But Wait, There's More. . .

• IBM last week reported its year-end and fourth-quarter financial results for 2002. IBM's worldwide sales across all products were up 7 percent in the quarter, to $23.7 billion, and down 2.3 percent for the year, to $81.2 billion. Net income per share for the fourth quarter was down 24 percent in the quarter, to $1.11, not counting a 52 cent hit against earnings for discontinued operations, and was down 53 percent for the year, to $2.06 a share, after a $1.01 hit for those discontinued operations (mostly chip and disk businesses that have been sold or closed.) Server and storage sales were down 1 percent (at constant currency) to $4.2 billion. In the fourth quarter, zSeries mainframe sales were down 4 percent, pSeries sales were flat, iSeries sales were down 13 percent, and xSeries sales were up 14 percent. Next week, we'll go through IBM's financials with a fine-toothed comb, since how IBM does in specific markets is such an indicator of what's going on in various IT sectors.

• Buell Duncan, the former general manager of the iSeries line, bid farewell to members of the iSeries Nation with an e-mail last week, parting with the personal touch that has been the hallmark of his 27-month tenure as general manager of IBM's midmarket server division. Duncan thanked iNation citizens for supporting the iSeries and for continuing to show passion for the platform. He briefly touched on the big announcements of the past year--the release of OS/400 V5R2 and the i890 mainframe--and hinted at "an even more exciting announcement" to come, an obvious reference to IBM's announcement today that it will make far-reaching changes in the way that iSeries servers are packaged and sold. Duncan also had nice things to say about Al Zollar, former head of IBM's Lotus division, who is now heading up the iSeries division as Duncan's successor. Duncan earned the respect of many iSeries professionals by making himself available for questions and comments through iNation events, such as "Chatting with Citizens" teleconferences and "town hall" meetings at COMMON conferences. Duncan continues his IBM career as general manager of developer relations at the company's Software Group.
  
  
• An announcement from IBM today promises a host of new iSeries hardware, including four new server models, new processor-on-demand capabilities, bigger and faster disks, and a new I/O structure. Sorting out the speeds and feeds of all this new hardware will take some time, and Midrange Performance Group is there to help you. Today the Boulder, Colorado, company announced that its capacity planning and performance management product, Performance Navigator, supports all the new iSeries hardware that IBM will be delivering, including the iSeries Model 800, 810, 825, 870, and revamped 890 servers; the new 15K-RPM 35-GB and 70-GB disk drives; the new PCI-X I/O backplane; and temporary and permanent capacity-upgrade-on-command analysis; as well as other configurable options. The new version of PerfNav, Version 8.0e, allows OS/400 shops to see how their current and historical workloads would fare on every configuration of iSeries server. PerfNav 8.0e is available now. For more information and free downloads, go to www.mpginc.com.
  
  
• Aldon Computer Group, developer of OS/400 programming tools and multiplatform change management software, announced last week the opening of new international headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. The company, headquartered in Oakland, California, says it decided to consolidate the management of its overseas business because of revenue growth and the requirement to support a growing clientele. That revenue growth, Aldon says, is being driven by sales of Affiniti, Aldon's newest change management product, which supports development on OS/400, Unix, Windows, and Web platforms from a single interface. Aldon's offices in England and Hong Kong, as well as its overseas distributors, will now report to Toronto, which, in turn, will report to Oakland. Aldon also formalized its expansion into the Southern Hemisphere last year, when it launched Aldon Australasia, a joint venture between Aldon and its partner Pickett Computer Services of Avalon Beach, New South Wales. At the time, Affiniti was cited as the primary motivating factor in cementing the partnership.
  
  
• COMMON, the OS/400 user group, doesn't want you to forget the importance of the ABCs. That would be Availability/Business Continuity, of course, the collection of technologies and practices that will allow your organization to ride out a disaster, or another unplanned malady, with a minimum of harm. Good news: There will be a boatload of A/BC classes at the upcoming COMMON conference in Indianapolis. In fact, COMMON is so up on the topic that it has grouped A/BC into its own "course of study," which includes labs, vendor sessions, and five different Focused Education Roadmaps. In turn, each roadmap features anywhere from six to 12 sessions. The five roadmaps--Availability and Recovery Introduction, Single System Recovery Strategy, Multiple System Availability Strategies, Using Journal/Commit, and Advanced Journal Commit Features--are all geared toward providing students with an educational goal, as well as a business goal, to strive for. To view a nifty six-page color PDF flyer you can show to your boss to get him to let you go to COMMON to learn the A/BCs, go to www.common.org/abc.
  
  
• Global Software and Computer Configuration Services announced the formation of a strategic partnership late last year. The two companies, which had already been partners for some time, have set up an exclusive arrangement whereby Global Software, a Raleigh, North Carolina, developer of financial software for OS/400, will endorse CCS, an Irvine, California, IBM reseller, to customers needing iSeries hardware. The announcement also calls for CCS to become a reseller for Global Software's product Spreadsheet Server for BPCS, a utility that streamlines the process of downloading financial data housed in the BPCS ERP system from SSA Global Technologies to spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and IBM Lotus 1-2-3.
  
  
• As practitioners of the OS/400 method, readers of The Four Hundred are, perhaps more so than other platform enthusiasts, acutely aware of the advantages and disadvantages of associated with particular operating systems. However, until now, there has been no rigorous scientific method available to rank today's popular operating systems (and give OS/400 its rightful place in the sun). Behold, the Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter, the first Web site devoted to quantifying users' experiences with their operating systems and publishing the results. By periodically performing in-depth Alta Vista searches for the number of times that a particular operating system is mentioned on a Web page directly followed by the words "sucks," "rules," or "rocks," the Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter is able to report, with a high degree of accuracy, the relative popularity and strength of a platform's following, in real time. According to the results--and this will probably not surprise you--Microsoft's Windows is a big-time loser, with 88 percent of Windows references being negative ("Windows sucks"). Linux, on the other hand, has an 82 percent approval rating ("Linux rocks" or "Linux rules"). To see how the operating systems fared against one another, go to http://srom.zgp.org. It's a pretty picture, ain't it? (Editor's Note: Today's iSeries announcements are not reflected in these rankings.) Our thanks to the site's creators for adding to the font of knowledge, and making us laugh out loud.
  
  

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