• How Low Can You Go?

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are at the dawn before IBM does yet another rejiggering and possibly a revamping of the OS/400 platform. That makes this a good time to reflect on where the AS/400 started out, where the iSeries has been, and where the i5 is going. Like most of you, I am concerned with the competitive positioning, in terms of feeds and speeds and prices, of the i5 platform; and also like you, I want the OS/400 ecosystem to expand, diversify, and thrive. To do that, the i5 has to either buck some pretty strong trends or learn how to better surf

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• Avnet, Lakeview Partner on iSeries High Availability

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software maker Lakeview Technology and Avnet Partner Solutions, the master server distributor arm of electronics supplier Avnet, have teamed up to help their respective partners sell Lakeview’s MIMIX high availability and disaster recovery solutions on various IBM platforms. Under the partnership, Lakeview and Avnet will partner to push the MIMIX high availability software on all of the operating systems that either run on the iSeries platform itself–i5/OS, AIX, and Linux–or on the Integrated xSeries Server and Integrated xSeries Adapter co-processors–which run Windows. Avnet and its downstream partners will be able to peddle MIMIX dr1 for i5/OS;

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• Seagull, CCSS Tout ServerProven Seals of Approval from IBM

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is probably safe to say that IBM‘s ServerProven system certification and co-marketing campaign for its eServer brands has been one of the most successful and useful tools that Big Blue has created for its community of software partners. That’s why we hear so many software vendors making sure that we all know that they are ServerProven. Seagull Software and CCSS last week said that some of their products had received the ServerProven seal of approval. IBM’s ServerProven rating means a particular piece of software has been tested by IBM and its ISV partner to ensure it works properly

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• IBM Buys CIMS Lab for Chargeback Capabilities

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has paid an undisclosed sum to acquire a little-known software company called CIMS Lab to bolster its On Demand product offerings. CIMS Lab has been around in one form or another for over 30 years, and it is a specialist in creating software that allows IT managers to figure out who is using what computing resources and create a chargeback mechanism for users, departments, and divisions to pay for the resources that they use. Chargeback is not a new idea, of course. The original IBM mainframes were based on the idea of timesharing of a single host computer and

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• Cross-Server Partitions Coming for i5/OS?

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, The Unix Guardian, our sister publication for the Unix platform, reported that IBM had created a five-year roadmap for its AIX Unix variant to give customers and business partners an idea–under non-disclosure, of course–of what was in store for this operating system and its associated pSeries platform. (See AIX: 20 Years Down, Many More to Go for more information on IBM’s plans for its Unix platform.) In talking to the lead architect of the AIX platform, IBM distinguished engineer Satya Sharma, he revealed to me that Big Blue was planning a maintenance release of AIX 5.3 for

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• IBM Quickly Fills VP of iSeries Marketing Position

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As he promised two weeks ago, iSeries general manager Mark Shearer moved fast and quickly replaced his recently departed vice president of iSeries marketing, Peter Bingaman. Late last Friday, IBM announced that is has brought Elaine Lennox over to the iSeries team to take on that role. The great thing about Bingaman is that he had energy, and it was under during his watch that IBM significantly boosted its marketing and advertising spending on the iSeries, for the first time since anyone can remember. And Shearer said he understood that he needed to have someone with energy, and he went

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• Hint: Read

  January 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Four Hundred Stuff This Week As we reported in last week’s issue, IBM cited customer expectations for impending i5 server and i5/OS operating system announcements for an 18 percent decline in iSeries sales in the fourth quarter of 2005. During its conference call, Big Blue said that it would be making iSeries announcements imminently, and I also reported last week that business partners were briefed on the new products on January 19. As you all well know, IBM tends to make its announcements on Tuesdays–not always, but most of the time. While I cannot tell you what IBM is up

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Virtual’s Impatience

  January 30, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  The more you know about virtualization–the ability of a computer to support working images of systems that don’t physically exist–the less sure you can be about its roots. For IBM‘s big commercial customers, virtualization arrived in the mid-1970s. Now the leader in virtualization, IBM was a laggard back then, and there is every possibility that virtualization technology from others will yet upstage Big Blue’s achievements. In computing, stardom can be as ephemeral as the theatrical ghosts of 1862, whose stunning impression on audiences set the stage for technology that first appeared nearly a century later. IBM offers virtualization technology

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• Lotusphere 2006: IBM Gears Up for Collaboration Battle with Microsoft

  January 30, 2006 Dan Burger

  There’s nothing quite like a large-scale user conference to set executive tongues a-wagging. This kind of talk used to be confined to heavyweight boxing championship bouts. But when heavyweights like IBM and Microsoft face off in the collaborative software battles, the only things missing are the satin robes, the baggy shorts, and the posse of trainers and bodyguards. And this year, Microsoft landed a pretty good punch before the opening round bell even sounded. Not that it was deliberate. Oh, no. Microsoft wouldn’t intentionally “place” a story about its latest tools to migrate Lotus Notes users to Exchange just in

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• The iSeries 2006 Job Market, Part 2: What’s in Store?

  January 30, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Last week, I established that, according to the nine end-user shops and the five software vendors I polled, iSeries shops do not seem to be hiring, but ISVs are. That generalization holds true for both IT staff in general and specifically for iSeries professionals. But what is happening in the IT market at large, and what factors will really affect hiring in iSeries shops in the coming years? That’s what I set out to find out. Well, to start, the optimists are having a field day, predicting a much-desired upswing in hiring for the technology sector. You have to take

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