• Details Emerge on Project Prometheus System i Promotion Efforts

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in June, The Four Hundred provided some insight into a secret project to promote the System i platform, which is called Project Prometheus. There are many different people and organizations involved in this effort, since Prometheus is attempting to organize the members of the OS/400 and i5/OS community and focus their resources on promoting the unique value of the System i platform. Prometheus is a lot of things to a lot of people, but the first fruits of the labors of the people behind the scenes will be announced at the System i Town Hall meeting September 17 at

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• Avnet Creates Training Portal for Resellers of IBM Wares

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an effort to try to make it easier for its downstream partners to sell IBM hardware, software, and services, master distributor Avnet has created a sales-oriented training portal called Ignition Online. While there is a wealth of information about IBM’s products out there on the Web, knowing the technical feeds and speeds of a product is not the same thing as knowing how to sell it. Just figuring out all of the intricacies of IBM’s sales tools and materials, much less its channel processes and incentives, is enough to drive a partner to sell Windows–er, drive a partner nuts,

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• Better Online Solutions Reports Mixed Results in Q2

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange connectivity solution provider Better Online Solutions continues to try to balance its revenues and costs after it divested itself recently of several business units, and in the second quarter of 2006 it reported a decline in sales, in part related to those divestitures. For the quarter ended June 30, BOS said sales were $4.5 million, down 39 percent from the $7.3 million it booked in the same quarter a year ago. However, by divesting of those businesses–relating to thin client and various software utilities–BOS was able to substantially drop its costs of sales and research and development, and managed

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• Tango/04 Posts Best First-Half Financials in Its 15-Year History

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The OS/400 and i5/OS ecosystem is populated by untold hundreds of privately held software companies that do not talk very much about how much revenue they are generating or how much profit they are making. And because of this, it is very difficult to get a sense of how the overall software business related to the OS/400 and i5/OS platforms is doing. But every now and again, one vendor lets us take a peek into its books. Last week, as Tango/04 Computing Group was celebrating the 15th year since it was founded, the company crowed a little bit about how

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• IDC Pegs IBM, HP as Juggernauts in Performance and Availability Management

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the big areas in the systems management software space is the subset of the market that has to do with managing the performance and availability of servers and operating systems. It may be hard to believe, but when you add up all of the data centers in the world, according to IDC they spent $4.1 billion on such software in 2005. That is an increase in sales of 6.7 percent, which is considerably larger than the growth in the server market itself, attesting to the fact that management of servers is in many ways a bigger problem than

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• Trucking Software Maker TMW Systems Buys Rival Maddocks Systems

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trucking application software provider TMW Systems announced last week that it has acquired one of its rivals in that market, Maddocks Systems. Because both companies are privately held, they did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition. TMW is well known in the trucking industry, and supports two sets of applications: The TL2000 suite for OS/400 and i5/OS servers and the TMWSuite for Windows boxes. TMW is based in Beachwood, Ohio. The company, founded in 1983, has been a long-time member of the OS/400 ecosystem. For the year-ended June 30, TMW booked sales of $28.7 million, and the

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• Venture Capitalists Offer to Take NetManage Private

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In what must seem like a big relief, midrange and mainframe host connectivity software provider NetManage has been approached by two venture capitalists who want to take it private. In late 2004, one of NetManage’s biggest competitors, the former WRQ, was taken private by venture capitalists Golden Gate Capital, Francisco Partners, and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners. And in April 2005, these same companies bought another NetManage rival, Attachmate, creating AttachmateWRQ. And then, about a year later, AttachmateWRQ shelled out $495 million to acquire systems and security management software provider NetIQ, to create a new private company simply called Attachmate,

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• Buyers Expect Softening in Server Spending in 2006

  September 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a survey released by market analysts at TheInfoPro, spending on servers could be softening this year. TheInfoPro conducted in-depth surveys with 133 IT shops in the second quarter, and has released a new report that compares server spending from last winter and the middle of this year. The survey respondents indicated that their projections for server spending for the full 2006 year have fallen sharply by the middle of this year compared to late last year, when these same shops were asked what their server spending plans were for 2006. Last fall, a little more than a

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• You Have Life Jackets, But Have You Ever Put One On?

  September 11, 2006 Bob Butcher

  The rain continued to fall heavily for the fifth consecutive day. I woke up the morning of June 28, and since I wasn’t feeling well, I called in sick. I told my boss to give me a shout on my cell phone if there were any problems at work. I remember dozing off on my couch with the Weather Channel chirping in the background. A few hours later, I heard the beeping of the emergency broadcasting system on the television indicating that severe flooding was taking place in most parts of upstate New York. At first I didn’t believe it.

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• Windows Consolidation with the System i: Is It Happening?

  September 11, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Earlier this month, Forrester Research issued a brief report, “Windows on IBM System i–Short-List It?” The author, Brad Day, Forrester’s vice president of computing infrastructure, notes the challenges faced by small- and medium-sized shops that often operate two different server environments–one for mission-critical applications and another for standard infrastructure software. While shops may have dedicated servers to support mission-critical applications, “these same customers have also deployed X86-based SMP and blade server designs to run infrastructure software like Microsoft Exchange, Web applications, or file-and-print facilities on Microsoft Windows Server.” Day points out, however, that these same shops often lack the staff

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