Bang for the Buck: Entry i5 Servers Versus the Competition
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In last week's issue, I compared the System i5 Value and Express Editions against baby Wintel and Lintel servers in terms of their performance on online transaction processing workloads and the value for the dollar these machines have in relation to each other. The advent of dual-core X64 processors and aggressive, core-neutral software pricing on Windows and Linux software is giving the i5's competitors a big leap in bang for the buck. And among the larger entry server market--machines with one or two processor sockets--the gap is similarly large. READ MORE >

Infor Closes SSA Buy and Acquires Remaining GEAC Bits
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Midrange ERP powerhouse Infor announced last week that it had finalized its acquisition of rival software maker and similarly venture-capital backed SSA Global, and said further that it had acquired Extensity, the piece of Canadian ERP software supplier GEAC that was not originally acquired back in November 2005 when Infor started to bulk up in a big way. And, for good measure, Extensity had just finished doing an acquisition of its own, a software company called Systems Union, which nearly doubled the size of the resulting Infor customer base. READ MORE >

IBM Acquires Webify and MRO to Enhance Software, Services Offerings
by Mary Lou Roberts

In two announcements in as many days last week, IBM bolstered both its WebSphere and Tivoli product lines along with its services oriented architecture software and middleware strategy. SOA is a technology that IBM, like so many software makers, seems to push at every turn these days. One of the acquisitions, at $740 million, represents one of the largest purchases IBM has made in years in the software arena. READ MORE >

The X Factor: High-End Chips Draw Even, Vendors Prepare to Differentiate
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has taken a long time, a lot of planning and roadmaps, and some coincidental delays in products and surprises in the performance delivered by chip makers, but the four major high-end processors used in big servers--the IBM Power, Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, the Intel Itanium, and the AMD Opteron--have more or less drawn even in terms of the high performance and dual-core capabilities that five years ago were only available from IBM. But the situation may not last for long, as these same chip makers are preparing to push their chips in different technological directions in the coming years to push the performance envelope further. READ MORE >