But Wait, There's More

Tell Us What You Want in the Future eServer i6 and i7

Everyone has ideas about how to improve to the OS/400 platform. You have heard our ideas over the past year, and now we 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. We will compile the wish lists and present them in the Four Hundred 2005 Special Report, which will be sent to all readers of our OS/400 newsletters on December 15.

Aldon Joins the Eclipse Foundation

Midrange software change management provider Aldon said last week that it has become a full member of the Eclipse Foundation, working in the Add-In Provider and Membership at Large communities of the foundation.

Like other companies offering products that assist with application development (whether they're the development tools themselves, the software change management software that shepherds code from idea through testing to production and ongoing maintenance, or the middleware that these applications reside on), Aldon is catching the standardization wave that Eclipse represents. However, the company is by no means a new supporter of Eclipse. Back in October 2003, Aldon launched its Affiniti 4.0 software configuration management tool, which was capable of acting as a team repository for developers working from Eclipse-compatible development tools. The three major software change management vendors in the midrange (Aldon, SoftLanding Systems, and MKS) offer plug-ins to the Eclipse environment, which is implemented on the iSeries in IBM's WebSphere Development Studio client (WDSc) product. However, this is a multiplatform world, and by being Eclipse-compatible, these vendors are better able to make their products work in conjunction with developers who code on Windows, Unix, Linux, and mainframe platforms, and who code in different languages as well.

"Aldon is excited about our new relationship with the Eclipse Foundation, and we look forward to participating in development projects and providing feedback for future Eclipse releases," says Daniel Magid, president and CEO at Aldon.

IBM funded the Eclipse consortium and its open-source development tool project with a $40 million grant nearly three years ago. Its mission has been to create a single, Java-based toolkit framework that would allow different brands of development tools to snap into that framework. The idea is to standardize development tools so that programmers can work with them in a consistent way. If many tool vendors support Eclipse and allow their tools to snap in, programmers who are used to the way that Eclipse works do not have to learn a new interface; moreover, tools that were formerly separate programs that programmers had to bounce back and forth between can now be integrated into a single IDE. In February, the Eclipse consortium was reorganized into a nonprofit corporation that is completely independent from IBM.

IBM Adds Two More ISVs for i5 Solution Editions

When IBM launched the eServer i5 Model 550 four-way Power5 server in August, it created a special product category called the Solution Edition, which is a Model 550 running i5/OS V5R3 Enterprise Edition, and gave a healthy discount to promote adoption of the i5 machine as a platform for new application installations. The Solution Edition can only be acquired in conjunction with certified applications. Last week, IBM added two more vendors and their applications to the roster.

The discount that comes with the Solution Edition certification is substantial. A base Model 550 with two out of its four cores activated and i5/OS Enterprise Edition enabled on those two cores costs $266,000. Even without activating the other two cores, this machine has more than enough oomph for the majority of OS/400 shops running applications like those being offered by the dozen certified Solution Edition vendors. The Solution Edition of the i5 has full 5250 green-screen capability and is priced at $206,000 in the same base configuration, which amounts to a 23 percent discount on the base i5 hardware. The Solution Edition is available only on the Model 550, which is in the P20 software tier and is therefore aimed at companies that need to support a large number of users, relatively large batch jobs, and myriad applications on a single box.

Agilysys, a specialist in hospitality applications used by hotels, and Jack Henry & Associates, which provides software to run banks and credit unions, both announced last week that their respective applications have been certified for the Solution Edition promotion.

Agilysys and Jack Henry join a who's who list of OS/400 vendors that have been certified in the Solution Edition program, including Clear Technologies, Integrated Distribution Solutions, International Business Systems, Intentia International, Lawson Software, Manhattan Associates, MAPICS, PeopleSoft, and SSA Global. Hopefully, IBM will pick up the pace and bestow this discount on many more dozens of midrange application vendors.

The i5 Model 595 Tops NotesBench Domino Benchmark

IBM announced last week that a 16-way chunk of the new eServer i5 Model 595 server has topped the NotesBench Domino benchmark test, beating a 16-way Model 570 that was quietly tested last month. In the tests, an i5 Model 595 with a quarter of its full complement of 64 1.65-GHz processors was able to sustain 175,000 Domino R6 Mail users, processing 258,403 NotesMark transactions. Why IBM did not test a full-blown 64-way is a bit of a mystery, but whenever vendors don't put the pedal to the metal, it leads us to believe that they are trying to hide some scalability issues in their machines. The i5 Model 570 tested in October was able to handle 165,000 R6 Mail users on its 16 Power5 processors, cranking through 242,835 NotesMarks. By the way, IBM has stopped giving prices for the iSeries and i5 configurations under test, thereby making price/performance comparisons with all other platforms not possible (unless you want to price a configuration yourself).

While we are convinced that the i5 Model 570 and Model 595 are great boxes on which to run Domino, IBM's announcement of these i5 test results seem to be aimed more at showing the i5 dominating in a place where it does not intend to do a p5 benchmark and where no other vendor is testing similar big iron boxes. And not giving out prices is very suspicious. All of this makes it hard to say how well the i5 is doing compared with its rivals. That is why the IT Jungle exists. We will be taking at stab at characterizing the performance of OS/400, Unix, Windows, and Linux platforms in early 2005, just to give you a sense of the competitive position of these different platforms. The NotesBench site has some serious Java errors, which is going to make it difficult to gather the information. But we will persist.

Incidentally, on the R6 iNotes benchmark, the i5 Model 570 supported only 28,500 users, the same number that the 32-way iSeries Model 890 did when it was tested in June 2003 on the R6 iNotes test. This is about what you would expect, given the relative power of the i5 Model 570 and the iSeries Model 890. However, what you would not expect, unless you looked at the report, is that a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire E2900 server with 24 UltraSparc-IV processor cores could handle about 20,000 R6 iNotes users, and that a Sun Fire V880 with 16 of the same cores could handle 14,000 users. In terms of per-processor performance, the Sun boxes are a lot closer at a 2 to 1 core count than on workloads like the TPC-C test, where it takes three to four Sun cores to match a Power5 core.

Acquisitions Fuel SSA Global's Fourth Quarter

Midrange software house SSA Global, which is in the process of going public, released financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and year end recently. Thanks to its many acquisitions, SSA Global has been able to show phenomenal growth. The challenge for the company going forward will be to show respectable revenue and profit growth without resorting to buying more companies.

For the fiscal fourth quarter ending July 31, SSA Global reported sales of $175.4 million, up 89 percent from the $92.9 million in sales for the same period last year. Software license sales were $49.4 million, up 62 percent from last year, but still only 28 percent of total sales in that quarter. That revenue growth came at a cost, however, as the acquisition of Baan, Marcam, Arzoon, and EXE Technologies drove down net income to $4.2 million, compared with $29.2 million this time last year. SSA Global booked a tax benefit of $19.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2003, so its "real" profits were about $9.8 million this time last year. The company also booked $6.1 million in amortization charges and $1.7 million in restructuring charges in this year's fourth quarter, which were related to the mergers. (Absent these factors, to some people's way of thinking, the company was slightly more profitable. But the accountants do not do the books this way.)

For the full fiscal 2004 year, SSA Global had sales of $637.8 million, up 115 percent from $296.6 million last year, and software license sales were up 69 percent, to $158.8 million. Licenses made up 25 percent of the company's overall sales in fiscal 2004. Net income was $20 million this fiscal year, driven down from the $52.3 level that SSA Global posted a year ago. Again, profits for 2003 were helped by tax benefits and profits for 2004 were hurt by the very acquisitions and charges that allowed the top line growth.

DataMirror Sets Up Partner Program, Hires New Marketing VP

High availability and data transformation software vendor DataMirror last week set up a new partner program, called appropriately enough the DataWorld Partner Program, to help partners sell the company's new Integration Suite 2005 middleware. Through DataWorld, DataMirror will offer product support, sales incentives (such as discounts on products sold that knock out competitive products, maintenance, and services), co-marketing support, and training and education for Integration Suite, the company says. DataWorld offers five partner types (provider, consultant, OEM, global integrator, and strategic alliance), as well as five levels of partnership within those types (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond). As partners meet skills requirements and revenue targets, they can move up through the tiers and gain more support. DataMirror says that it already has 145 partners that will be rolled into the program.

In other DataMirror news, the company announced that it has named Mark Deep as its new vice president of marketing. Deep was previously senior director of marketing and was responsible for the launch of the company's Integration Suite 2005. He has held marketing and consulting positions at American Express, Dell, Intel, and IBM. Deep has a bachelor's degree in commerce from Queen's University in Canada.

IDC Says Services Spending to Grow Steadily

If you think that the IT services business has been dampened by continued sluggishness in the economies of the world, you'll be glad to learn that recent data from IDC would seem to indicate otherwise. IDC expects companies and governments the world over to spend $553 billion on services that are external to their own organizations, according to a recent report. The researcher also expects that the IT services market will do reasonably well compared with the overall IT market in the next four years, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.9 percent. IDC says that utility computing and subscription-based pricing models, offshoring, and business process outsourcing are helping to redefine the IT services business, and says that it expects consolidation in the services business (particularly in Europe) and that global players will, despite any political pressures, continue to build up their offshoring capabilities.