• Some Insight Into IBM’s Server Sales for Q3

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Kudos once again to Richard Farmer, the lead IT analyst at brokerage house Merrill Lynch, for peeling apart IBM‘s financial results for the third quarter of 2006. As usual, Farmer has estimated what each of the four IBM server lines brought to the top line in the quarter. The System i5 line brought in, according to Farmer’s estimates, about $301 million in sales in the quarter, down 22 percent compared to the $388 million in sales from the third quarter of 2005. While this number was pretty low, it was not as bad as in the first quarter,

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• iTera Offers Big Discounts on Echo2 Software for New CBUs

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software maker iTera has extended the discounts it is giving to customers who buy IBM‘s Capacity BackUp editions of the System i5 line to the new machines the company launched two weeks ago. Back in July and August of this year, IBM extended the Capacity BackUp editions with a new i5 550 machine and added some i5 570 and i5 595 models, and also started to allow companies to use CBU machines for real work, not to just sit there idly waiting for a disaster to happen. This last change, which came in August, was met with

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• CDW Buys Its Way Into the i5 Business Through Berbee Acquisition

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT distributor CDW, which is one of the largest distributors of PCs, servers, and software in the world, has completed its acquisition of Berbee Information Networks, an IT reseller based in Madison, Wisconsin, for $184 million. Berbee was founded in 1993 by a former IBM systems engineer named Jim Berbee. He set up the company to provide systems integration and other services for IBM midrange gear and networks, then added support for other IBM server products (including System p5 and System x today in addition to System i5). Berbee, who is chairman of the board of the company that

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• Upgrade Paths Are Available for User-Capped Standard Edition i5 520s

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This could go down as the shortest article I have ever written. When IBM announced the i5 520 Solution Editions with user-caps two weeks ago, it was not entirely clear that there were upgrade paths for these boxes. In fact, as it turns out, you can convert from a 20-user box to a 40-user box through a feature conversion. Specifically, you convert from i5 520 processor feature 7786, which is the 20-user machine, to feature 7787, the 40-user machine. This conversion costs $12,200, which is the $12,000 price difference between the two boxes plus $200 that is apparently for paperwork

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• IBM Offers Rebates on i5 Disks and Disk Controllers

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just as we were going to press on Friday, and in the wake of product rejiggering and special price breaks on storage for certain i5 models, IBM announced a special price promotion on i5 disks and disk controllers. The deal, which expires December 31, gives customers who buy 10-packs of disks a rebate. IBM is also giving customers rebates if they buy in blocks of 150 drives, or buy a mirror disk/controller package. And, for those who are buying new i5 550 or 570 servers and putting on Linux partitions (or upgrading to those machines to do so), they can

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• Some Insight Into IBM’s Server Sales for Q3

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Kudos once again to Richard Farmer, the lead IT analyst at brokerage house Merrill Lynch, for peeling apart IBM‘s financial results for the third quarter of 2006. As usual, Farmer has estimated what each of the four IBM server lines brought to the top line in the quarter. The System i5 line brought in, according to Farmer’s estimates, about $301 million in sales in the quarter, down 22 percent compared to the $388 million in sales from the third quarter of 2005. While this number was pretty low, it was not as bad as in the first quarter,

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• The System i VOIP Solution: Now Ready for Prime Time

  October 23, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  At the spring COMMON user group meeting this year, IBM and 3Com piqued audience interest with the announcement that the two companies were developing an integrated voice over IP (VOIP) solution that would run natively on the System i. Today, the two have delivered on that promise with the announcement of the first-ever IP telephony solution designed to run on a single system along with a customer’s business applications. That single system is the System i. As the press release notes, typically IP telephony environments are built with a single server supporting each of the components–call processing, messaging, and conferencing,

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• System i Awareness Campaign Depends on Print Advertising Effectiveness

  October 23, 2006 Dan Burger

  Are you feeling out of control? Within the confines of the data center, IBM says it can fix that. And to the extent that reducing IT complexity can simplify the goal of reaching business objectives, Big Blue is saying it has the silver bullet. It’s called the System i and its current advertising message is “i want control.” The idea is to attack server sprawl, attack IT complexity, and reduce the pain and suffering of those whose lives are devoted to babysitting a 24-hour IT care center. Can such a message strike a nerve with companies and IT staffs? I

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• Software, Unix and Mainframe Servers Boost IBM’s Profits in Q3

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The effect of changes in its hardware, software, and services product lines in the past year and layoffs last summer helped IT juggernaut IBM post a 5 percent increase in sales in the third quarter, hitting $22.6 billion in sales, and pumping up profits by 46.5 percent to $2.2 billion. Sales of software across its brands, exploding growth in emerging markets, and a resurgent market for mainframes and Unix servers were the key drivers in the quarter. IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, last week gave the traditional statement in the traditional IBM press release accompanying the numbers.

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• Will New Rebates on Standard Edition i5s Boost Sales?

  October 23, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, on the same day that IBM announced that sales of System i5 servers were down 22 percent in the third quarter, the company also announced a rebate deal that gives significant cash back to customers with older iSeries gear as well as newer i5 gear running i5/OS Enterprise Edition if they move to a new System i5 machine running i5/OS V5R4 Standard Edition. The two events are almost certainly connected. There was a lot of concern about the drop in iSeries sales in the quarter. We have gone over the numbers in detail in the IBM financial coverage

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