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 Nov. 2. An archive of OS/400 PTF Guides is also available on our site.

• BCC Technologies has expanded its recently announced "RedStreak" promotion with the addition of a new trade-in involving 10K RPM iSeries disks. Under the original RedStreak promo, organizations that bought two of BCC's 15K RPM iSeries disks would get one 15K RPM disk for free--effectively giving customers 50 percent off the regular price, much like IBM's "GreenStreak" promotion for 50 percent off the price of some iSeries servers. Now BCC is offering to double customers' disk capacity by allowing organizations to trade in their IBM 10K RPM 17 GB iSeries disks for one BCC 15K RPM 35 GB disk. BCC says its 15K RPM 35 GB drives--based on IBM drives not yet available for iSeries customers through IBM--are 177 percent faster than IBM's 10K RPM drives. The promo is a one-for-one offer, BCC says; the only costs to the user are taxes, shipping, installation, and maintenance. The offer is good through December 31. Go to BCC's Web site, at www.bcctech.com, for more information.
  
  
• IBM last week announced some minor tweaks to some AS/400 and iSeries feature prices. The biggest change was that IBM more than doubled the price on its HSL optical adapters, from $6,500 to $15,000. It cut the price on its PCI-based cryptographic accelerator card from $7,400 to $6,000, a decrease of 19 percent. IBM also cut prices on conversions from specific I/O racks to I/O towers, and cut some memory feature upgrade prices. You can see a table outlining the price changes by clicking here.
  
  
• Data compression utility software vendor PKWARE last week announced the acquisition of its business partner Ascent Solutions, which adapted PKWARE's compression technology, called PKZIP, to work on IBM's mainframe and OS/400 server platforms. PKWARE's chief executive, George Haddix, said the acquisition of Ascent Solutions helped to "galvanize our focus on the enterprise market" and added to PKWARE's PKZIP products for Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms. Ascent Solutions had recently won several industry awards, and its customer list read like a who's who of enterprise accounts, including companies such as American Express, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Time Warner, and Wells Fargo. PKWARE was founded in 1986 by Phillip Katz, who created the wildly popular ZIP compression format. Both companies were privately held, and financial terms of the deal were not released.
  
  
• DataMirror last week announced that it will continue its "Simple HA for Under $60K" promotion through January 21, 2003. DataMirror originally announced the deal in August in the wake of IBM's announcement of the "GreenStreak" program, offering 50 percent discounts on certain iSeries Model 270s and Model 820s. Realizing that these boxes would make terrific backup servers, DataMirror, like other high availability software vendors, sought to capitalize on IBM's promotion by dropping the price of its iCluster high availability software and services (see "HA Vendors Continue to Roll Out Discounts" for more on the side effects of GreenStreak). With "Simple HA for Under $60K," the Toronto, Ontario, company offers organizations two licenses of its iCluster clustering software for OS/400, implementation, training, maintenance, and support--all for under $60,000. The deal had originally been scheduled to end on Halloween.
  
  
• IBM and EXE Technologies last week renewed their vow to promote each other's products in the market for supply chain execution software. EXE Technologies ported its COBOL-based warehouse management system, called EXceed, from OS/390 to OS/400 about two years ago, providing competition on the platform to Manhattan Associates, the dominant supplier of warehouse management software on the OS/400 platform and one of the more successful suppliers in the wider market. EXE Technologies announced a steep 50 percent discount on its OS/400-based warehouse management system in August. As part of the renewed strategic alliance, the company will continue to develop and support IBM's middleware software--including the DB2 database, the WebSphere portal server, and the WebSphere MQ messaging software--on IBM's OS/400 and AIX platforms. The two companies first became strategic partners in 1999.
  
  

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