The Four Hundred

OS/400 Edition
Volume 11, Number 30 -- August 5, 2002

But Wait, There's More. . .

Look for the upcoming special editions of The Four Hundred dedicated to looking at the technology inside the new OS/400 V5R2 release, which begins shipping August 30. Our techies have gathered a lot of technical information from IBM Rochester to give you a deeper understanding of what is inside this new release of the iSeries operating system. Subscribers to this newsletter will automatically receive the V5R2 special editions, the first of which will be published August 15.

As we reported last week, IBM EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) is offering a special deal to promote the use of its Domino messaging and groupware software among iSeries customers. As we indicated last week, IBM is giving customers buying a new iSeries machine a free license for the Domino R5 server on one processor, five Notes clients, or five iNotes clients bundled on the machines. Under current IBM EMEA pricing, according to IBM sources, a one-processor license of Domino Application Server with one year's worth of support and maintenance costs 2,722 euros, and five Domino iNotes clients cost 89 euros. The Domino/Notes software is bundled and activated automatically on the iSeries machines, but IBM says that customers who want to use the software in production have to pay the maintenance fee for it, which is 837 euros. The bundled software deal, which sources say will not be available outside EMEA and will only available during the third quarter of 2002, will cut the Domino/Notes prices by 70 percent. This bundle is available for new iSeries Model 270-2432, 270-2434, 270-2452, and 270-2454 servers, as well as for all new Model 8XX acquisitions and upgrades to Model 8XX servers. The software was bundled and activated automatically on the machines. In this current economic climate, companies buying iSeries machines outside EMEA should demand an equivalent deal from their local IBM division or business partner, regardless of IBM's rules. It can't hurt to ask, or even to demand. It's a buyer's market in the server biz.
The XML-enabled version of Windows 2000, code-named "Whistler" and named Windows .NET Server, took a step closer to becoming a real product with Microsoft's announcement late last week, at its annual financial analysts conference in Redmond, Washington, that Release Candidate 1 (or RC1) of Windows .NET Server was ready for testing. In Microsoft lingo, a release candidate is in limbo, half-way between beta and production release. Generally, Microsoft has at least three RCs before a product is put on sale. But this one may not take as many RCs. In fact, Microsoft's Web sites are running on Windows .NET Server RC1 right now. Windows .NET Server is expected to be announced late this year or early next year, and will probably ship sometime in January. (For more details, see "Microsoft Puts Out Windows .NET Server Release Candidate 1.")
Midrange Direct will be giving away a free AS/400 Model 170 at the end of the month, in celebration of 22 years of being in business. Any U.S. resident can enter to win the box, which sports 64 MB of memory, two 4 GB disk drives, a 4 GB one-quarter inch tape drive, power and networking cables, and OS/400 V4R4. Midrange Direct, which sells, rents, and leases a complete line of used server and networking equipment, including used servers from IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard, will select the winner from a random drawing on August 31. To enter the drawing, fill out the form on Midrange Direct's Web site.
Sysix Technologies is the newest member of the iSeries sales channel. The Chicago-based company was already a reseller of IBM pSeries and xSeries servers, as well as servers from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Now, with IBM's authorization to begin selling on the iSeries, Sysix says it is well positioned to meet the demands of its customer base in the manufacturing, financial services, education, health care, and professional services industries, for which Sysix says the iSeries is the "optimum computing choice." The company maintains a consulting subsidiary for ERP, CRM, and supply chain solutions, based on software from Oracle, SAP, i2 Technologies, Datatel, and Microsoft Great Plains Software.
SafeStone Technologies is on the move, English-style. A week after announcing it had received $4 million in funding from Symantec and other investors, the Princeton, New Jersey, provider of OS/400 security and application provisioning software formed new OEM partnerships with two British iSeries consultancies, GSA and DVV Solutions, signifying a move back to an indirect sales strategy for the DetectIT suite of OS/400 security tools, which have enjoyed healthy adoption in Europe. London-based GSA is one of IBM's premier iSeries business partners and provides a wide range of consulting services to some of Britain's largest companies. Among other expertise, GSA maintains a clustering and high availability business using DataMirror technology, and also sells a database change management system for DB2/400, called Ø-Source. DVV Solutions was founded in 2000 and specializes in networking security for midsize and large companies.
Cetova last week introduced a Java-based financial analysis and reporting solution that it says simplifies the process of extracting financial data from ERP systems, storing it, and then analyzing it. The software, dubbed C-FAR, isn't a business intelligence or data warehousing platform, the Jersey City, New Jersey, company proudly points out. Instead, C-FAR provides an Excel-like front-end, from which non-technical users can create and then populate reports using data from ERP databases, the company says. C-FAR features connectors to ERP packages from J.D. Edwards, SAP, Lawson Software, Oracle, and Microsoft Great Plains Software; it supports database systems from Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle; and it runs on Windows, Unix, and OS/400 operating systems.
Complaints about slow Java performance will nary be heard among J.D. Edwards customers if the ERP giant's new partnership with Precise Software Solutions goes as planned. With Precise/Indepth for WebSphere, J.D. Edwards plans to make sure that its next generation of WebSphere-powered OneWorld and CRM applications are optimized for server-side Java performance before the software packages are shipped to customers for installation. In addition to seeing action in J.D. Edwards' labs, Precise/Indepth for WebSphere will be offered to customers to help them monitor and tune their Web-based Java 2 Enterprise Edition applications. J.D. Edwards said it reviewed several Java optimization technologies before settling on Precise, because of its J2EE instrumentation, correlation of J2EE performance metrics, in-depth drill-down analysis to isolate root cause, and low overhead while collecting profile data. Precise's application performance software has seen wide use among enterprise software developers, including BEA Systems, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and EMC.