• COMMON Extends Deadline for 2007 System i Innovation Awards

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, you were all supposed to submit your applications for the 2007 System i Innovation Awards by February 28, but apparently a lot of you OS/400 and i5/OS shops were too busy and didn’t get your paperwork done. So COMMON, the System i user group, and IBM, which makes the server platform, have extended the deadline for applications. If you want to embarrass your colleagues by making them give a speech or try to get a trip for yourself to Anaheim, California, to get your award at the annual COMMOM user group meeting and expo, you now have

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• IBM Tosses Google Gadgets Into WebSphere Portal

  March 5, 2007 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s WebSphere Portal users are about to find a brand new bag of tricks on their doorstep. Next month, the WebSphere Portal catalog will include Google Gadgets, which means portal page designers and portal dwellers will have access to utilities that provide links to research databases, package delivery tracking tools, Google Maps utilities, traffic information, and applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. These and approximately 4,000 other small applications will end up as the building blocks that configure composite applications supporting a variety of business objectives, says Lauren Wendle, IBM WebSphere Portal product manager. Portal developers will be

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• Magic Software Ekes Out a Profit in Q4

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Magic Software Enterprises, a provider of application development tools for i5/OS and OS/400 platforms, has begun to turn itself around financially after a restructuring of its operations that began in October 2006. The Or Yeduda, Israel company reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2006, and says that it has returned to profitability. Sales in the fourth quarter increase by 8 percent to $16.2 million, and were up sequentially by 7 percent from the $15.1 million in sales the company reported in the third quarter that necessitated the October 2006 restructuring. The brightest spot in the quarter

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• Oracle Buys Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 Billion

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Database, middleware, and application software powerhouse Oracle went on an acquisition hunt again last week, and captured Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 billion. The deal will only obliquely affect the i5/OS platform, since Hyperion’s business intelligence tools for Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms, which are called System 9 BI+ collectively, do not run on the platform. However, the Essbase multidimensional OLAP server that is at the heart of the System 9 BI+ tools has been available for more than a decade on the OS/400 and i5/OS platform through a licensing arrangement with ShowCase, which was acquired by BI tool maker SPSS

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• IBM Offers System i5 Shops Single Sign-On Services

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While implementing single sign-on (SSO) on the iSeries and System i5 can make life a whole lot easier for system administrators and end users alike, setting up SSO is not necessarily an easy task. You have to think it through, and there are a lot of different things to consider. That’s why IBM last week announced a new Implementation Service for System i focused on SSO. The details are a bit sketchy, but as part of this service, Global Services will walk customers through setting up SSO on a single machine. This includes a conference call for planning the activation

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• COMMON Extends Deadline for 2007 System i Innovation Awards

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, you were all supposed to submit your applications for the 2007 System i Innovation Awards by February 28, but apparently a lot of you OS/400 and i5/OS shops were too busy and didn’t get your paperwork done. So COMMON, the System i user group, and IBM, which makes the server platform, have extended the deadline for applications. If you want to embarrass your colleagues by making them give a speech or try to get a trip for yourself to Anaheim, California, to get your award at the annual COMMOM user group meeting and expo, you now have

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• The X Factor: How Many Servers, How Much Juice, How Much Money?

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Data center managers around the world are complaining about the fact that they are running out of electricity to build out their server farms, and processor and server makers have been struggling in past years to deliver high performance products that can be virtualized and therefore be used more efficiently. The problem of power and cooling for servers seems to be a big problem, but nailing down exactly how big of a problem has been difficult. There are reasons for this. First, few companies know how many servers they have installed with any degree of accuracy. Servers pop up all

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• Midrange Boxes, Big Iron Drive Server Growth in Q4 2006

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market watchers at IDC have built their models of the business for the final quarter of 2006, and this time around, some interesting things seem to have been a-foot as last year drew to a close. IDC reckons that for the first time in a long time, the midrange and high-end server markets are outgrowing the volume server space (which is mostly X64-based machines these days). Moreover, revenue growth far outpaced shipment growth in the fourth quarter of 2006, which is a reverse of the usual trend. IDC has been tracking the quarter-by-quarter slugfest in the server market

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• System i Marketeer Chats with iSociety Members

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The general manager of the System i division, Mark Shearer, hosted an online chat with the members of the iSociety System i advocacy group last month, and this month, it was Elaine Lennox’s turn. Lennox, who has been the vice president of marketing for the division for a little more than a year, gave chat listeners (readers?) a sneak peek at how IBM will be marketing the System i platform in 2007. Not everyone has an hour to kill in the middle of the workday, so I participated on your behalf. As I go to press, iSociety has not yet

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• What’s IBM Cooking Up for RPG and the Web?

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its WebSphere Development Studio Client Version 7.0 announcements last week, IBM buried some statements of direction at the tail end of the announcement letters that indicated that it was working on making it easier for RPG programmers to create Web applications. To be blunt, many people were expecting such features in WDSc 7.0 last week, and they told me they were surprised when these features were not there. Last year, in closed meetings where journalists and analysts are not invited and in the wake of a controversy that IT Jungle helped stir up about the need for

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