But Wait, There's More . . .

• Look for the second of our three special reports on 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's inside this new release of the iSeries operating system. Subscribers to The Four Hundred newsletter will automatically receive our special reports, the second of which will be published August 22. (The first special report in our series is available online.)

• 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 Guides, which our partner, DLB Associates, has compiled for you. The latest OS/400 PTF Guides are for August 3 and August 10. An archive of OS/400 PTF Guides published to date is also available on our site.
  
  
• IBM last week confirmed it would layoff about 5 percent of its workforce, primarily in its Global Services unit and Microelectronics Division. About 1,400 of the cuts come in the chip-making division, with the remaining 14,200 cuts in the services biz. After the cuts, IBM's workforce will drop from 320,000 worldwide to just under 305,000. IBM will add 30,000 employees when it finishes the acquisition of the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers sometime this year, but will reportedly shed another 18,000 employees as it exits the hard disk business by selling it off most of that business and all of its employees to Hitachi by the end of the year, if all goes well. IBM sources say voluntary layoffs have been accepted by a higher percentage of employees than originally expected, which is why the job cuts are somewhat higher than the 8,000 to 9,000 cuts many Wall Street analysts were expecting. The cuts are nonetheless tracking with IBM's revenue decline, and that is the point. IBM is keeping costs in line with sales, and that means it can, presumably, still profitably provide IT goods and services. That is what is important to customers over the long haul, no matter what disruptions the layoffs cause in the short term.
  
  
• COMMON will hold its first IT Executive Conference in Denver, Colorado, this October. The three-day event will be held at the same time and place as the regular conference and expo, namely the Colorado Convention Center from Sunday, October 13, to Tuesday, October 15. The difference is that the IT Executive Conference is aimed at the executives who hold the purse strings for the IT budget, rather than the techies responsible for programming, operating, and administering OS/400 servers. COMMON has put together a schedule for the IT Executive Conference that includes continental breakfasts, luncheons, golf outings, IBM executive briefings, and visits to the COMMON expo floor, the iSeries Nation Town Hall Meeting, and the COMMON User Discussion Social, as well as presentations by Bob Tipton, president and chief executive of R.S. Tipton, Ian Jarman, IBM's iSeries marketing manager, Wayne Madden, of iSeries Network, Dan Galvan, IBM's WebSphere marketing vice president, Mark Endry, J.D. Edwards' chief information officer, and Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, CIO of The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. For more information about the 2002 IT Executive Conference, or to see the full schedule, go to www.common.org/executive. Registration for the event costs $895 per person.
  
  
• Great Britain's iSeries compatriots will be holding an event next month that seeks to give the box its proper status as a truly fashionable machine. "Making the iSeries Fashionable" is the theme given the second annual iSeries symposium by its sponsors, which include IBM United Kingdom, COMMON UK, and IBM Computer Users' Association, a British midrange user group. The show, which will be held September 18 and 19 at The Royal Court Hotel near Coventry, will feature presentations on topics such as iSeries Linux, a vendor expo, and keynote speeches by Frank Soltis, iSeries Chief Scientist, Henrik Schlegel, IBM's vice president of iSeries for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and Malcolm Haines, the former iSeries evangelist who left IBM last year but who "will ensure his knowledge of this platform is passed on to the audience," the promotional material says.
  
  
• Registration for OCEAN User Group's seventh annual iSeries technical conference and vendor expo is now open. The one-day event will focus on honing RPG programmers' development skills and will feature classes on RPG IV advanced techniques, WebSphere development tools, and interfacing with the Web, XML, and SQL. The event's featured speakers will be iSeries experts Jon Paris and Susan Gantner, of the Toronto, Ontario, management-consulting firm Partner 400. The conference will be held on September 13 at the Marriott Hotel in Irvine, California. Last year's OCEAN conference was sold out, and OCEAN is encouraging people to sign up soon to reserve their space, which is limited. If you register before August 10, the fee is $225 or, if you're already an OCEAN member, $175. After August 10, those rates go up to $285 and $235 respectively. To register, go to www.ocean400.org.
  
  
• At LinuxWorld last week, Vision Solutions gave full-scale demonstrations of Orion, the new cross-platform high-availability software that Vision has been developing since 2001. At the same time, Vision announced it has been accepted into IBM's eLiza program, which now consists of 19 IBM business partners whose software helps companies manage heterogeneous IT environments. The Orion demo, on the new iSeries Model 890 mainframe IBM hauled to the event, was the first time Vision has publicly exhibited Orion since the LinuxWorld event in New York City last fall (which you can read more about in the "Vision Previews 'Orion' Cross-Platform Clustering"). Vision joins its OS/400 high-availability rival Lakeview Technology, which is developing a version of its MIMIX software for Windows operating systems. The eLiza project is an IBM-only research and development program that seeks ways to develop self-healing and self-optimizing servers. IBM opened the project up to its business partners earlier this year to demonstrate that there are already many such software products on the market. Software companies accepted into the eLiza partner project will have their software listed in a newly created self-managing systems category of IBM's Tools Network. (For more information about Project eLiza and the Tools Network, go to IBM's Web site.)
  
  
• It's been an introspective month for ASNA so far, as the application development tool provider celebrated its 20th birthday on August 7. The midrange community has changed significantly in the last two decades, and ASNA has changed right along with it. "David Ferguson founded ASNA, Amalgamated Software of North America, Inc., in Southern California 20 years ago with a simple, but revolutionary, idea: he thought he could do something better than IBM--and be successful selling it," stated an ASNA press release. "Indeed, he was. For several years, ASNA sold many IBM S/3X products that replaced True-Blue IBM-provided components with better ones. David retired a couple of years ago and now spends his time playing chess, polishing his sports car and, yes, he continues to fiddle with computers." Today, ASNA is headed by Anne Ferguson, and its OS/400 and Windows development tools, ASNA Visual RPG and DataGate, are distributed around the world. ASNA has put together a cool history in photos on its Web site, illustrating 20 years of ASNA, including pictures of David and Anne at ASNA's first headquarters in Malibu, California (is that a converted surf shop?), and shots of their second, third, and fourth headquarters in Newport Beach and Big Bear, California, and now San Antonio.
  
  
• The n-tier application-development environment created by NeuVis Software is now owned by Rational Software, a Lexington, Massachusetts, company that makes programming tools. Last week Rational acquired NeuVis, along with 26 NeuVis employees and NeuArchitect, a model-driven rapid-application-development environment that automatically generates compiled code that runs on a wide variety of operating systems and Web application servers, including OS/400, Windows, Unix, and Java 2 Enterprise Edition-compliant Web application servers, such as IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic. (For more information about NeuVis Software, see "NeuVis Software Ships RAD Tool for OS/400".) NeuArchitect appears to be a good fit for Rational's product lineup, which includes modeling tools, project management, software configuration management, debuggers, and testing tools for Java and Microsoft development environments and Unix, Linux, and Windows runtime environments.
  
  
• Kronos last week announced the acquisitions of two regional distributors of its labor-management solutions. Packard Business Systems of Charleston, West Virginia, and Time & Data Systems of Salt Lake City were previously Kronos distributors serving the West Virginia, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming regions. Kronos said that as its software has grown in sophistication, it's become evident that the company is better off selling and supporting the software itself, instead of relying on other companies to do so. This year Kronos acquired the rights to sell and modify two payroll and human resources packages developed by Best Software. Kronos is in the midst of integrating Workforce Central, its Windows-based time-and-attendance package, with the two new solutions.
  
  

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