• Zend Puts Out Beta PHP Tools for OS/400 V5R3

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As promised, Zend Technologies is diligently doing the job of back-porting its PHP language and related Zend for i5/OS tools to OS/400 V5R3. This year, as we all know, Zend delivered a freebie version of the PHP tools for i5/OS V5R4, but given that maybe only 15,000 or so people have V5R4, this limits the appeal of PHP on the System i5 platform and its predecessors. Which is why Zend and IBM are working together on a port to OS/400 V5R3, which probably has four or five times as many users. Last week, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at

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• BOS Reduces Its Losses in the Third Quarter, Affirms 2006 Guidance

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange connectivity software and thin client vendor Better Online Solutions continues to make progress in getting its top and bottom lines moving in the same direction after restructurings earlier this year. For the third quarter ended September 30, BOS reported sales of $5.3 million, down 6 percent, and a gross profit of $1.1 million, down 39 percent. These results do not include the effects of several divestitures that BOS made earlier this year. For the quarter, BOS still booked a net loss of $394,000, but that was a far cry better than the $1.7 million net loss it had a

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• IBM Breaks Through 2,500 Linux Applications on Power Chips

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After years of putting in energy and money to get independent software vendors to support the Power platforms running Linux applications created by these ISVs, IBM says that it has broken through the 2,500 applications barrier with Linux on Power. That is a tripling of the installed base of Linux on Power applications in the past two years. According to Adam Jollans, worldwide open source strategy manager at IBM, these 2,500 applications are real ISV applications, too–not the thousands of widgets, gadgets, and otherwise interesting applications that are incorporated into Linux distributions from Red Hat, Novell, and Terra

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• Disk Array Sales Keep Revving in Q3, Says IDC

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market saw a tiny uptick in sales in the third quarter of 2006, but the external disk array market saw a much more pronounced increase, according to research by IDC. The storing of new kinds of rich content as well as server consolidation is driving up capacity sold and revenues, said IDC. In the third quarter, sales of all kinds of disk storage systems (both internal to servers and externally attached) increased by 7.9 percent to $6.2 billion, IDC reckons. External disk array sales–which means machines that attach to servers through Fibre Channel, Ethernet, or other kinds

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• Gartner Predicts Half of Data Centers Will Run Out of Power by 2008

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you don’t think power and cooling issue is a problem with data centers, then you are either one of the lucky companies with only modest computing requirements or you have never lived with a server cluster. But the analysts at Gartner have jumped on the power and cooling bandwagon, and now say that half of the data centers in the world are going to run out of power by the end of 2008. Maybe the situation is worse than I thought, then, when I wrote Lean, Mean Green Machines three years ago. Gartner did not, by the way, literally

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• Zend Puts Out Beta PHP Tools for OS/400 V5R3

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As promised, Zend Technologies is diligently doing the job of back-porting its PHP language and related Zend for i5/OS tools to OS/400 V5R3. This year, as we all know, Zend delivered a freebie version of the PHP tools for i5/OS V5R4, but given that maybe only 15,000 or so people have V5R4, this limits the appeal of PHP on the System i5 platform and its predecessors. Which is why Zend and IBM are working together on a port to OS/400 V5R3, which probably has four or five times as many users. Last week, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at

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• The X Factor: You Can’t Steal What’s Free, But You Can Pay a Lot for Something That Isn’t Worth It

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early 1990s, when IBM was on the rocks after its mainframe business imploded and the world shifted to cheaper Unix servers and client/server development was just getting underway, the Wall Street Journal ran a multi-page story that I have never forgotten. The story was one of hubris, of Big Blue’s lack of understanding of how the market had changed so much around it that it took the company the better part of six years to find its feet again. Had it not been for the Y2K and dot-com bubbles, IBM might not have found its feet again.

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• Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

  December 4, 2006 Brian Kelly

  In 2005, Windows servers eclipsed Unix servers for the first time in terms of revenue, by nearly $200 million. According to IDC, over $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers and $15.5 billion in Unix servers were sold worldwide in 2005. Additionally, Linux took third place at $5.3 billion and mainframes slipped to $4.8 billion. With sales of approximately $2 billion in 2005, IBM‘s System i fell short of making the report. How is it that the grandfather of what was once the darling small business system family in the world (the IBM System/3 and System/3X) could have slipped

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• PwC Consultants Predict an IT Talent Shortage

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The data centers and departments of the world’s companies are not the only organizations that are constantly wrestling with developing technical talent and keeping their techies happy. The technology companies of the world–who supply us our hardware, software, telecommunications, and information services–have the same exact problem. And maybe they even have it worse, if a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers is a glimpse into the personnel management realities that technology companies are facing. PwC puts out an annual survey related to hiring and employee management practices at technology companies because it has a business practice consulting with these firms–many of them the

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• The System iWant, 2007 Edition

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great thing about IBM‘s woes with the AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 products and its line of business within the Server Group, Systems Group, and now the Systems and Technology Group for the past dozen years is that there is always an opportunity to tell Big Blue how it might improve the OS/400 and i5/OS platform. It is always fun to try to figure out how IBM might do a better job of competing first against mainframes, then Unix, then Windows, and now Linux servers. The bad thing about this situation, of course, is that the OS/400 and

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