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

• QAD, a midrange ERP and supply chain management software vendor, last week tightened its alliance with IBM. The company--which has had a development and marketing alliance with IBM since October 2000 and which began delivering the eQ supply chain management software on Windows (NT and 2000), Unix (AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX), and OS/400 in March 2001--has standardized on IBM's middleware stack, including DB2 as the database, WebSphere as the Web application server, and WebSphere MQ as the message queuing layer. QAD has been shipping eQ, a set of Java programs, on this stack for quite a while, but now this is the default software stack. Moreover, QAD says that the two companies will now ship preconfigured stacks of the eQ applications and IBM's middleware on IBM iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers, thus eliminating one layer of integration that customers have to cope with.
  
  
• Jack Henry & Associates, a midrange provider of financial applications that are popular among iSeries and AS/400 shops, last week acquired CU Solutions, a privately held company that has a financial package aimed at small credit unions, primarily with assets of under $20 million. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Jack Henry, which is a public company, said that CU Solutions is a profitable company with 140 customers and has annual sales of around $2 million. The target market that CU Solutions has been chasing with its Cruise/SQL application in the United States is about 9,800 institutions, with about two thirds of them having assets of $20 million or less. Jack Henry will be aggressively chasing those potential customers with the Cruise/SQL applications. In 1998, Jack Henry acquired Peerless Group, which had an application called Conductor, aimed at midsized credit unions, and in 2000, the company acquired Symitar for its Episys credit union suite, which is aimed at larger organizations. Now Jack Henry has a trifecta of applications for small, midsized, and large credit unions. Odds are that the company will brand the CU Solutions under the Symitar brand, as it did with the Peerless Group software.
  
  
• IBM last week withdrew a deal it had announced in April that offered rebates, ranging from $235,000 to $1 million, to iSeries customers who were implementing high availability solutions on iSeries Model 8XX servers. The deal gave those big rebates to customers who acquired specific iSeries configurations, dedicated half of the CPW power of the machines to high availability software, bought IBM's Backup, Recovery and Media Services software, and took a prepaid, three-year Software Subscription license on the machine. All customers who participated in this deal recently have an IBM shipment date for their machines--and hence allow IBM to book the sale in the fourth quarter. The cancellation of this deal does not mean that IBM won't offer another similar deal in early 2003--high availability deals have a habit of resurrecting if the first quarter is not going so hot--but IBM is trying to get current deals closed.
  
  
• Only a week ago, Microsoft killed off the "Longhorn" edition of its Windows server operating system, and it looked like the "Whistler" kicker to Windows 2000, now called Windows .NET Server 2003, was slipping, too. Last weekend, at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ended all the speculation by saying that Whistler would ship in April 2003, with Release Candidate 2 shipping to customers in the next few weeks. Microsoft did not give a reason for the delay. This is the third delay for Whistler server, which was originally expected in mid to late 2001 and which is sold in a desktop version under the name Windows XP. The fact that Gates has emphatically set a date means that, whatever the problem is, Microsoft is confident that it can address it and fix it before April. This is also when the Visual Studio.NET 2003 development tool, code-named "Everett," is expected to be available, which has just this week gone into final beta. This tool will create code that adheres to Microsoft's .NET Framework, which creates Web services applications relying heavily on XML, and that .NET Framework runs on Whistler server.
  
  

Sponsored By FAST400

What makes IBM different from Microsoft regarding Fast400?? What is Fast400? You are hearing a lot about Fast400 aren't you? But what is Fast400? Fast400 is a "tuning" product for the iSeries. Fast400 will allow an iSeries server to utilize the available CPW for interactive processing. IBM would have you believe that these interactive cards that cost thousands to millions of dollars, actually add value to your server. By buying Fast400, you do not ever need to buy anther interactive card for your iSeries. For a free demonstration of Fast400, please visit www.fast400.net . Why Fast400? A few years ago Microsoft would not let other software companies build tools to work with the Windows operating system. Microsoft did all kinds of scurrilous things to stop other manufacturers software from working on their platform. They would put code in the base operating system that prevented other companies code from working properly. IBM even had these issues with Operations Navigator. In the early days of Operations Navigator, the developers in Rochester had to scrap early versions because Microsoft did not want IBM leverage on what was proprietary to them. Netscape also had a few problems using the Windows operating system. The result Now we all know what happened to Microsoft. After spending tens of millions of our tax dollars in the trial, the US government told Microsoft that they were acting as a monopoly and what they did was not right or fair. The similarity IBM is doing exactly the same thing to Fast400 as Microsoft did. IBM has changed the operating system of the iSeries 400 to prevent Fast400 from working. In fact this has been done several times now, and each time the Fast400 developers produce a new fix to circumvent the IBM action. Why does IBM do this? because Fast400 takes money out of IBM's pocket. The potential for IBM to make billions from its user base, for delivering virtually no product is tantamount to corporate deception! Did IBM change the operating system when EMC introduced a low cost storage solution for the iSeries? The future The cat and mouse game between IBM and Fast400 is already a year old. Every time IBM changes the operating system to disable Fast400, the developers of Fast400 produce a new version within days to enable it again. Does Fast400 have a commercial agenda? Of course it does. Fast400 is in business to provide its clients with added benefits, which will maximise the interactive performance of iSeries 400 servers. And as we are a business, why shouldn't we charge a nominal fee for that service? A fee that our clients see as being fair and proper. After all, it's not Fast400 that is making enemies in the user base. As long as IBM wants to play "David and Goliath" we will continue to "out" the giant. Fast400 is not running, you can be assured!! For more information, please visit www.fast400.net.