• IBM Tweaks i5 515 and 525 User-Based Prices

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After getting lots of feedback from customers, resellers, and independent software developers who have been reacting to the announcement of the user-priced System i5 515 and 525 Power5+ servers, IBM has made some modifications to the way software is priced on the boxes. The change in pricing gives the i5 515 and 525 servers a better fit into the way certain kinds of customers make use of the box, and it also shows that IBM wants to react fast to any feedback from customers to get the pricing right. When the i5 515 and 525 servers were launched on April

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• Developer Population to Grow to Nearly 19 Million by 2010

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to estimates made by Evans Data, which watches the segments of the IT space that relate to programmers like a hawk, the worldwide population of programmers is expected to explode to nearly 19 million by the end of the decade. That pool of programmers would be 45 percent larger than in 2006, when just north of 13 million programmers were in the world–with the largest portion in North America, but with a sizable number in Europe and a growing share coming out of the Asia/Pacific area. Right now, 15 countries account for over two-thirds of the programmer population

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• Big Blue’s Transport Partner Loses Employee Data

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a bit embarrassing for a security-conscious vendor like IBM, but according to a letter that the company sent out to employees last week, data tapes containing information on IBM’s own employees were lost in transport to an archiving facility in late February. According to the letter, which was sent to IT Jungle by an anonymous source and written by Barbara Brickmeier, vice president of human resources at the company, the IBM tapes were lost by accident and were not stolen, and assured employees that while the data included on the tapes included Social Security numbers, it was

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• Acquisitions Fuel Growth for Reseller Logicalis

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thanks to a number of acquisitions in recent years, Logicalis, a division of the $3.2 billion tech conglomerate called Datatec, has emerged as one of the dominant value-added resellers of servers from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Both Logicalis and its parent company just finished their fiscal 2007 years at the end of February, with Logicalis posting very good growth. For fiscal year 2007, Logicalis booked $696 million in revenues, up 37 percent. According to the financial results posted by the company, $43 million of that increase in revenue came from acquisitions made during the prior

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• Sirius Computer Builds Out Biz With DyComp Acquisition

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In November 2006, IBM system reseller Sirius Computer Solutions announced that it had received an equity investment from Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, which has invested in or acquired a number of i5/OS-related software companies. In the wake of that infusion, Sirius has acquired another reseller named DyComp. “Being a small, regional company has allowed me to hand pick the people on my team and focus on giving the best customer service as an IBM solutions provider,” said Jim Dyson, president and chief executive officer at DyComp, which he founded in 1997 and which is now located in Clemmons,

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• IBM Outlines its Long-Term Financial Goals to Wall Street

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As pointed out elsewhere in this issue, chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, and chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, hosted IBM‘s annual Wall Street analyst day event in Yorktown Heights, New York, last Thursday. At that meeting, Big Blue gave an overview of how it saw the next several years unfolding. To get a sense of what IBM said at the meeting, I perused a report put out by Ben Reitzes, who is the lead tech analyst at brokerage house UBS. According to that report, IBM is basically going to take the savings it is getting from

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• IBM Expected to Launch Power6 Servers Today

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it is official. The head honchos at IBM had a big shindig with Wall Street analysts up at its Yorktown Heights research facilities last Thursday, and one of the things that chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, confirmed in that meeting is that the first Power6 servers will be launched today. As expected, the Power6 processors will make their debut in the System p product line, and will feature support for the current AIX 5.3 operating system rather than for the AIX 5.4 operating system that has new software functionality to take full advantage of the Power6 hardware

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• As I See It: Operating on Overload

  May 21, 2007 Victor Rozek

  If the name Conrad Gesner is unfamiliar, it’s probably because you’re either not a librarian or weren’t around in the 16th century when Gesner walked the earth. Born in Switzerland, Gesner was a naturalist and a scholar, but he is known to librarians as the creator of the bibliography. And what an ambitious accomplishment it was! Known as the Bibliotheca universalis, it was written in three languages–Greek, Latin, and Hebrew–and it listed all of the writers who had ever lived and the titles of all their works. No surprise then that Gesner was also among the first to have

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• The Gulf Between Buyers and Sellers Widens in IT,

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Says IDC The analysts at IDC spend a lot of time talking to IT suppliers to understand their strategies and products, and they spend a similarly large amount of time talking to IT managers and C-level executives to try to understand the challenges they face in their data centers. A new report put out by IDC this week focuses on the interface between the two–where IT buyer meets IT seller. As anyone who follows the quarterly results of the major public IT players can attest to, many complain from time to time–some, more frequently–about lengthening product sales cycles and smaller

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• An i5 Platform: Q&A with Marlin Equity’s Top Brass

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  An i5 Platform: Q&A with Marlin Equity’s Top Brass Two weeks ago, Marlin Equity Partners, a relative newcomer in the private equity business that was founded by people with more than a passing familiarity with the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem, acquired Aldon, one of the big providers of application lifecycle development tools in the System i market. The top brass at Marlin Equity, which has big plans for the i5 market, took some time out of their schedules to chat about those plans and to explain why they are entering the market as an investment platform for the

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