• Power.org Organization Announces Merged Power Instruction Set Architecture

  November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As promised, the Power.org organization that IBM created to promote and standardize the Power processor architecture and build of the ecosystem of hardware and software based on the Power chips has rolled out a new instruction set architecture, or ISA, for the Power platform. Power ISA Version 2.03 and the related Power Architecture Platform Requirements (PAPR) specification were both announced last week, and Power.org also unveiled a roadmap for the Power architecture and the processors that use it. The new ISA merges the architectural elements of IBM’s Power and PowerPC processors with the vector processing extensions created by Motorola before

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• Arrow and Agilysys Cite Weakness in Proprietary Server Sales

  November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two of the biggest master distributors of IBM‘s servers, Arrow Electronics and Agilysys, have turned in their financial report cards for the three months ended September 30, and as you might expect, both companies cited weakness in the sale of proprietary servers–meaning mostly System i5 products and some mainframes. Arrow, of course, has a vast distribution business, including electronic components as well as IT gear (much like rival Avnet, the other “A” of the three A-named companies who are master resellers of the System i platforms. During the third quarter, Arrow had revenues of $3.45 billion, up

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• IBM Lowers Interest Rates on Low Rate Financing Deal

  November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is jerking around the interest rates on its Low Rate Financing deal again, and this time, it is lowering the rates it is charging to finance IT hardware, software, and services so it can boost sales in the fourth quarter. On September 19, IBM raised the financing rates on the Low Rate Financing deal for the second time in 2006, and now the rate has gone down. Interest rates have, by the way, been more or less stable during this time, so IBM is clearly using its ability to borrow money very cheaply to help customers finance gear,

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• Marywood University and IBM Team on System i Curricula Development

  November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Marywood University, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, business and managerial science college that offers MIS degrees with a business bend, has been a staunch supporter of the IBM midrange platform for a very long time. And as a means of reinvigorating its MIS program, which is now being transformed into a Bachelor’s of Business Administration degree with a focus on Business Information Technology, the university is working with IBM to create System i-specific course material that could be the basis of college and university courses around the world some day. Marywood is located on a 115-acre parcel of land in the

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• As I See It: The Workplace Politician

  November 13, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Politics is a great tree burdened with rotting fruit, and there’s nothing like a recent election to remind us of why it can be so distasteful. If political ads are any measure of gravitas, politics is full of brash sound and feigned fury signifying rudeness. Although politics is associated primarily with governance, the term is also used in the workplace, where it describes the backroom and boardroom decisions that impact employees–often adversely–but have little or nothing to do with the actual running of the business. To be sure, the term “politics” is also used more loosely to describe a range

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• Interest in WDSc Indicates Small but Steady Change in App Dev

  November 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  One of the reasons applications, such as those developed in RPG and COBOL, are branded as legacy is because most are constructed with non graphical server-side tools that are clunky and slow compared to modern, client-side tools with graphical interfaces and major productivity and functionality advantages. Alternatives to the trustworthy SEU/PDU tools exist. IBM and a long list of its business partners offer these alternatives. And I think it is fair to say momentum is building when it comes to developing modern applications, but it would be an exaggeration to call it anything approaching a groundswell. Ask anyone in the

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• Power6 Ups the Ante for Virtualization, Power Management

  November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last month, IBM told the world about some of the features that it had built into its future Power6 RISC processors, which are expected to appear in IBM’s System p machines around mid-2007 and maybe in its System i machines around that time, or maybe in late 2007 and perhaps early 2008. Big Blue is being a little vague about exactly when Power6 will come out for reasons it has not specified. But the company is being clear that when it does come out, Power6 will be jammed full of improvements. As previously reported in this newsletter, the Power6 chip

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