Volume 15, Number 44 - November 6, 2006 Archives

PeopleSoft Founder Duffield Launches Workday ERP Today

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Revenge is a dish that is best served cold, and Dave Duffield, the founder of the formerly independent software company PeopleSoft, which was acquired in January 2005 in a hostile takeover by Oracle, has not forgotten how Larry Ellison beat him. Since May 2005, he has been working on a follow-on company and ERP software suite, and today the company, Workday, and its products, Workday Enterprise Business Services, will come to market.

The Workday suite was created using Web technologies and will apparently be sold as a service rather than as a licensed product that companies install on

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IDC Says Virtual Tape Library Sales to Double in Five Years

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The market researchers at IDC have polished up the crystal balls they have dedicated to the storage market, and last week predicted that sales of virtual tape libraries would double in the next five years, hitting $1.4 billion in sales by 2011.

Perhaps even more astounding than that revenue increase is the expectation that the amount of capacity under management by VTL solutions will increase at a compounded annual growth rate of 47.4 percent of that five year period. This is a huge increase in data, and it seems to indicate that companies that have loved tape archiving for decades

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LANSA Partners with IONA Technologies for SOA Enablement on System i

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

LANSA, a tool vendor with expertise in rapid application development and i5/OS and OS/400 legacy application modernization, and IONA Technologies, which has positioned itself in the center of the services oriented architecture (SOA) arena with its Artix implementation of the Enterprise Service Bus idea, last week announced that they have partnered to help make SOA-style application modernization easier for System i shops that are coping with distributed application architectures.

IONA is based in Dublin, Ireland, and has been focusing on object-oriented programming and then Web services for the past decade. The company’s Orbix product implements the CORBA object

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Jack Henry Sees 10 Percent Revenue and Profit Growth in Fiscal Q1

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a good thing to see independent software vendors that push the System i platform doing well. And in its most recent quarter Jack Henry & Associates, which specializes in selling software to financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions, said that sales were up 10 percent.

Jack Henry ended its first quarter of fiscal 2007 on September 30, and reported sales of $150.6 million, up 10 percent from the $137 million it booked in the prior year’s first quarter. Software license sales were actually down in the quarter, however, falling 8 percent to $15.5

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TMW Systems Has a Great Third Quarter, Thanks to Maddocks Acquisition

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Trucking software supplier and long-time i5/OS and OS/400 platform promoter TMW Systems had its first quarter of sales with the combined operations of TMW Systems and Maddocks Systems, the competitor it acquired in early September.

According to the company, which is privately held (more on that in a second), the new-and-improved TMW Systems posted sales of $11.3 million in the quarter, an increase of 27 percent for the combined operations a year ago. Driving sales during the quarter were 34 deals for software licenses to the TMWSuite and TruckMate suites to new customers.

“While our financial reports are interesting, our

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PeopleSoft Founder Duffield Launches Workday ERP Today

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Workday suite was created using Web technologies and will apparently be sold as a service rather than as a licensed product that companies install on

…

The X Factor: Form Follows Function

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In nature, the shape of an animal or a plant is the result of the interplay between the organism and its environment–the latter being the sum result of the forces at play, the competitive pressures between competing life forms, and the materials at hand with which to build and sustain the life form. In the data center, similar competitive pressures are at work on computer designs, and instead of working at periodic timescales, evolution happens over a human generation or less. But sometimes evolution is stalled by greed.

While there has been plenty of evolution under the skins of servers

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PowerTech Issues Third Annual State of i5/OS Security Report

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The security of any system is only as good as the methods companies use to implement access to applications, data, and operating system resources. Anyone with a PC on his or her desktop knows this intuitively these days, with the maelstrom of malware and viruses that are attacking us. But, according to the third annual state of security on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform put out by security software maker The PowerTech Group, some System i shops are not being diligent about the security of their systems.

Part of the problem that i5/OS and OS/400 shops are facing is

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Bang for the Buck: User-Capped i5 520s Versus Windows X64 Servers

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly a month ago, IBM made a big deal about its new i5 520 Solution Edition for SAP applications, which offered dramatically better bang for the buck than regular i5 520s, and quietly announced what I am calling the user-capped i5 520 Solution Editions. Big Blue emphasized the wrong products in its announcements and public relations campaign. While an SAP box is interesting for a small number of customers, the entry user-capped i5 520 box does something more interesting: it actually competes head-to-head, and user-for-user, with Windows-based X64 servers.

No kidding. Well, at least not on the initial 20-user

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Thoma Cressey Strikes Again: Buys iTera to Merge with Vision Solutions

November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The buying spree continued last week in the i5/OS and OS/400 community, as Thoma Cressey Equity Partners announced that it was acquiring System i high availability software specialist iTera to merge it with competitor Vision Solutions. The merger of these two companies is something that has been on the minds of the top brass of these two companies for many years, according to sources, but it took a private equity firm’s deep pockets to broker a truce between these two fiercely competitive HA software providers.

Back at the fall COMMON expo, there were some rumors around that iTera was

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