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

• IBM's chairman, Louis Gerstner, is set to step down from his nine-year job of running Big Blue on December 31. But he won't be out of work for long. Gerstner has accepted the job of chairman at The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that has used its global political connections to help it bring a good return on investment to its investors. Carlyle's current chairman is Frank Carlucci, the former Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration who lead Carlyle on a buying binge of defense contractors, which has given Carlyle's investors an excellent return and which was largely responsible for Carlyle growing to manage a portfolio of $13.7 billion in assets. Caryle, founded in Washington in 1987, employs former U.S. President George Bush, former English Prime Minister John Major, former Secretary of State James Baker, former Securities and Exchange Commissioner Arthur Levitt, former FCC Chairman William Kennard, and former White House Budget Director Richard Darman, among other politicos. Gerstner says that he will devote 20 percent of his time to his duties as chairman at Carlyle, which includes running two equity funds, as well as overseeing what the group does in other areas, which includes acquisitions in the healthcare and telecommunications fields. Gerstner also plans to study Chinese history at Cambridge University in London and to become involved in revamping the educational system in the United States.
  
  
• MKS recently announced that its SCM (software change management) system for OS/400 servers is now compatible with IBM's newest integrated development environment for the OS/400 platform, WebSphere Development Studio client 4.0. WDSc is IBM's new IDE for developing applications that are compatible with Eclipse, IBM's open framework for aggregating developer tools under a common framework even if they are used to create applications for incompatible systems. MKS's SCM offerings for the iSeries, Implementer and MKS Source Integrity Enterprise Edition, provide OS/400 development teams access to functionality such as file check in and file check out, create project, create private developer workspaces, file merge, file compare, compare, promotion, deployment, and compilation--all from within their familiar IBM WebSphere Studio environment. MKS claims to be the first provider of SCM software to support WDSc for developers working on both native and Web development projects.
  
  
• Recent benchmark tests went well for EUR Systems at IBM's Rochester, Minnesota, labs. The San Antonio provider of customer care and billing applications for the telecommunications industry was interested in seeing how its Java application, Aptis 3.0, could handle situations in which Aptis is used to consolidate multiple billing systems, so it loaded the application, which has recently been retrofitted with multithreading support--along with some actual client data--on an 8-way iSeries Model 830 and a 32-way Model 890 server, then it ran some tests. The tests called on the application to process more than 500 million call detail records (CDRs) and more than 4.6 million flat-fee charges, which, EUR says, simulates real-world consolidation environments. With multithreading activated in Aptis 3.0, a Model 830 with 8 GB of main memory was able to crank through the data in about three hours, a 70 percent improvement over the version of Aptis 3.0 that only supported single threads and that took eight hours to perform the same test. A Model 890 with 32 processors and 256 GB of memory could also crank through the Aptis test in three hours with multithreading support in the application turned on, but this was an 890 percent improvement (a funny numerical coincidence) over a single-threaded version of Aptis running the test on the same Model 890. The tests on the Aptis program demonstrate that scalability often depends as much on how applications are written as on the underlying hardware technologies that IBM deploys on the iSeries. Also of note: A 32-way iSeries could not process this particular data set any faster than an 8-way iSeries. Sizing a machine based on IBM's CPW performance rankings would not lead a customer to the same conclusion. Relative performance rankings are only as useful as their similarities to your own workloads.
  
  
• OS/400 shipping software provider Varsity Logistics and International Business Systems, a developer of OS/400-based ERP applications, announced that they will integrate their applications as part of a formal partnership. The companies will work to integrate ShipSoft, Varsity's application that helps automate the process of preparing parcels and freight to be transported by shippers, and ASW, International Business Systems' ERP and warehouse management application. When the two products are integrated, ShipSoft will be able to update ASW in real time, which will result in a reduction of errors due to manual data entry and in lower overall shipping costs.
  
  

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