• New IBM Deal Gives Decent Trade-In Rebates on Old Gear

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I reported in the last week’s issue, IBM is getting set to raise monthly maintenance fees on AS/400 servers by 9 percent or so starting July 1. This maintenance hike is the stick that Big Blue often uses to move customers ahead to newer iron. The stick is usually accompanied by a carrot, and last Friday, IBM put that side of the carrot-and-stick promotion out. Specifically, IBM announced a trade-in promotion that gives companies who exchange their AS/400 or iSeries servers for a new System i machine. This trade-in promotion is meant to represent the approximate fair market

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• Job Posting Areas Created on the IT Jungle Forums

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At the request of a number of IT Jungle Forums users, we have added a new Job Postings section to the forums. Headhunters and companies sometimes abuse forums by posting open job positions all over the place, and we are having none of that. We want to help people get work and companies find good people, so there are some ground rules. We have created specific areas for people looking for jobs and companies looking for people, and in our no-nonsense fashion, these areas are called Job Postings–People Looking for Work and Job Postings–Companies Looking for People. Anyone who

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• CA Buys Cybermation to Bolster System Management Software

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Software powerhouse CA, formerly known as Computer Associates but joining the ranks of silly companies that think an abbreviation is a proper name for a corporation, announced last week that it had acquired cross-platform job scheduling specialist Cybermation for $75 million in cash. While CA has divested itself from a lot of its OS/400-related products (including the PRMS and Interbiz suites, which were sold off to SSA Global), it still has the Synon 4GL development language, now called AllFusion and now, by virtue of the Cybermation acquisition, CA has a tool that can hook into OS/400 and i5/OS

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• RAID Buys Assets of Zzyzx–Formerly eStorage, Formerly BCC Technologies

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A small innovative storage array maker called RAID Incorporated has acquired the assets of another storage maker with a presence in the iSeries market and with the improbable name of Zzyzx Peripherals. In November 2005, Zzyzx got a toe in the OS/400 market when it acquired eStorage, both of which hail from California. (Zzyzz was located in San Diego, while eStorage was located in Irvine.) The reason why eStorage was interesting to the iSeries market was because BCC Technologies, the midrange storage company, was rebranded as eStorage in March 2003 after founder David Breisacher left the company and the

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• Raz-Lee Security, Advantage International Announce iSeries Partnership

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Nanuet, New York-based Raz-Lee Security, a security software provider for the iSeries and System i server lines, said last week that it had inked a partnership with Advantage International Systems, an IBM business partner located in Palm Harbor, Florida. Advantage International was founded a decade ago and provides turnkey iSeries and System i solutions aimed at customer relationship management, business intelligence, and high availability clustering workloads. The company is a reseller of iTera‘s Echo2 product for HA clustering of OS/400-based servers. The company also sells the NGS-IQ business intelligence software from New Generation Software and the System

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• New IBM Deal Gives Decent Trade-In Rebates on Old Gear

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I reported in the last week’s issue, IBM is getting set to raise monthly maintenance fees on AS/400 servers by 9 percent or so starting July 1. This maintenance hike is the stick that Big Blue often uses to move customers ahead to newer iron. The stick is usually accompanied by a carrot, and last Friday, IBM put that side of the carrot-and-stick promotion out. Specifically, IBM announced a trade-in promotion that gives companies who exchange their AS/400 or iSeries servers for a new System i machine. This trade-in promotion is meant to represent the approximate fair market

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• Oracle Puts Out FAQ File on Its iSeries Plans

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I told you about how Oracle and IBM were working together to rebuild the channel for the former J.D. Edwards ERP application suites, the RPG-based World suite and the cross-platform EnterpriseOne suite. In that story, I discussed with IBM how Oracle might be encouraged to fully support i5/OS with its future Project Fusion ERP suite, which is a future Java-based suite that Oracle is working on and which is supposed to be the kicker for the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JDE EnterpriseOne, and JDE World software suites. What I didn’t know last week was that Oracle had

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Patent Lather

  April 17, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  A while ago, in 1449 to be precise, King Henry VI of England issued a written proclamation bearing his official seal that for 20 years granted Flemish-born John of Utynam the exclusive right to make stained glass using his special process. Many other similar declarations, called litterae patentes or letters patent, meaning open letters, followed, each granting a monopoly to its holder. Only some went to inventors. Then and now, not every invention is patentable. In the Elizabethan era, you couldn’t patent a toilet bowl; today you can’t get an unequivocal patent on software in Europe. In both cases,

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• Red Hat Buys JBoss–Your Move, Novell

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There have been rumors since early this year that open source and commercial Java middleware distributor JBoss was in play, and that software giant Oracle was pursuing the company as well as Zend Technologies, which distributes a popular open source alternative to Java called PHP. JBoss was definitely in play, but the company has agreed to be acquired by commercial Linux distributor Red Hat for $350 million rather than Oracle, which oddly enough puts Novell in a funny position. Under the acquisition deal, Red Hat is giving JBoss, which is a privately held company that is headquartered in Atlanta,

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• Next Up on the System i: Python

  April 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Strictly speaking, the popular open source software stack that is abbreviated as LAMP should really be shortened to LAMPPP, since the stack is comprised of the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and the three programming languages made popular for Web programming: Perl, Python, and PHP. While the OS/400 platform has informally supported Perl for years, and is just now getting official support for PHP, what you might not know is that two Python variants also run natively on the box. Of course, running and having support–which means IBM‘s official blessing and

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