawson Software, new application software sales are up smartly. We’ll have to leave it to the geniuses on Wall Street to figure out which is a better bellwether for the economies of the world. Maybe Larry Ellison was right and Oracle was just facing a tough compare in its most recent quarter? Anyway, over at Lawson, the combination of the Lawson and Intentia application software lines and a business that

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• ACOM Wants to Add 200 Resellers in Three Years

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You looking to make some money peddling solutions to your AS/400, iSeries, System i, and soon Power Systems customers? Then ACOM Solutions, the long-time maker of document management and content management software for the IBM midrange and Windows platform, wants to talk to you. The Long Beach, California, company put a stake in the ground, saying that it wanted to add 40 new reseller partners before 2008 is done, and add a total of 200 in the next three years. ACOM, which was founded in 1983 and has over 4,000 customers worldwide, has had resellers since its inception, and

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• IBM Buys FilesX for Continuous Data Protection Software

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Seeking to bolster its position in the continuous data protection (CDP) market, IBM last week acquired FileX, company located in Newton, Massachusetts, that was founded in 2000 by Jacob Herbst, who IBM midrange shops will remember as the cofounder of IIS, a maker of IBM-compatible SNA communications gear from back in the dawn of time. FileX is one of the myriad companies out there trying to make operating systems, their applications, and their data more resilient without having to go full-tilt-boogie with high availability system clustering. For a lot of customers, particularly small and midrange shops, a CDP solution

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• Windows and Linux Get a Skinny Blade Server from IBM

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is intent on getting its BladeCenter blade servers into the data centers and data closets of small and medium businesses, and last week continued the revamping of its blade products to make them more suitable for SMB shops with the addition of the HS12 entry Xeon blade server. The launch of the single-socket HS12 Xeon-based blade server follows a week after Big Blue announced the JS12, also a single-socket blade, but one that is uses IBM’s own dual-core Power6 rather than Intel‘s dual-core and quad-core Xeons. The HS12 comes in two flavors. The 8014 machines support a single-core

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• It’s Official: Now We’re Power Systems and i for Business

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The mystery is finally over. Last Wednesday, at the Town Hall meeting at the COMMON user group conference and expo, IBM‘s executives finally and formally did away with the System i and System p brands and changed the name of the i5/OS operating system for what is very likely to be the last time. I said “very likely” because this is Big Blue, after all. Many of us had a hunch that this rebranding of the box and possibly the operating system has been in the works for some time, of course. Last month, in an article called Bye

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• Power6 Chips Get i Support in New Entry and Blade Machines

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the consolidation of the Power-based System i and System p servers last week and the rebranding of the i5/OS operating system to simply i, or i for Business or IBM i 6.l if you can’t stand a single letter product name, Big Blue also announced repacked versions of the entry System p 520 and midrange System p 550 servers that came out at the end of January running AIX and Linux. These are now simply the Power 520 and the Power 550. IBM also did the smart thing and got a single-socket Power6 blade server, the JS12,

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• We’re Listening About and Acting For the i Platform, Says IBM

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan and Alex Woodie

  If there is one thing that a system vendor doesn’t want–particularly one selling a premium product at a premium price–it is to leave the impression with current and prospective customers that it is not listening to them. The reliability of the AS/400 and follow-on platforms is legendary, and in manufacturing quality and tech support circles, the IBM Rochester Labs where the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now the Power Systems-i 6.1 combo are developed and supported is also legendary. At the COMMON user conference last week in Nashville, Tennessee, IBM wanted to make it clear that most of the changes

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Bears’ Turns

  April 7, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  You’re not alone if you’ve become skeptical about the near term prospects for banks that have overpaid for assets. The banks are having trouble selling these assets because they can’t find trusting buyers. With so many people asking hard questions about bankers and financiers, this nosy, impolite attitude is becoming infectious. It is even spreading into other areas, such as information technology. Some customers are subjecting vendors’ claims about value to serious examination, and while this prudence might be practical, it isn’t pretty. We are not only in a bear market for many kinds of securities, we seem to be

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