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But Wait, There's More
IBM Reaches 2,000 Installations of SAP Apps on OS/400 Servers
It is hard to predict what will happen in any new market. Back in late 1996, the ERP craze was in full swing, SAP was the Cinderella story, and IBM had finally hornswoggled the German software maker into supporting the AS/400 line. By July 1997, when I did most of an issue of the The Four Hundred on SAP and how it was causing seismic shifts in the midrange market, SAP had 250 installations running on the AS/400 and hoped to have 1,000 by the end of the year, thanks to the 12-way "Apache" Northstar servers, which could support nearly 200 SAP users. (Today's two-way i5 Model 520 can support over about 400 SAP users who are running much denser software.) Based on conversations with SAP at the time, I was projecting 2,300 installations on the AS/400 by the end of 1999 as the SAP base would grow to a total of 21,000 installations.
Getting to that 1,000 installation milestone took a lot longer than any of us expected, until the middle of 2001 or so. However, getting the next 1,000 installations on the OS/400 platform has been a little bit easier, no doubt in thanks to the rapidly increasing performance of the AS/400 and iSeries line and the substantial price cuts IBM has made. The 2,000th SAP installation on the OS/400 platform went to Starwood Hotels, which owns the St Regis luxury hotel in New York as well as the Sheraton, W, and Westin hotels. SAP now has 22,600 customers worldwide and 76,100 installations; the bulk of these ERP systems run on Unix and Windows machines. The OS/400 platform's share of that pie is 2.6 percent, and if IBM keeps improving the price/performance of the i5 line, there's no reason why it cannot grow to eventually reach 4 or 5 percent of the SAP base.
Plan to JAM with WAM in October
The idea of an OS/400 JAM session conjures up images of a group of "pickers and grinners" sharing their various skills and appreciating what each person brings to the mix. That description is not too far off the reality of JAM, the annual educational conference sponsored by the Washington Area Midrange user group, or WAM. So what we have here is a WAM JAM. If you live within train, plan, or automobile distance from the Washington D.C. area (or you think in terms of great locations for working vacations), mark the date of October 29 on your calendar. Take advantage of a full day's worth of educational classes and then spend a few days in the nation's capital.
For the first time, JAM has been designed as a cross-platform technical conference. Session topics include OS/400 (i5/OS), AIX, Linux, and WebSphere. A sampling of the JAM sessions on the agenda includes "Upgrade your AS/400 and iSeries to V5R2 or V5R3," by Dave Prescott; "iSeries Strategies," by Carson Soule; "OS/400 Fundamentals for Performance," by Pete Massiello; "Care and Feeding of AIX," by Susan Schreitmueller; "Managing Users in AIX," by Matilde L. Valdez; and "LPAR Fundamentals," by Glenn Ericson. The entire listing of sessions can be viewed on WAM's Web site, along with short biographies of the presenters.
The keynote address, "What's Next for the Net? A New Paradigm for Computing," will be presented by Michael Nelson, IBM's director of Internet technology and strategy.
The one-day event will be held at the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Maryland. The registration fee for WAM members is $250 and $275 for non-members. All registrations after October 8 will be subject to a $25 late fee. Go to the WAM site for more details.
Disk Array Sales Up 6.5% in First Quarter, Says IDC
According to market research performed by IDC, the worldwide external disk array market surged 6.5 percent to hit $3.5 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2004. Total disk sales (including internal arrays) grew more modestly at a rate of 3.5 percent, to $5.1 billion, which suggests that the market is shifting away from internal disks to external units. This is ironic, given that the shift to internal systems began about a decade ago as vendors tried to keep account control by integrating disk arrays with their servers. In terms of total disk storage sold, Hewlett-Packard was the dominant seller, with $1.2 billion in sales, but its revenues were down 6.1 percent. IBM was second in the IDC ranking, with just over $1 billion in sales, with revenues up 11.2 percent. As external arrays are taking off again, EMC's share of the market went up 26 percent, to $707 million. Dell and Hitachi had $351 million and $348 million in disk sales in the first quarter. Sun was number six, with $309 million, while all other vendors together accounted for $1.2 billion in sales, or 23.3 percent of the market.
There Are 20,000 Partitioned Machines in OS/400 Land
IBM first started shipping logical partitions in May 2001 with OS/400 V5R1 and what would be later rebranded as the iSeries servers. A year later, sources at IBM told me that about 35 percent of all iSeries machines were being shipped from the factory with logical partitions activated. Depending on how you do the math, that was somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 partition-enabled machines. As of this spring, I hear that IBM has passed the 20,000-machine mark. I'm still trying to get confirmation of that number, and I would love to know how many partitions customers have activated. It would be interesting to see if OS/400 shops do the server consolidation walk, or if IBM just does a lot of server consolidation talk. My guess is with the eServer i5s, we are going to see that partition number skyrocket since it is very inexpensive (by AS/400 standards) to add Linux partitions to the i5s. It's hard to imagine less than 50 percent or even 75 percent of i5 shipments not having at least one Linux partition on them, just because Linux is one of the default Web infrastructure platforms.
Like, No Kidding: IT Morale Is Low
IT consultancy META Group has just finished putting together its "2004 IT Staffing and Compensation Guide," and Maria Shafer, author of the study, says that low morale in IT shops is reaching a critical point. As we all know, this whole "do more with less" approach to IT (indeed across all businesses) has put a lot of strain on work and home relationships. Offshoring and outsourcing, the uncertainty of the business environment, and heavy workloads are all contributing to morale issues. Of the 650 companies that META surveyed for the study, 72 percent said that low IT employee morale is a serious issue. To that end, 45 percent of those companies have begun implementing employee recognition programs (if you can't give money, give praise), and another 40 percent have given employees a chance to get some training to boost their moral as well as their skills (this thing tends to cut both ways). Only 4 percent of companies surveyed are giving cash incentives to demonstrate the value of the IT employees to the company.
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