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But Wait, There's More . . .
IBM took an ax to prices on selected hardware and
software to make the iSeries more competitive and affordable, as we said it would in last week's issue. (See our table outlining
hardware price changes in detail.) As part of last week's announcements, IBM also announced it had raised
certain fees for upgrading selected components of Software Subscription when moving between OS/400
software tiers. These prices have increased by 25 percent, and the price increases will go into effect on July 1.
BCC Technologies, one of the few remaining
third-party storage suppliers in the OS/400 server market, has signed a deal with Blue Chip Customer Engineering of Bedford, England, that will
see Blue Chip work with BCC to sell and support BCC's Extender family of AS/400 and iSeries internal
disk arrays in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Sri Lanka. Blue Chip, which was founded in 1987, says
that it is the largest non-IBM midrange support specialist
in the United Kingdom, and that it also uses ex-IBMers as its support engineers.
This is very likely the first of many such alliances that BCC will form, since it has had some difficulties with partner IBM,
which installs and supports the Extender disks on behalf of BCC. BCC says that some IBMers do not like
IBM Global Services, Global Finance, and Technology Group helping BCC sell against the MidMarket
Server Division, which controls the iSeries. Last week, the company released a statement that amounted to a
declaration of independence from IBM and outlined its grievances and the reasons why the company
believes co-opetition with IBM is good for IBM, as well as for the OS/400 customer base. In this document,
BCC says it is looking at alternative support and component suppliers to ensure that it can continue to
deliver compatible iSeries disk subsystems.
It's becoming a big, bad Java world, and Business
Computer Design Int'l is right there in it. BCD's ProGen WebSmart development environment has
helped programmers to create dynamic Web applications that run as ILE RPG-based CGI programs on
AS/400 and iSeries servers. Now BCD is adding Java-generation capabilities to WebSmart, which will
allow developers to take the same WebSmart applications they created as CGI scripts for OS/400 and
deploy them with Java to practically any platform, including Windows and Linux servers. BCD plans to
deliver the new Java capability with a separate add-on component called WebSmart Java Servlet Edition.
WebSmart JSE is in beta tests and should be available in 30 to 45 days, BCD officials said.
A story surfaced early last week in the Financial Times of London that Microsoft is getting ready to acquire European application software
vendor Navision for $1.2 billion. Such an acquisition,
if it does take place, would be Microsoft's second big application software buy, after the $1 billion
acquisition of Great Plains Software at the end of 2000. Microsoft would not confirm the rumor, and all
Navision would say is that it is entertaining offers. Navision is probably not familiar to companies in North
America. Navision is the result of the merger, in November 2000, of two midrange ERP software vendors
from Denmark, Navision Software and Damgaard Software. The combined company, which sells ERP
applications throughout the world, has an installed base of over 130,000 installations and a reseller and
implementation partner channel that numbers over 2,250 companies. Sources at Navision say that the
company averages over 10,000 installs of its products each year, which makes Navision one of the highest-
volume players in the midrange. Navision's chief competitor on the Windows server platform is none other
than Microsoft's own Great Plains Software unit. The interesting thing about Navision, as far as OS/400
shops are concerned, and as we reported in Midrange Stuff, OS/400
Edition, in February, is that the company intended to port some of its applications to OS/400,
which could be a boon for the iSeries. However, if Microsoft ends up owning Navision, you can pretty
much kiss those applications goodbye.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices last week gave proper names to the 64-bit
processors they plan to ship later this year and early next. Intel's development of its second generation 64-
bit processor has gone by the code name "McKinley," but when the processor becomes available later this
year, it will be known as Itanium 2. And AMD's 64-bit development effort, which has been code-named
"Hammer," will spawn a processor for use in multiprocessor servers called Opteron.
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