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But Wait, There's More
Tell Us What You Want in the Future i5, and We Will Nudge IBM
Everyone has ideas about how to improve to the OS/400 platform. You have all heard a lot of mine over the past year, and now I want to hear yours. IBM is in the middle of the next product engineering cycle for the Power6 systems and is contemplating what to do with the Power7 systems. Now is the time to think about the features and functions you want to see added to iSeries hardware and OS/400 software, and to tell IBM loudly and clearly so it understands your wants and needs.
To tell us what is on your iSeries and OS/400 wish list, go to our Contact Us page and send an e-mail to Timothy Prickett Morgan. Don't be afraid to get into nitty-gritty technical detail or speak more broadly about the platform. Timothy Prickett Morgan will compile the wish lists and add his own ideas in a special edition of The Four Hundred that will be sent to readers of all our OS/400 newsletters on December 15.
PeopleSoft Rejects Oracle's Final Offer
PeopleSoft's board of directors has rejected Oracle's final offer of $9.2 billion in cash to acquire the company in a hostile takeover. That means PeopleSoft's shareholders, who have been asked directly by Oracle to tender their shares for $24 each to that company, will now decide the fate of PeopleSoft. If Oracle gets a majority of the shares, it will become embroiled in a proxy fight with the board to have its own directors elected. Oracle could then remove the "poison pill" that has prevented the company from taking PeopleSoft over as cheaply as it wants to, and acquire the rest of the company.
"The board concluded that PeopleSoft is worth substantially more than Oracle's latest offer," said Dave Duffield, PeopleSoft's founder and chairman and CEO, in a statement. "We are a vibrant, strong company with a focused, motivated management team and employee base dedicated to executing on the company's plan." Skip Battle, chairman of the committee dealing with the hostile takeover, put it bluntly in the same statement: "As members of the Board have testified in Delaware, we would be willing to discuss an offer made by Oracle at an appropriate price--but $24 isn't it. We told Oracle that its price must reflect both PeopleSoft's intrinsic value and the fact that PeopleSoft is materially more valuable to Oracle now than it was when Oracle made its inadequate $26 per share offer. Oracle indicated they understood our position and appreciated the call." Oracle has said that while many of the terms of its latest acquisition offer were negotiable, $24 a share was its final price, and it would not be pushed higher.
PeopleSoft is hoping that its own sales and profits will make investors less likely to tender their shares to Oracle, and Oracle is hoping that they will take the $24 a share and run. In a presentation to Wall Street analysts last week, Kevin Parker, PeopleSoft's chief financial officer, said that the company is expecting sales of new licenses to range from $175 million to $185 million in the fourth quarter, with overall sales between $700 million and $715 million. For 2005, PeopleSoft is projecting sales of between $2.8 billion and $2.9 billion, with license sales up between 5 and 10 percent, to $640 million through $655 million, and with profits of between 82 and 87 cents a share. (This guidance does not include projections of an upside if the Oracle deal fails, and if it does fail PeopleSoft could see sales increase during 2005.)
ACOM, Metafile Sign Joint Marketing Agreement
ACOM, a maker of document management and electronic payment software for midrange platforms, and Metafile, a maker of content management software that digitizes and indexes anything that a computer can print (like spool files, reports, or PDFs), have announced a partnership. The two companies have customers that use both of their products and have already integrated them, and they figured it was time to have a formal alliance in order to push the concept and jointly chase business opportunities. The companies will push ACOM's EZPayManager, EZDocs, and EZConnect software alongside Metafile's MetaViewer content management system. They will also exchange sales leads, push each other's products into their respective installed bases, and engage in joint marketing efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Only a few weeks ago, ACOM announced a similar deal with the Fax*Star division of Sepe, one of the leaders in the fax serving market. Under that agreement, ACOM and Fax*Star will refer customers to each other's solutions and engage in joint marketing activities as well.
iSeries Storage Specialist eStorage Merges with Zzyzx
eStorage, one of the few remaining independent storage vendors in the iSeries market, has merged with Zzyzx Peripherals. The merger was completed on October 1, but neither company made a big fuss about it.
BCC Technologies, the midrange storage company, was rebranded as eStorage in March 2003 after founder David Breisacher left the company and the venture capitalists who had invested in BCC brought in a new management team. Based in Irvine, California, eStorage, has about 2,000 customers worldwide, which have acquired its disk and tape storage products over the years (BCC Technologies was founded in 1994).
Zzyzx, which was founded in 1991 and is based in San Diego, is a storage services and storage hardware company that provides products for the Unix, Linux, Windows, and NetWare server markets. Zzyzx is clearly adding support for the OS/400 platform through the acquisition of eStorage, even though the two companies call it a merger. Zzyzx, which, like eStorage, is privately held, sells RAID arrays; storage area networks; network-attached storage, tape arrays, and libraries; all kinds of Fibre channel switching equipment; and various storage management and file systems software. The company counts most of the big storage players as its partners. Financial terms of the merger were not disclosed.
Brian Kelly Wants Your AS/400 Stories for His New Book
Lots of people love the AS/400, its ancestor (the System/38), and its children (the iSeries and eServer i5). Brian Kelly, one of the authors allied with IT Jungle, is working on a new book, called The All-Everything Machine, and wants your help in fleshing it out. The book "will outline the history and the capabilities of the finest computer system ever built by IBM," Kelly says. (No, he isn't talking about the PC AT, but that was a pretty good one, too, considering it was made from junk parts with a toy operating system.) Kelly is looking for quotes from customers, as well as good short stories that "praise about the power, elegance, productivity, long-lastingness, reliability, availability, ease of use, and so forth, of the System/38, the AS/400, the iSeries, or the eServer i5."
Please send your thoughts and stories to Kelly at bkelly@kellyconsulting.com.
Solaris Is Free and Open-Source; OS/400's Time Has Come
Making a program open-source does not instantly fix all of its marketing and technical problems, but it probably is a step in the right direction. And that's why this week Sun Microsystems will announce its plans to begin offering the Solaris 10 Unix operating system free of charge and to take the software open-source. Sun wants to undercut the Linux market, specifically Red Hat, which gives its implementation of Linux away for free, provides its variant of Linux as open-source, and makes all of its money by selling maintenance and tech support services for that Linux. Sun wants to do the same thing with Solaris, and sees that, as the underdog in the open source community, it has to undercut Red Hat on price.
Sun has taken its lumps in the past three years as it went from being the server industry juggernaut to a laughing stock. But the company is nimble and smart. Solaris is arguably the best Unix platform, particularly with the enhancements that have been made in Solaris 10, and by going to an open-source, services model, Sun is making AIX and HP-UX look pretty pricey, and it is also looking modern, generous, and unafraid.
As we have argued many times before, the market wants and deserves Open Source/400. (See "Open Source OS/400: A Crazy Idea for Crazy Times," from August 2002, and "OS/400: There Are Always Possibilities," from February 9, for our ideas on open source.)
What is good for Solaris 10 is even better for OS/400. There is no question about it, other than why IBM won't do it.
Ingres Database on the iSeries? Why Not?
Computer Associates took its Ingres database open-source and made it available on Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms several weeks ago. Ingres and its antecedents have a long history in the IT community, and it was developed at the very beginning of relational database technology when the System/38 and early versions of Oracle for mainframes first appeared, in the late 1970s. Ingres is not a toy database but a very respectable product, and one that can now be ported to OS/400. Imagine, if you will, if some intrepid programmers in the open source community put interfaces that allowed RPG and COBOL applications running on an OS/400 partition to talk to Ingres databases running on Linux partitions on an iSeries or eServer i5 box. Since most of the cost of an iSeries or i5 is the 5250 protocol and the DB2/400 database, if done properly, an Ingres port could allow customers to tweak their RPG code, access a relational database outside of the primary OS/400 partition, and thus make it a lot less expensive to run those RPG applications. Such an Ingres/400 would be a very useful thing to broaden the appeal of the concepts embodied in the OS/400 platform, and might even compel IBM to rethink its OS/400 and DB2/400 pricing. An open source RPG compiler and 5250 green-screen protocol would come in really handy as well.
To learn more about the open source version of Ingres, check out our complete coverage in The Linux Beacon, our enterprise Linux newsletter. See "CA Releases Ingres r3 Database as Open Source" for the details on the open source version of this venerable database.
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