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But Wait, There's More
IBM, BlueWare Tout iSeries-Based Patient Care Record System
IBM and iSeries independent software vendor BlueWare are touting the success of a recent effort to digitize the operations of the West Branch Regional Medical Center, the flagship hospital a system that covers the "mitten" section of the state of Michigan. (West Branch is where the second knuckle on the index finger would be inside the mitten.) BlueWare has developed an application suite targeted at healthcare facilities called the Wellness Connection Suite, which runs on the iSeries. The West Branch hospital opted to replace some homegrown applications with the software, which, among other things, digitized patient records. To do so, it chose BlueWare, which is located in Cadillac, Michigan--due west from West Branch, in fact, somewhere about on the second knuckle of the ring finger inside the mitten.
The hospital says that by moving to the Wellness Connection Suite, it has saved $50,000 in the first six months of using the software, and says further that staff inefficiency has been cut by 40 percent. This is a measure of how much easier it is to deal with electronic documents rather than paper ones. BlueWare says that the hospital often had significant delays in putting out its bills as the accounting department awaited medical records to find out what exactly to bill patients for. The new system has furthermore cut back accounts receivables from 90 days back to 60 days, which has obviously helped cash flow. The Wellness Connection Suite runs atop OS/400 and uses IBM's DB2 Content Manager and the DB2/400 database to store and retrieve digitized patient records. Records are ultimately stored on COLD storage. (That's short for Computer Output to Laser Disc.)
GST Creates Market Guides to Help eServer Buyers
Midrange storage specialist GST has put together a bunch of buyer's guides for iSeries, pSeries, and TotalStorage products from IBM as a service to midrange shops and as a means of promoting its own disk and tape products. GST is also a reseller of eServer i5 and p5 servers, and in addition to providing detailed feeds and speeds of the IBM Power-based servers, the company has the good sense to show the street prices it is charging for customers who buy these systems through GST.
The following buyer's guides are available:
TCG, Innovative Partner to Link Trucking Applications
Transportation Costing Group, a maker of software for the transportation industry, and Innovative Computing, a software maker that sells complementary software to the trucking industry, have announced that they have integrated their applications to help their customers run more efficiently and to help them save money.
Innovative sells a suite of software called the Innovative Enterprise Software suite, which automates the operations of a trucking company, including dispatch, fleet management, pallet control, fleet maintenance, accounting, payroll, and other modules. The software is written in RPG and runs natively on the OS/400 platform. TCG is a specialist in software that figured out the costing of the shipping of particular loads of goods (including partially filled trucks), and has patents on its means of calculating these costs. Many companies using the Innovative Enterprise Software suite want to use TCG's Truck Load Cost Information System (TL/CIS), and the agreement between the two companies to expose APIs to allow that integration is what this announcement is all about.
Lakeview Technology Gets ServerProven Status for MIMIX Wares
High availability software maker Lakeview Technology said last week that six of its MIMIX-derived HA software programs have been given the ServerProven status from IBM. These include MIMIX ha1, MIMIX ha Lite, MIMIX ha1 for Windows, MIMIX network1, MIMIX dr1, and MIMIX replicate1.
ServerProven status is important for a number of reasons. First, it means that a particular piece of software has been put through the paces by IBM and its ISV partner to ensure that it works properly on the latest server and operating system releases in the eServer portfolio. Moreover, IBM gives ISVs with ServerProven status co-marketing and advertising money, plus rebates to end users who buy these solutions. Right now, IBM's North American unit is offering rebates of between $250 and $64,000 for companies that buy ServerProven software on a new iSeries or eServer i5 machine; additionally, in Europe, pushing certain ServerProven applications, both the customer and the ISV each get the rebate in U.S. dollars. To check out what OS/400 applications have been certified as ServerProven, go to http://www.developer.ibm.com/welcome/eserver/eSC/index.jsp.
Gartner's People3 Predicts IT Workforce Shortage
The People3 human capital practice of Gartner is raising the specter of yet another IT skills shortage. In a report entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Workforce: Addressing Tomorrow's Issues Today," People3 analysts say that future job growth in the IT sector will be concentrated in highly skilled and knowledge-based work (presumably meaning application design and system architecting based on deep knowledge of IT and business practices in particular industries). The report estimates that there will be 21 million new IT jobs in 2012 and only 17 million new entrants, which seems to imply that companies will be put in the position of raiding other companies for talent as they themselves get raided. Increased demand meeting shortening supplies always leads to pay increases, which is good news for employees, but not so good for employers who don't want their IT people to return to the kind of sports star status they enjoyed in the late 1990s.
People3, which is pronounced "people cubed," has some sound advice that has a familiar ring to it: conduct a workforce analysis, find out who your key employees are and what their compensation is relative to their opportunities elsewhere, and make sure they don't leave. That workforce plan should also look at how the company should cultivate the kind of IT employees that will be needed for future IT projects, and it should plot out the expected career paths for employees. "Workforce planning helps IT leaders avoid making the same overstaffing mistakes they made during the technology boom era which consequently caused the layoffs and downsizing during the recent economic downturn," said Diane Berry, managing vice president at People3. "It also prevents the pitfalls of understaffing that eventually lead to employee burnout, low morale and low productivity."
IBM Launches Faster 'Irwindale' Xeon Servers
IBM will this week deliver versions of its xSeries and BladeCenter servers that employ the new "Irwindale" Xeon DP processor from Intel. The Irwindale chip is a variant of the 64-bit "Nocona" processor, except that it has 2 MB of L2 cache memory as well as the new Demand Based Switching and SpeedStep power management and Execute Disable security enhancement. It has an 800 MHz frontside bus, just like the Nocona chip, which means it can plug into the exact same slots (see the separate story in this issue for more on the Irwindale chip).
IBM says that the xSeries and BladeCenter blade servers equipped with the new Irwindale chips, which have twice as much cache memory as the Noconas, can provide as much as an 18 percent performance boost, according to Intel's internal benchmarks. But the Irwindales are expected to run at the same clock speeds as the Noconas, so this will only be true on applications that can make use of that larger cache.
IBM says that the Irwindale chips will ship in four of its two-way servers and the HS20 two-way blade servers by the end of February. The xSeries 226 is a 4U tower or rack machine that supports from 512 MB to 16 GB of main memory, and 1.8 TB of internal SCSI or 1 TB of internal SATA disks, and has three PCI-X, two PCI, and one PCI-Express slot. It costs $1,225 with a single Irwindale chip running at 3 GHz plus 512 MB of memory and no disk; it costs $1,475 to buy the machine with a three-year warranty. The xSeries 236 is a slightly larger 5U tower or rack server that supports the same memory configurations, but has room for nine disks. It has three PCI-X, two PC-Express, and one PCI slot. It comes with a three-year warranty and costs $2,399 with a single 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of main memory, no disks, and a three-year warranty. The xSeries 336 is a 1U, rack-mounted server that can house two disk drives (300 GB SCSI Or 250 GB SATA) and has two PCI-X slots and an optional PCI-Express slot. It supports up to 16 GB of main memory as well, and costs $2,359 in a base configuration (1 GB of memory, one 3 GHz chip, no disk, and a three-year warranty). And, finally, the xSeries 346 is a 2U rack-mounted server with four PCI-X or two PCI-X and two PCI-Express slots that has the same memory expansion as the other Irwindale-based xSeries machines being announced today. A base xSeries 346 comes with one 3 GHz processor and 1 GB of main memory; it costs $2,745 with that three-year warranty. IBM did not provide pricing on the HS20 blades.
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