• Utility Service/400: Making the iSeries into a Different Market

  January 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As 2005 was drawing to a close, there was a lot of activity surrounding a new twist on a very old idea: the compute utility. Well, to be more precise, utilities are an old idea that were perfected during that industrial revolution for water distribution (and other related public water works such as sewage disposal), transportation, energy distribution, and communications. The question that the IT community is pondering is whether it is possible or desirable for there to be a utility or a collection of utilities for data processing, data storage, networking, and collaboration. For over a year, Sun Microsystems

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• China Tops the United States in IT Exports, Says OECD

  January 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A chilling but not unexpected statistic has just emerged from a report the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: China was in 2004 the biggest exporter of information technology, surpassing the United States for the first time. IBM’s sale of its PC business to Lenovo Group last year certainly helped buoy the Chinese market for computers and communications in the 2005 data, but the OECD, which is a Paris-based organization of the biggest economies in the world that was founded over 40 years ago, indicates that the sale to Lenovo will not hardly register in the growth the Chinese

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• SSA Sales Come in as Expected in Q1, Profits Squeezed by Acquisitions

  January 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  SSA Global, one of the dominant providers of ERP software for midrange customers, recently released its financial results for its first quarter of fiscal 2006 ended October 31, 2005, and the company’s acquisition strategy has certainly helped bolster its top line. According to the company’s filings, SSA saw sales go up by 7 percent to $177.5 million in the quarter, with software license sales up 26 percent to $52 million. SSA’s acquisition of Epiphany closed on September 29 of that quarter, and that unit’s sales contributed $6.4 million in revenues and $2.4 million in software license sales in the

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• Lawson, Intentia Extend Merger Deadline to April 30

  January 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in June of 2005, Lawson Software, one of the oldest OS/400-related ERP software providers in the market and one of the few midrange suppliers that made the transition to Unix and Windows without severely hurting itself, decided to acquire Intentia International, another long-time OS/400 vendor that had branched out from RPG to embrace Java as it became a dominant player in the European ERP software market. With the ERP software space consolidating like crazy, midrange players like Lawson and Intentia, which hails from Sweden, who hope not to be crowded out by other and also merging players,

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• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Moves Forward with New Release

  January 3, 2006 Dan Burger

  Companies with J2EE and Web application aspirations owe more than a passing glimpse to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) 1.0 release that became generally available in mid-December. For the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to implementation of a universal development platform, this becomes an important stepping-stone along the way to providing a universal development platform for tools integration. Already WTP has been adopted by the leading J2EE suppliers, including IBM, BEA Systems, Borland, JBoss, and ObjectWeb. This full-version release has solidified the platform API for third-party extension and provides documentation improvements

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• IBM Makes Bowstreet, Micromuse Buys

  January 3, 2006 Alex Woodie

  IBM announced a pair of acquisitions just before the year-end holidays: Micromuse, a provider of network and server monitoring software, and Bowstreet, a developer of Java-based tools for writing Web portals. Both of the vendors’ products support the iSeries, among most other major platforms. IBM plans to operate Micromuse as a business unit within its Tivoli brand, where its Netcool suite will be used to bolster IBM’s capabilities for monitoring voice over IP and video on demand monitoring, according to Al Zollar, the former iSeries general manager who is now heading up Tivoli. “Today’s networks are no longer

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• Looks Like iSeries Announcements Coming in Late February

  January 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Of course, there is still no official word on this from IBM, but the latest word on the street during the holiday season was that Big Blue would be making its expected iSeries announcements in February. The consensus of rumors seems to be pointing to an announcement sometime in late February, but as you all know so well, this is all subject to change. The core of the iSeries announcements that are due in February will be i5/OS Version 5 Release 4, the latest update to the OS/400 operating system. IBM has been letting out bits and bites of

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• As I See It: Balance

  January 3, 2006 Victor Rozek

  This is the time of year that invites assorted foolish commitments to change and self discipline. And if you are among the legions of the overworked, you may be contemplating a little more balance in your life. Well, good luck. What manager wouldn’t be thrilled to have his 60-hour-a-week star employee morph into a 40-hour-a-week plodder. Face it, working for a salary is like playing baseball: The game has no time limit. You’ll be standing under the hot sun until your team records 27 outs. Then you can go home. The revolutionary act of announcing that you intend to work

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• What’s in Store for 2006? The iSeries Community Predicts

  January 3, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  One of the best games for the end of one year and the beginning of a new one is sitting around the fire with friends, sipping egg nog, munching on cookies, feeding Aunt Millie’s fruitcake to the dogs (who actually like it), and reminiscing about times past. But even more fun (especially after the libations have mellowed the guests) are the predictions of what’s to come in the new year. Folks in the iSeries community are no slouches at prognosticating their own futures, and several of them were kind enough to share their thoughts–some of them obviously tongue in cheek–with

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• Waiting for Linux to Pull Its Own Weight on the iSeries

  January 3, 2006 Dan Burger

  In a few weeks, IBM will be delivering an update to OS/400, which has been i5/OS for the past year. Everyone knows its reputation for handling heavy-duty workloads by virtue of its impressive architecture and long list of applications. As an iSeries customer, you firmly believe that you get what you pay for. For instance, you get the capability to run multiple operating systems. In the past, OS/400 may have been enough. But as you look ahead, and certainly as IBM looks ahead, Linux could begin pulling more and more weight. What can Linux do for you? Nothing if you

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