• IBM Announces New System i5 Collaboration Edition

  May 15, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Slowly but surely, I think that IBM is coming around to the idea that if it wants to win the business of small businesses, it has to make its System i5 machines less expensive. I also think that IBM wants its established Notes/Domino groupware and emerging Workplace collaboration software to drive more sales of System i5 boxes. And that is why Big Blue has created the System i5 Collaboration Edition, which is a less-expensive i5 box aimed at supporting various Lotus-branded software. With Ray Ozzie, the brains behind Notes client and Domino groupware software (and the competing Groove collaboration software),

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• TMW Systems Gets New CEO

  May 15, 2006 Alex Woodie

  TMW Systems, a developer of OS/400 and Windows dispatching software, last week appointed a new president and chief executive officer. David Wangler will take over control of the Beachwood, Ohio, company from Ken Thompson, who announced his retirement. The change in command at one of the “Big Three” developers of the software that runs our nation’s trucking companies was expected. Thompson and fellow TMW Systems executive Dave Mook took the reins of the company just last fall when Tom Weisz, the company’s founder and then its CEO and chairman, sold the company to two private equity firms, Wachovia Capital

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• IBM Acquires BuildForge to Fill Gaps in Change Management

  May 15, 2006 Alex Woodie

  IBM has announced its acquisition of BuildForge, an Austin, Texas, developer of lifecycle tools for automating and streamlining the development process, particularly as it relates to compliance initiatives. Big Blue plans to incorporate BuildForge and its products into its Rational business. BuildForge was founded in 2001, and has attracted about 65 buyers of its BuildForge products, which include FullControl, a build and release management tool that supports Rational ClearCase, CVS, Perforce change management systems, and development in Java, .NET, and other languages; FullThrottle, a release “acceleration” tool for turning “idle servers into optimized build clusters;” and Prism, which lets

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• New COBOL-to-SAP NetWeaver Adapters On Tap from Software AG

  May 15, 2006 Alex Woodie

  COBOL remains one of the most popular languages for programming business applications, but that doesn’t mean COBOL apps have “plug-and-play” compatibility with today’s generation of e-business applications. To help these organizations make their COBOL play nice with SAP‘s middleware and ERP applications, Software AG last week unveiled a new group of certified adapters. According to Gary Barnett, a research director at software consultancy Ovum, COBOL remains the most widely deployed programming language in large businesses, and accounts for 75 percent of all computer transactions and more than 200 billion lines of code. What’s more, this COBOL code base

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• IBM Adds 13 New Members to OpenAJAX Group

  May 15, 2006 Alex Woodie

  IBM‘s new initiative to build an open source community around AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development technologies continues to grow. Last week, IBM added 13 new members, including Adobe, SAP, and TIBCO, to its OpenAJAX community, bringing the total number of participants to 28. IBM created OpenAJAX in February 2006 as a way to expand the adoption of AJAX and evolve AJAX tools and runtime environments. OpenAJAX members are planning a summit this month to discuss the present usage of AJAX, its growth into new markets, and to create a business and technical roadmap for moving

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• Sun Microsystems Sues Azul Systems Right Back

  May 15, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in March, upstart startup Azul Systems, the maker of network-work attached processors for running Java applications, launched a lawsuit against Java owner Sun Microsystems. And last week, Sun sued Azul right back. Azul has been tight-lipped about the suit it filed in the U.S. Federal District Court for Northern California, but back in March it said it was “fending off predatory attacks” from Sun. Azul asked for declaratory relief from unfounded claims that Sun is alleged to have made against Azul, including patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. Azul also claimed that Sun repeatedly has threatened

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• Big Blue Raises Rates on Low Rate Financing Deal

  May 15, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After mothballing its Low Rate Financing deal at the end of 2005, IBM brought it back to life in mid-January, offering customers with squeaky-clean credit very attractive 2.9 percent financing rates on its servers. This was considerably lower than the prevailing street prime interest rates, which were around 7.5 percent at the time. Last week, IBM jacked the rates up by 2 points. Under the Low Rate Financing deal, which is offered by IBM’s Global Financing unit, customers can finance deals ranging in size from $1,000 to $1 million for System i5, System x, and System z servers as well

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• As I See It: Betrayal

  May 15, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Corporations find it hard to think of China as being populated by actual human beings. China is not viewed as a nation, or a people, or even a system of governance. Through corporate eyes, China is, first and foremost, an enormous market that is therefore populated by needs. Being a supplier of “needs” is problematic to the degree that it focuses on the object of the need and ignores the humanity of the needy. When commerce abandons conscience, market share trumps social impact, profits take precedence over scruples, then rules are bent and statutes are circumvented. The more repressive and

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• System i5 Security: What’s New, and What the Future Holds

  May 15, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  For lots of reasons, the push for IT to implement better and better system and data security continues to be at or at least near the top of the to-do list for most IT shops. While certain industries–financial services, healthcare, and government, for example–have been grappling with tightening up security for years, virtually all IT organizations today, regardless of size or industry, are being forced to take a closer look at just how secure their systems and data really are. For one thing, the regulatory environment (SOX, HIPPA, PCI standards, to name just a few) are mandating many of the

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• IBM Delivers iSCSI Connection, Pushes Blades to OS/400 Shops

  May 15, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As it promised it would last fall, IBM has delivered an iSCSI link into the System i5 server line that will replace the special Integrated xSeries Adapter cards that it has used for a number of years to allow external xSeries X86 servers to plug into disk arrays under the skins of the iSeries and System i5 servers, using them as their primary storage. In addition to the iSCSI links, IBM announced a push to get its BladeCenter blade servers into i5 shops and various other new I/O adapter cards. The new iSCSI adapter is based on the Internet SCSI

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