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But Wait, There's More . . .
It seems unwise in the current suspicious climate of executive stewardship that IBM has not said how many employees it intends to layoff, where it intends to do it, and what the cost will be, but this is the case. However, with pressure from Wall Street and investors weighing in, IBM last week announced that it would have to take a $2 billion to $2.5 billion charge, most of it in the second quarter, to account for company-wide layoffs as well as restructurings in its chip making units and the sale of its disk drive business to rival Hitachi. IBM says that it will end chip lines that make aluminum-based chips and ramp up production on factories for copper-based chips. There is a glut of aluminum chip-making capacity on the market and a shortage of copper chip production facilities. IBM didn't say what lines would be cut or if it was actually closing down factories. In the Microelectronics Division, 1,500 of IBM's 20,000 employees were cut from the payroll under the recent restructuring. Lee Conrad, who heads up the Alliance@ IBM office of the Communications Workers of America union, put Big Blue's unofficial job cut tally at 6,872. Conrad said, based on industry reports and inside talk, he reckons Server Group has laid off 1,009 workers; Software Group, 707 workers; Global Financing, 99 workers; Storage Systems Group, 305 workers; Global Services, 2,163 workers; Microelectronics Division, 1,500 workers; Sales and Distribution, 725 workers; and corporate headquarters, 364 workers.
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Sources at EMC say emphatically that the company does not modify OS/400 code to attach its Symmetrix arrays to AS/400 and iSeries servers. Our story last week on the Fast400 governor buster suggested that EMC had hacked OS/400 to add support for Symmetrix arrays. EMC says that Symmetrix attaches to OS/400 servers by emulating iSeries disks and that IBM claims--and, according to EMC, incorrectly claims--that EMC alters or modifies AS/400 or iSeries hardware when the company installs its load source emulator. However, this load source emulator is an IBM disk drive electronics jacket with the physical disk removed. EMC plugs the Symmetrix array into a sufficient number of these disk electronics jackets to provide bandwidth between the OS/400 server and the Symmetrix array. As far as OS/400 knows, it is just talking to IBM disk drives, though it is in fact talking to the Symmetrix.
If you are trying to sort out the latest PTFs for OS/400 and its related systems programs that IBM has released, you need to check out the OS/400 PTF Guide, which is put together by our friends at iSeries business partner DLB Associates. You can take a look at the latest OS/400 PTF Guide. An archive of OS/400 PTF Guides published to date is also available.
In a personnel move right out of the soon-to-be-created soap opera As The Midrange World Turns, Joe Mertens has come back to take a leadership role at Sirius Computer Solutions, the same place he started his career years ago when it was known as Star Data Systems. Mertens arrives at the San Antonio, Texas, hardware reseller from Phoenix, Arizona, based reseller giant Avnet, which he joined in July 2000 when Savoir Technology Group, of which he was president and chief operating officer, was bought by Avnet. As Sirius' new executive vice president of business development, Mertens will again work closely with Sirius' chief executive, Harvey Najim, who is the only other non-IBMer besides Mertens to receive an IBM Lifetime Achievement Award, Sirius says. As Sirius' executive vice president of business development, Mertens fills a position vacated earlier this year when its sales and business development director Bryan Flanagan left to take a job with Lakeview Technology, a Sirius business partner that was itself looking for executive know-how when its vice president of business development, David Wegman, left late last year to take a job with Lakeview's rival in the OS/400 high availability market, Vision Solutions.
DataMirror has extended indefinitely its third and final offer to purchase a simple majority of shares in Vision Solutions' parent company, IDION Technology Holdings. Since we last visited this episode of the dueling OS/400 high availability business partners, in the May 20 issue of this newsletter, in which we described how Vision Solutions shareholders had rejected what DataMirror called its final offer of 180 Rand cents per share, DataMirror has been gobbling up IDION stock, and now owns more than 35 percent of the South African company and its holdings. When DataMirror launched its take-over bid in March, the publicly traded Canadian company owned about 16 percent of IDION. Because it is now the single largest stockholder of IDION, DataMirror says its final offer is no longer conditional on DataMirror obtaining a simple ownership majority, and that the offer "has been extended until further notice." The same day DataMirror extended its final offer and made it unconditional, IDION posted a note on its Web site that reiterated its stance that DataMirror's offer is too low, and declared that DataMirror would not receive a position on IDION's board of directors. "DataMirror has sought to position itself as a competitor of IDION and as such will not be granted board representation," stated Nicolaas Vlok, chief executive of IDION. "In addition, DataMirror will not gain access to IDION's technology."
Coglin Mill, the Rochester, Minnesota, software company that writes data warehousing and extract, transform, and load software for the OS/400 platform, made a couple of personnel moves last week. First, the company hired Pete Wangen to be its new director of sales and marketing and to push the RODIN Data Asset Management platform into the AS/400 and iSeries installed base. Wangen, who arrives at Coglin Mill from an Oregon company called Pacific Northwest Networks, is reportedly glad to be back in his hometown of Rochester (especially in June). Coglin Mill has also hired Hellena Smejda, president of WordsWorth International, to provide strategic and tactical marketing services.
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Editor
Timothy Prickett Morgan
Managing Editor
Shannon Pastore
Contributing Editors:
Dan Burger
Joe Hertvik
Kevin Vandever
Shannon O'Donnell
Victor Rozek
Hesh Wiener
Alex Woodie
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