Volume 16, Number 1 - January 8, 2007 Archives

Arrow Buys Agilysys’ IT Distribution Business for $485 Million

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The consolidation in the server and storage distribution business continues apace in 2007 as Arrow Electronics announced last week that it would pay $485 million in cash to buy the KeyLink Systems Group distribution business from rival Agilysys. With this deal, Arrow positions itself to better compete against Avnet, its remaining big rival in the enterprise server, storage, and software distribution business. Both Arrow and Avnet have been doing acquisitions in recent months to build up their IT distributorships.

Both Arrow and Avnet also have strong partnerships with the two biggest server makers, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and

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HP Projects Over $100 Billion in Sales in Fiscal 2008

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard was hosting its annual event with securities analysts in New York as we ended the publishing year, and the big news was that HP is now projecting that it will be the first information technology company to break through the $100 billion sales mark.

This is probably not a case, like the four-minute mile, where once somebody does it, then others will follow. IBM is probably about the only other company that could break through this level, and with the divestitures IBM has made in recent years–spinning off its PC and disk drive businesses–it seems unlike that Big Blue

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Seagate Buys EVault, Moves Into Storage Services

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Disk and tape storage maker Seagate Technology wants to expand into online backup services, and that is why the company has acquired EVault, one of the pioneers in the fast-growing market for online backups, for $185 million in cash.

Seagate is one of the dominant suppliers of disk drives into the enterprise, and is co-developer with IBM and Hewlett-Packard of the LTO tape format that is taking over the tape archiving market in a steady, methodical manner. But for many customers, making off-site backups is becoming as important as having onsite archives, and that is why online data vaulting

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IDC Expects App Server Shipments to Grow Faster Than Sales

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you might expect, the advent of popular and open source Web application servers as well as the integration of such components within operating systems is causing some downward pricing pressure. But, according to research from IDC, it appears that vendors will still be able to make it up in volume.

IDC reckons that the worldwide market for application server software grew by 6 percent in 2005 to hit $4.5 billion in sales. (Hard figures are not yet available for 2006, but IDC has put together projects for 2006 through 2010.) IDC is projecting that between 2005 and 2010,

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What Happened to the iSociety?

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With much fanfare at the last of the Fall COMMON conferences and expos that we will ever see, the midrange user group, back by strong support from IBM and other key System i players, launched the iSociety, a portal for organizing the community of AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 shops.

So, what happened to the iSociety?

Initially, a subset of the iSociety site was hosted on COMMON’s own Web site, but as promised, the full iSociety site is now running on its own at www.isociety.org. The iSociety domain was owned by the New York Social Diary, which is

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Reader Feedback on Saving System i

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you might have expected, Brian Kelly’s two-part article series, called Saving the System i: Fight Pervasive with Pervasive and Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch, from late last year generated a lot of heated discussion and enthusiasm from the readership of The Four Hundred. Here’s a sample of the feedback, with Kelly’s responses.

Great article.

We are a small Belgian iSeries business partner. We sell an application for real estate agencies. Our average customer has three users. A small machine would be great now we have very tough competition from Windows machines. We have a

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As I See It: Questioning Retirement

January 8, 2007 Victor Rozek

Another year begins. Perhaps this will be your final year of formal employment, or perhaps you have many more to go before confronting retirement. Regardless, there’s never a bad time to do some serious thinking about survival after the paychecks stop. But thinking is not unlike computing: stuff the brain with garbage, and garbage will emerge. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, many Americans are filling their heads with unfounded hope and betting their future on a set of risky assumptions.

The warning, coming as it does from the WSJ, is worth noting. The Journal is, after all,

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Uncle Sam Pushes Energy Star Ratings for Servers

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever the government gets involved in a problem, then we know we are in big trouble and that it is probably a worse situation than we imagined. Just as the year was ended, two events in the political arena in the United States indicated that the problem of energy consumption in the data center is, well, heating up. While the entry of the government and its regulations is not generally perceived as a good thing by many people, in this case, some government regulation and encouragement is just what the data center manager ordered.

The first event occurred on December

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Arrow Buys Agilysys’ IT Distribution Business for $485 Million

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Both Arrow and Avnet also have strong partnerships with the two biggest server makers, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and

…

IBM’s System i Priorities for 2007

January 8, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As the holiday season approached last December, two key people at IBM‘s System i division took some time out of their schedules to talk about the technology and marketing areas that they would focus on in 2007 with the i5/OS platform. Many of the priorities that Big Blue has for the platform have been talked about in 2006, such as Voice Over IP telephony and the PHP language running on the platform. But these key IBMers did offer some more insight as well as an initial reaction to my own suggestion that IBM fully embrace user-based capacity pricing for

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