Volume 16, Number 34 - September 4, 2007 Archives

Zend Preps System i Sessions for October ZendCon 2 Event

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

ZendCon 2, the second annual conference for users of the PHP language, is going to be hosted by Zend Technology in San Francisco October 9 through 11. And because i5/OS and OS/400 customers are important to Zend and IBM, Zend is working hard to provide content specific to the System i platform at the event.

Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance program manager at Zend who interfaces with the i5/OS and OS/400 community, is hoping to get some sort of idea about how many of you want to attend the System i-related sessions at ZendCon 2, so the company can

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IBM Licenses Tech from Siemens for Unified Communications

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Web 2.0 is the buzzword of the day in application development, unified communication is all the talk in the messaging and groupware space. And IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems are girding their loins to do battle over a real set of communication technologies and their integration. This stands in stark contrast with the academic distinction between one kind of Web computing and another–what people seem to be talking about when they say Web 2.0–that is, at its root, utter poppycock.

Unified communications–bringing voice, email, fax, instant messaging, chat, video, and other forms of communication used by businesses

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IBM’s Toronto Labs Turns 40, DataMirror Shareholders OK IBM Deal

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This month, IBM‘s Toronto Software Labs are celebrating its 40th birthday, and looking forward to adding some technologies and people from DataMirror, a maker of high availability and data transformation software that is going to plug right into IBM’s Canadian software development operations.

There has always been a competitive relationship between the various IBM labs around the world, and there has definitely been a lot of give and take and push and pull over the years between IBM’s Rochester Labs, where the System/3X, AS/400, iSeries, and System i product lines came to market, and the Toronto Software Labs,

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IDC Gives 2006 Report Cards for Data Warehousing Vendors

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IDC is handing out its annual report cards for the vendors of software in the data warehousing space. Because it takes a long time to gather and sift through the market data, IDC is only just now assessing who did what in the data warehousing generation and management tools market for 2006. The worldwide market was healthy in 2006, rising by 12.5 percent to reach $5.7 billion in aggregate sales.

As has been the case for the past decade, the large database makers are big in data warehouse tools. Oracle barely outgrew the overall market, posting $1.9 billion in data

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Aberdeen Ranks the TCO of Mid-Market ERP Software

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The manufacturing and distribution sectors of the world economy have always been the backbone of the midrange computer business, and time may have changed a lot of things in the IT landscape over the years, but this is not one of them. There has always been fierce competition between application software vendors in the mid-market, and as long as there are midrange companies, there always will be.

To try to give manufacturers a sense of where their current and perhaps future ERP software providers stack up, the analysts at Aberdeen Group did a survey of 645 manufacturing companies with between

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Zend Preps System i Sessions for October ZendCon 2 Event

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

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COMMON Poll: DB2/400 Support for Domino 8 Matters

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we all know by now, IBM has decided to not support the storage of data for Notes and Domino applications inside DB2/400 databases on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform–something that end users had been anticipating since this capability was provided for other platforms nearly two years ago. The North American COMMON midrange user group and its counterpart in EMEA, COMMON Europe, surveyed their constituencies in the wake of IBM’s pulling the plug on NSFDB2 support on i5/OS.

The results of these surveys seem to suggest that when Rob Ingram, Domino product manager at IBM’s Lotus division, gets back

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Mad Dog 21/21: Leverage

September 4, 2007 Hesh Wiener

Archimedes was talking about leverage, one of his favorite topics. He said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” The Sicilian from Syracuse probably knew more about mechanical leverage than anyone of his era, which was the third century BC, but he didn’t know about financial leverage. Some people are still finding out about financial leverage, particularly on Wall Street, and doing it the hard way. What they cannot learn from Archimedes they might try to garner from IBM, which looks like it knows a little more about the topic than most companies.

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Aldon Works on Acquisitions to Build Out Biz

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of its acquisition by Marlin Equity Partners in May of this year, Aldon, the dominant supplier of application lifecycle management software for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, is exploring its acquisition options as it seeks to build out a broader set of products to sell into this market. Thus far, the company’s plans have been unchanged by the uncertainty in the credit markets, and business continues to be good, too.

Dan Magid, who was president and chief executive officer at Aldon prior to the acquisition and who is now technology strategist, and Matt Scholl, who is

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Consumers Create a Feedback Loop into IT

September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes, the corporate data centers of the world lead when it comes to the adoption of new information technologies, and sometimes they lag. And when IT is lagging, and a hot new technology is being picked up by tech-savvy consumers in their personal lives, it usually doesn’t take long for these people, who are end users as far as their employers are concerned, bring that technology into the workplace. And that is where the IT organization’s headaches begin.

Two new reports, one from Yankee Group and the other from IDC, examine the issue of the consumerization of the data

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