But Wait, There's More. . .

• 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 Guide is for Sept. 28. An archive of OS/400 PTF Guides is also available on our site.

• IBM closed its $3.5 billion acquisition of the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers last week, and it immediately created a new 60,000-person-strong division that will stand beside IBM Global Services and will be headed up by Ginni Rometty, a 45-year-old fast-rising star at IBM who was in charge of the Americas region of Global Services. While PwC partners overwhelmingly approved of the IBM acquisition in August, only 1,000 of the 1,200 partners at PwC are now employees of IBM. PwC partners are taking a big pay cut to move into IBM, but the company is lavishing lots of stock options on partners to make up for it in the long run. Rometty is on the fast track at IBM, and has been one of the driving forces behind Big Blue's e-business efforts. If she can make the new Business Consulting Services unit work internally--which is comprised of 30,000 IBMers and 30,000 former PwCers who do not share similar cultures--and turn around its sinking revenues (due mostly to the poor economy), then she is probably going to go far at Big Blue.
  
  
• If you are looking to add disk capacity to your iSeries or AS/400 server, you might be interested in a try-and-buy program from BCC Technologies. Under the deal, OS/400 shops that are first-time buyers of BCC disks can try up to four 15K RPM disks for 30 days for free. But you have to act fast. This deal expires on October 31. Customers who take part in the deal can get the BCC 35 GB Extender disks for $995 each, a 43 percent discount off their $1,750 list price, and the 17 GB Extender disks for $750 each, a 38 percent discount off their $1,200 list price.
  
  
• ROI last week announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2002, which ended June 30, 2002. The Kennesaw, Georgia, company--which offers a range of credit card transaction software and services and OS/400 application development tools through its subsidiaries, GO Software, S.A.F.E. Systems, and Net400--reported that its revenues were up by more than 123 percent over the previous year. Total revenue came in at about $8.4 million, up from about $3.8 million in fiscal 2001. The company reported an overall loss of $4.6 million for the year, compared with $2.6 million last year, which corresponded to a $.43 loss for fiscal 2002, up from a $.28 loss the year before. If you eliminate non-cash items, the corresponding losses resulted in $.13 per share this year and $.18 for 2001, according to ROI.
  
  
• MSI Systems Integrators, an Omaha, Nebraska, iSeries reseller, has joined Lakeview Technology's MIMIX high-availability business partner program, the companies announced last week. MSI sells IBM's complete range of eServers, as well as IBM's storage and middleware offerings. The company employs 160 consultants, who helped to generate the company $133 million in revenues for the fiscal year ending June 2002, with $18.5 million of that total coming from iSeries revenue, the company said. Lakeview joins a group of other hardware and software vendors that MSI also has partnerships with, including PowerTech Group, IBM Tivoli, IBM Lotus, Cisco Systems, and AT&T. In July, MSI announced the opening of a WIC, or WebSphere Innovation Center, at its headquarters. WICs are where potential customers or business partners can go to test run WebSphere applications.
  
  
• LXI last week announced that Media Management System, its storage management and backup and recovery utility for OS/400 servers, has gained the TotalStorage Proven certification from IBM. The MMS family of storage management applications--which helps companies prioritize and automate backups, perform concurrent saves, and automate recovery options--has supported the OS/400 platform for the last 10 years. LXI says that by gaining the TotalStorage Proven certification from IBM, it helps customers to more easily see the storage solutions have that have been pre-tested with their system for interoperability, which helps customers make good decisions about their storage investments and minimizes risk for their businesses.
  
  

Sponsored By COGLIN MILL

RODIN delivers truly amazing data warehouse load rates in ETL performance benchmark! In June this year, Coglin Mill was the first IBM business partner invited into the iSeries Teraplex Center in Rochester, MN to test our software on the new 32-way i890 iSeries server. This was Coglin Mill's fifth visit to the Teraplex Center and, as previously, the results were simply amazing, with data warehouse load rates of up to 625 million rows per hour (no, that is not a typo)! These industry leading results are enabled by RODIN's unique parallel loading technology which utilizes all available processors (in this case 32 of them). A native iSeries product, RODIN was designed from the ground up to take advantage of all unique features of the iSeries architecture. IBM recognizes RODIN's role as the premier iSeries ETL tool for building and managing scalable, enterprise-wide data warehouses, and as such uses RODIN as their standard measuring stick for each new generation of iSeries servers. We perform the same series of tests each time, using the latest version of RODIN and OS/400, so that we can truly measure the performance improvements delivered by both hardware and software. Unlike some of our competitors, we did no complex optimization of the test data, and the actual results are published - in contrast to a benchmark result recently published by a competing vendor that was inflated by 100% by "scaling" the numbers to a hardware configuration that does not even exist! These are truly real-world results, achieved using commercially available hardware and software. We are continuing to raise the bar and prove that the winning combination or RODIN and iSeries is an unbeatable platform for enterprise-wide business intelligence implementations. To see the full details and results of the benchmark tests, download the detailed results paper (PDF format). Contact Pete Wangen at 507-282-4151 x45 or pwangen@coglinmill.com