• Service with a Smile–and a Wink and a Nod

  February 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400, the iSeries, and the System i5 have a problem, and it is a big one. The problem is not any particular hard or soft ware. It is not that it supports legacy applications as well as modern ones. The problem is perception, both in the IT market at large and within IBM itself. At IT Jungle, we spend a lot of time dissecting and discussing the former, but because we are not inside the IBM Company, we can’t really do much about the latter. Here’s the problem, in a nutshell: In the last decade, IBM has transformed itself

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• Bytware Brings StandGuard AntiVirus to p5 Unix Servers

  February 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in 2003, a security software vendor called Bytware, which specializes in the IBM iSeries server market space, brought out a product called StandGuardAV to protect the non-OS/400 file systems on the iSeries server. This product was based on the antivirus scanning engine created by McAfee, which is one of the big sellers of antivirus software for PCs and servers. After starting on the iSeries and moving to Linux, Byware’s StandGuardAV is now branching out to AIX. About a decade ago, IBM grafted the high performance version of the OS/2 file system onto OS/400 to allow it to

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• Gartner Gives Novell, Red Hat Their Grades in Linux

  February 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at Gartner have taken a hard look at the Red Hat and Novell and given them report cards on how well or poorly they have done in various areas as they seek to make Linux a more mature commercial option for the data center. There apparently was not a curve. In the cross-platform resource management area, which Novell makes a lot of noise about because of its ZENworks products and which Red Hat largely partners to deliver, Novell surprising pulled a B+ compared to Red Hat’s C. Novell’s ZENworks product line predates its entry into the Linux market

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• Big Blue Ponies up $1 Billion for Information Management Initiative

  February 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There’s gold in them there databases, or so you would believe if you heard that IBM is committing $1 billion and over 15,000 employees to chase the information management market, a kind of catch-all buzzword that seems to mean about as many different things as WebSphere does. That’s a lot of money and a lot of consultants to deploy at anything, and information management is apparently an area that Big Blue says is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 18 percent between 2005 and 2009, reaching $69 billion by 2009. In plain English, information management is yet another

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• IBM Raises iSeries Maintenance Prices

  February 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever times get tough, all server makers are tempted to raise maintenance prices, and they usually succumb to that temptation. And, as part of the System i5 announcements three weeks ago, IBM raised charges for its Enterprise Service Agreement (ESA) onsite, 24×7 support and Minimum Monthly Maintenance Charge (MMMC) 24×7, and IBM onsite repair maintenance fees on selected iSeries gear. Across all of the features that saw their maintenance charges rise, the price increases for maintenance averaged about 19 percent, which is a pretty steep rise. But not every feature that carries an ESA or MMMC charge in the iSeries

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• Reader Feedback: Declare War on Wintel

  February 20, 2006 Brian Kelly

  I like Elaine Lennox, the new vice president of iSeries marketing. I have never met her, but based on her interview in this newsletter, which was published last week, she sounds real. I hope all System i5 folks let her know what the iSeries is all about. Unfortunately, those potential new System i5 accounts that are now running Wintel, who never considered a System i5 for whatever reason, cannot tell Lennox what is needed and that is who she needs to hear from. The System i5 must look modern and it does not and IBM needs to do something for

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• What’s in the New System i5 Name?

  February 20, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Shakespeare observed, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” This certainly seems to have been true for the faithful OS/400 community, who continue to believe that their AS/400s continue to be sweet, no matter what moniker IBM chooses to attach to them. But that doesn’t mean that frequent name changes are welcome or that all agree that they are in the best interest of the platform’s acceptance in the marketplace. What do customers, analysts, and ISVs think of “System i5”? Bob Djurdevic, president of Annex Research, laughs, calling

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• Shaking IT Up: Don’t Fear Silence, and Buy Some Duct Tape

  February 20, 2006 Kevin Vandever

  I was driving my 13-year old daughter to school the other day and noticed a phenomenon that hadn’t happened in a long time, if ever: Complete silence. I wasn’t talking, she wasn’t talking, and the radio wasn’t listing the side-effects of the latest drug to hit the market. What made this more improbable was the fact that neither of us were listening in private to an iPod nor was this a five minute drive to school. My daughter attends a performing arts school and on good days it takes about 40 minutes to wind through southern California traffic to get

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• Which Way the Wind Blows for i5-Windows Integration

  February 20, 2006 Dan Burger

  The use of Windows-based applications and databases in iSeries shops and their integration with the OS/400 platform will probably be one of the most wrestled with tasks companies deal with in the foreseeable future. By most estimates, nine out of ten iSeries shops have Windows servers for application or infrastructure purposes, beginning with file serving, and including such things as e-mail, SQL databases, Web serving, distribution of desktop tools such as Word and Excel, and, yes, even line of business applications. iSeries shops are deploying Windows apps and there is a need to lash them to the iSeries so they

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• Analysts, Users, and ISVs React to the System i5

  February 20, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  IBM‘s System i5 announcements on January 31 have neither shattered expectations nor set the IT industry in a tailspin. The specifics of the announcement are not cause for either alarm or for great celebration. They do, however, represent steady progress in what platform believers have come to expect in a continuing evolution as IBM attempts to hold onto its large installed base and capture new customers at the same time. But, as always, reactions to Big Blue’s announcements are varied. To gauge the reaction of the OS/400 community, I contacted several analysts, end users, and ISVs to get their

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