Volume 15, Number 6 - February 6, 2006 Archives

Big Blue Gives Big i5 Customers Extra Hand Holding for Free

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here’s a word you don’t see much in the IBM iSeries catalog: free. As part of the January 31 i5 announcements, IBM said that it would now be giving away new Optimum Care services to buyers of its largest i5 machines.

IBM concedes that i5 570 and 595 installations can be a little complex, and the new Optimum Care services are intended to take some of the pain out of upgrading to or buying new i5 570s and 595s. As you might expect, those buying 595s get the most goodies for free. Customers buying an i5 595 with either i5/OS

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iSeries Software Helps NetManage’s Recovery

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

NetManage, the legacy application access and extension software provider, is seeing continued improvement in profits as it rolls out new products and deals with lower revenues. In the fourth quarter of 2005, NetManage reported sales of $10.7 million, down 19 percent, but net income was more than doubled to $1.6 million, or about 17 cents per share. For the full year, NetManage posted sales of $43.4 million, down 9 percent, but because of a $1.8 million tax benefit in 2005, was able to push profits to $4.7 million, more than triple from the prior year. The company’s cash position

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JDA Closes Out 2005, Looks for Growth in 2006

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Retail application software specialist JDA Software has announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, and its results are stabilizing. Overall sales were $55.1 million, down 4 percent, and the software license sales component of this number came to $15.6 million, down 23 percent.

JDA said it closed 100 deals in the quarter, and that another four customers had signed up for its .NET-enabled, Windows-based Portfolio retail suite, bringing the total customer count to 14. A few weeks ago, JDA had warned Wall Street that a few big deals had slipped into the new year, and that pushed the company

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ASNA, ISS Launch Midrange Migration Center

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometime in the next week or so, iSeries application porting specialist ASNA, which in recent years has pursued a tight partnership with Microsoft and which is aggressively peddling its Monarch Migration Suite to move RPG applications to .NET and DB2/400 databases to SQL Server, announced a partnership with Italian services provider International Software Solutions, one of its partners in Europe, to create the Midrange Migration Center.

The two companies believe that small independent software vendors that have created applications in RPG are worried about the fate of RPG and its related iSeries platform and are similarly looking at

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Datavantage Acquires CommercialWare for $13.2 Million

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A company called Datavantage, a name that most iSeries shops probably have not heard of, last week got into the OS/400 platform when it acquired CommercialWare, a well-known specialist in OS/400-based cross-channel retailing software.

CommercialWare is based in Natick, Massachusetts, and was founded three decades ago by Donald Askin, the primary author of the OASIS catalog management system that was developed in 1979 for the System/34 and subsequently for the System/38, System/36, and AS/400. In 1995, CommercialWare developed a more modern, RPG-based catalog management system, which it called Mozart, using the old Synon fourth generation language development tool,

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Big Blue Gives Big i5 Customers Extra Hand Holding for Free

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

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COMMON Is Not Canceling Conferences in 2007

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes, it is important to answer direct questions directly to avoid confusion. Readers of Insider Weekly, another newsletter that participates in the iSeries market, may have made a mistake in interpreting two key sentences in a story about the upcoming reconfiguration of the COMMON iSeries user group. In a story that ran last week, COMMON president Beverly Russell was explaining about the changes that were coming in 2007 for the user group, and twice while she was explaining those changes, she didn’t say explicitly, after direct questions, that the twice-a-year COMMON conferences that are a part of

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As I See It: Changing the World, One Pension at a Time

February 6, 2006 Victor Rozek

It will sound improbable to people under 40 who have no memory of it, but not that long ago, families got by on the income of a single earner. One salary was enough to support a middle-class lifestyle. Back then, health care was actually affordable and the cost of health insurance wasn’t the equivalent of a second mortgage. You could attend a state college for next to nothing, and graduates did not begin life buried under a mountain of debt. Entire careers were spent working for a single company with a secured pension at retirement. The middle class flourished.

But

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IBM Weaves Together HATS and WebFacing Tools

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the World Wide Web interface to the Internet has been a wonderful thing for consumers and corporate end users alike, the radically different way of doing interfaces compared to traditional host machines such as OS/400, VMS, and mainframe systems has, to put it bluntly, caused a tremendous amount of trouble in the past decade. And while IBM and its partners have skinned this cat in what seems like a zillion clever ways, making RPG and COBOL applications speak Web is still a big hassle.

This is one of the reasons that with i5/OS V5R4, IBM has integrated the functionality

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System i5 V5R4 Software Announcement Roundup

February 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever IBM does iSeries platform announcements, it takes a little while to get all of the information together about what it has done. Consequently, we take some time to go through the announcements in finer detail. In last week’s announcements, which ran in Four Hundred Stuff because of an announcement embargo, I explained what the new i5 servers were all about and hit the high points of the i5/OS V5R4 announcements. This week, I want to cover a bunch of other interesting things IBM announced with the System i5 software stack.

With an integrated system line the i5, it gets

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