But Wait, There's More

IBM Hires New iSeries Sales Exec for Latin America

IBM continues to revamp and build out its sales team for the iSeries server line, and last Friday announced that it has appointed Freddy Alves-Vaquero as the new sales lead for its Latin America region for the iSeries. Alves-Vaquero previously sold wares from the Information Management area within IBM's Software Group in the Latin America region, and now he will push the iSeries in the same region. He will be based in Miami, Fla., and will be instrumental in pumping up iSeries sales in fast-growing regions such as Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. He will report to Bill Donohue, the newly appointed worldwide vice president of iSeries sales, who took of the top sales spot for the iSeries in early July after four years as the top salesperson for the pSeries line in the Americas.

Several weeks ago, IBM hired Thomas Striebel to head up iSeries sales in Germany, and Pascal Gaussen to run sales in the Southwest Europe region.

IDC Projects IT Spending to Grow 5.9 Percent Through 2009

The prognosticators at IDC have taken a stab at predicting where the worldwide market for IT goods and services will be in 2009, and according to its most recent models, IT spending will hit $1.3 trillion by the end of that year. The growth represents a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 percent, compounded over the five years from 2004 through 2009. While this in not the high growth we saw in the dot-com era, it is better than a sharp kick in the teeth, which is what the decline in IT spending was like in 2001 and 2002.

As is always the case in the IT market, there are hot and cold spots when it comes to spending. Anne Songtao Lu, the IDC analyst in charge of monitoring worldwide vertical markets, said in a report that spending will be highest in government, manufacturing and banking, but the highest growth in spending will be in the healthcare and the communications/media industry. In the latter vertical market, for instance, IDC reckons that IT spending will grow from $95 billion in 2005 to $128 billion by 2009, driven by heavy investment in networking gear, new PCs, peripherals, and storage.

IDC is projecting that consumer spending on IT services, peripherals, and PCs will grow in the double digits over this term, obviously pulling up the averages for spending among corporations if the two together are only hitting a compound growth rate of just under 6 percent. Because of changing regulations and compliance issues, the banking and financing industry is expected to spend big bucks, too, but IDC didn't elaborate on growth rates. The analysts also expect the telecommunications industry to upgrade their IT infrastructure as they roll out more so-called 3G (third generation) services for their telecom customers.

GST Launches i5 and p5 Configuration Center

Disk and tape storage vendor GST last week announced a new service for the iSeries and pSeries market: a Configuration Center that assists customers in setting up and validating the configurations of servers as related storage products from IBM and alternatives made by GST itself. You can go to the Configuration Center by clicking here. The Configuration Center brings together GST's own eServer Market Guides, its StorFacts Reports (which talk about technical issues relating to disk and tape technology), and white papers that focus on various storage technologies. The interesting bit that makes this more than passive electronic reports is the Configuration Assistance. You fill out a form detailing what you are trying to accomplish--migrating from one OS/400 server to another, set up logical partitions, whatever--and GST's techies will help you figure it out. The Configuration Assistance service has a nominal fee that is proportional to the complexity of the issue. Most of the other tools on the site are free.

Midrange Performance Group Signs Up Resellers

iSeries performance experts Midrange Performance Group announced last week that it has expanded its overseas channel of business partners and resellers.

MPG is best known as the supplier of the Performance Navigator capacity planning and performance monitoring tool for the OS/400 platform, which is just about the only alternative to the PATROL tool from BMC Software after IBM ditched the well-regarded Performance Tools a number of years ago. Last fall, MPG developed a complementary tool to Performance Navigator called Power Navigator, which monitors the performance of AIX and Linux workloads running inside iSeries logical partitions and which provides basic capacity planning.

MPG already has resellers and distributors of its products in the United States, Australia, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, and Austria, and this week it is building out that channel further. Specifically, MPG has inked a deal with Mitra Infosarana, which was established in Indonesia in 1992 as USI Jaya as a joint venture with IBM Indonesia; Mitra Infosarana sells the all of IBM's eServer platforms as well as its software. In Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, MPG has partnered with Sunway Computer Services, the computing arm of a giant conglomerate that was founded as a construction company in 1974. MPG has also signed up Anam Information Technology, which is located in Korea, Syan in the United Kingdom, The Eniac Group in Venezuela, Fritz & Macziol in Germany and Switzerland, and Becom Information Systems in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

COMMON Gives Interim Director Gervasi the Executive Director Job

The board of directors of the COMMON midrange user group has made Ralph Gervasi, its interim executive director, the official executive director. The appointment is effective September 1.

The prior executive director, Lynne Schwartz, stepped down on March 31, and Gervasi, who was COMMON's membership manager, was tapped to be the interim executive director of the organization. He is now in his fifth year at the organization, and has more than 15 years of experience in association management. Gervasi has a bachelor's of science degree in information technology from DeVry University and a bachelor's of arts in business administration from Dominican University. COMMON's president, Beverly Russell, said that Gervasi has, in his short tenure, been able to reduce costs at the user group while maintaining its service to iSeries users and the vendors in the community.

Windows 2000 Worm Wreaks Havoc

Companies running Windows 2000 computers were being urged last week to patch their computers as soon as possible to prevent the "Zotob" worm from infecting their computers. Another worm, likely a variant of the Zotob worm, wreaked havoc on the computers of several news organizations just days after Microsoft issued a patch for it.

CNN reported that its Windows 2000 computers, as well as the Windows 2000 systems of ABC News and The New York Times, were rendered useless late Tuesday by an Internet worm, which it identified as worm--rbot.ebq, and which most likely is a Zotob variant. The computers became unusable when they repeatedly shut down and re-booted, CNN says.

The Zotob worm takes advantage of the recently disclosed "plug-and-play" vulnerability in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability August 9 (see "Microsoft Issues Six Security Patches for Windows" and Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-039.

Exploit code for the plug-and-play vulnerability began appearing on the Internet over the weekend. The SANS Institute says that, after finding a host, the worm connects to a control server to ask for instructions. It then scans network neighborhoods and tries to infect them. The security organization says the coverage of the Zotob worm is likely a result of CNN becoming infected, and does not indicate a widespread worm attack. It's likely an isolated event, SANS says.

Microsoft gives a "critical" rating to this vulnerability only for Windows 2000 systems. It rates an "important" rating on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, because an attacker must have valid logon credentials. Computers running pre-Windows 2000 versions of the operating system are not affected.

Antivirus vendors, including F-Secure, McAfee, Sophos, Secunia, and Symantec, started protecting against Zotob soon after it surfaced.

Intel to Debut New Chip Architecture at Fall IDF

If the big event at the Spring Intel Developer Forum was Intel's embracement of the concept of putting multiple processor cores into a single computer socket to deliver performance increases, the upcoming IDF show this week will be about the unveiling of a new processor microarchitecture, apparently code-named "Nehalem," but then again, Intel won't confirm that. The company did say it would be talking about the new microarchitecture, which has nothing to do with the 10 GHz Pentium 4 that Intel had been talking about delivering in 2005 back in 2002 that was also code-named Nehalem. (Remember that? 10 GHz. Well, we'll never see that, and thank heavens.)

There is a lot of speculation out there that Nehalem will involve taking the Pentium M core from Intel's laptop and notebook line of chips and making the Nehalem architecture by tweaking the Pentium M pipeline so it can handle desktop, workstation, and server workloads. This may involve adding HyperThreading to the Pentium M core (which it does not have), as well as tweaks that allow the processor to scale from four to maybe as many as 16 cores per socket and deliver a reasonable performance benefit. The new architecture will probably also feature the so-called Common System Interface bus, which allows either Xeon or Itanium processors to be plugged into the same box (although not concurrently), as well as Intel's answer to AMD's HyperTransport interconnection scheme for its Opteron processors. New processors based on this new microarchitecture are expected to come to market in the second half of 2006.