But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• October 4
• September 27
• September 20
• September 13
• September 6

• A few weeks ago, DataMirror and Lakeview Technology announced that they were offering special deals in conjunction with the new iSeries for Capacity BackUp and the iSeries for High Availability servers that IBM announced last month. Now, Vision Solutions is making a similar offer to try to get companies to acquire these machines and its software. Under the Orion Launch HA Server promotion, companies that acquire an Orion license for either the HA Server or the Capacity BackUp server, as well as a license for Orion for OS/400 for their primary machine, will get the Orion Engine, the core component of the company's cross-platform clustering and high availability software, and its Active Data module, which provides repair-while-active and reorg-while-active functions for databases, for free. Vision Solutions says that this represents a savings of $50,000 or more off of licensing fees. This promotion runs through December 31.
  
  
• IBM has been using the services of a small, privately held company called Sector7 to help it port applications running on HP 3000 and other platforms to the iSeries. As soon as Hewlett-Packard announced that it was sunsetting its proprietary HP 3000 servers, IBM partnered with Sector7, which was founded in the United Kingdom in 1985 and which moved to Austin, Texas, in 1989, to try to drive HP's customers and software partners to the iSeries. How well that strategy worked is unclear, but last week IBM acquired a majority of Sector7's assets and intellectual property for an undisclosed sum. IBM plans to hire Sector7's employees and put them to work in its Global Services leviathan doing porting projects, particularly to Linux. It is unclear if IBM will continue to emphasize porting to the iSeries from other platforms.
  
  
• According to a survey of chief information officers performed by IBM and Executive Technology magazine, outsourcing and upgrading outdated point-of-sale terminals look like the hot tickets among retailers who are hesitant to commit big bags of money to new IT projects in 2003 but who are looking ahead over the next few years. CIOs and senior IT executives at big retailers (with more than $100 million in sales) were surveyed in North America, Europe, and Asia to gauge their enthusiasm for new technologies aimed at retailers and to get a sense of the issues that they are facing as they try to get more out of tighter budgets. If you average the spending levels of all the companies surveyed, IT spending accounted for 1.8 percent of total revenues in a similar IBM/Executive Technology survey performed for 2001. This latest survey looked at what happened in 2002 and asked executives to look ahead to the next year or two, and then to look to three to five years out. IT spending across those big companies surveyed was 2.1 percent of revenue in 2002, which is up somewhat. But don't get too excited: the IBM executive summary of the survey's results did not say if absolute IT spending for these retailers went up or down. All the survey does say is that the situation doesn't look good for growth in 2003, with operating and capital IT budgets expected to stay flat or to decrease among these retailers. Nearly all retailers plan to upgrade their point-of-sale systems, so they can speed up customer checkout and reduce costs. The survey indicates that the deployment of Linux-based in-store systems and POS devices was expected to increase fivefold in the next three to five years, but this statistic was hung in the air without any comparison to other store system shipments.
  
  
• CRM software maker Siebel Systems, which has IBM as its biggest customer, is taking a second stab at launching a hosted CRM solution for companies who do not want to buy and run their own implementations of Siebel CRM applications but who nonetheless want or need the software. Siebel killed a similar product just about two years ago before it came to market, when the bloom was off the rose on the application service provider model and Siebel wanted to focus on selling its core software. With Salesforce.com and a number of other players proving every day that Siebel should have been more patient concerning hosted CRM, Siebel and IBM last week launched Siebel CRM OnDemand, a joint venture that will sell a hosted version of Siebel's eponymous CRM applications for $70 per user, per month. The deal is a multiyear joint development, sales, marketing, and services agreement. Exactly how much money each party is investing in the partnership is not yet known. The partnership will be governed by Mike Lawrie, IBM's senior vice president in charge of global sales and distribution; Tom Siebel, CEO of the company that bears his name; David Schmaier, executive vice president at Siebel; and Doug Elix, IBM's senior vice president in charge of Global Services. Neither company announced what platforms the service would run on, but odds favor Windows, where Siebel is the strongest. But IBM and Siebel could be choosing pSeries Unix platforms, which have better on-demand features.
  
  
• Elite Document Solutions and Global Software announced last week that they have formed a partnership that will see Elite's electronic document management (file, e-mail, and fax documents can be managed) and laser check printing applications integrated with Global Software's financial and analytical application software. Both vendors are specialists in the OS/400 market, and the integration of Elite's document management and check printing software with Global Software's applications will make things easier for the latter company's 400 customers. The integration of document handling will probably help Global Software close more deals, which will push more money Elite's way, too.
  
  
• According to a report by market researchers at IDC, IBM gained more than five points of market share in the worldwide IT outsourcing market, widening the gap between itself and rival Electronic Data Systems considerably. IBM ended 2002 with a 22.4 percent share of the $68.5 billion worldwide outsourcing market. However, IBM's gains might be as much from bookkeeping tricks as from generating new business, according to comments made by IDC analyst David Tapper in the Wall Street Journal. EDS saw its share of the market grow from 12.1 percent in 2001 to 16.2 percent in 2002. Computer Sciences Corp., which has been in the IT outsourcing racket since 1958 (when there were only 4,000 computers in the world) was ranked third, with 5.6 percent of the market, dropping more than three points a share. Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard were respectively ranked fourth and fifth for 2002, according to IDC, with 4.7 percent and 1.8 percent of the worldwide outsourcing market respectively.
  
  

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