But Wait, There's More

i5/OS V5R4--January, February, or March 2006?

Ah, the rumors about the forthcoming i5/OS V5R4 operating system are beginning to swirl around like snow on a blustery day in Rochester, Minnesota. IBM is, as usual, mum on exactly when the next rev on the iSeries operating system will come to market, except to say that it is due some time in 2006. But with the iSeries ITSO Tech Forum EMEA being held February 13 through 17 and jam-packed with V5R4 material, it seems likely that it will be launched either before then or around then. The OMNI User Technical Conference in southern California will be held on February 7, and it also sporting a lot of V5R4 technical content. The original rumors from earlier this year pegged V5R4 in the March 2006 time frame, roughly in synch with the COMMON iSeries user group meeting in New Orleans, but because of Hurricane Katrina's damage to that city, COMMON is now later in March and IBM may not want to wait. A lot of tongues are wagging that V5R4 will come out in January now.

IBM has been gradually letting out information about what will be inside V5R4, which we have reported in several stories ( including The Mysteries of i5/OS V5R3M5 and V5R4 and IBM Raises the Curtain a Little on Future Power Chips, i5/OS V5R4).

IBM has sprung iSeries announcements on us earlier than expected before--notably in January 2003, when it lost no time it completely revamping the pricing and packaging of the iSeries product line with OS/400 V5R2 to make it more competitive. V5R4 is not expected to be nearly as dramatic, and the real question is if there will be any tweaks to the iSeries package to make it even more competitive. An OS/400 V5R4 Light edition on a very inexpensive i5 server would be well-received by the market--but Big Blue seems disinclined to chase that opportunity.

The iSeries Not Hit by Marketing Layoffs at IBM

The Alliance@IBM employees union for IBM workers is reporting that Big Blue had layoffs last week in the United States, with the bulk of the layoffs affecting its marketing organization but with employees also cut in IBM's legal, finance, and operations staffs. Alliance@IBM says that it hears as much as 15 percent of the marketing staff was cut, which might explain why Abby Kohnstamm, who has been senior vice president of marketing at IBM since 1993, left the company in the middle of November. Kohnstamm came to Big Blue from American Express when former IBM chairman and CEO, Lou Gerstner, came to Big Blue to turn it around after stints at RJR Nabisco and American Express. The reports says that 200 workers, located in Somers and White Plains, New York, as well as workers from around the country working from home offices.

I checked with IBM sources about whether iSeries employees were affected by the layoffs, and while those sources would not confirm the Alliance@IBM story, they did say that there were no iSeries-related employees involved in the layoffs. This is very encouraging news, indeed.

IBM Offers Discounts on Online Training

If you are looking to spend some dough on training from IBM, then Big Blue has a deal for you. Until February 17, 2006, customers who spend $25,000 to get a new Education Pack Online Account or add $25,000 to an existing account will get an instant $2,500, or 10 percent, discount. You can apply the 10 percent discount to your 2005 account and your 2006 account, by the way. You can delay the account activation for a 2006 account for 60 days. The Education Pack service is like a credit/debit card. You load it up and then draw down against it as your employees acquire training from Big Blue, which can include online and video courses as well as onsite training.

CCSS Partners with i3 Tech Group to Conquer the Great White North

CCSS, the British maker of adjunct systems management software for the OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems, said last week that it has signed its first partner in Canada, i3 Tech Group.

i3 Tech Group is a services company based in Aurora, Ontario, that sells new and used iSeries and AS/400 servers as well as various new and used X86 servers. The company was founded by Jonathan Perry and Garth Tucker, who are among the "iSeries iNtelligentsia" and are frequent speakers at the COMMON user group meetings. With this new deal, i3 Tech Group will resell the QSystems Management Suite created by CCSS for the iSeries platform, which is a set of software that provides real-time performance monitoring and reporting as well as the ability to remotely and securely manage iSeries performance from a mobile phone. i3 Tech Group is an IBM business partner. CCSS has a number of other resellers around the world, including CESCE Soluçoes Informaticas in Portugal, Syres Automation Consultancy in the Netherlands, Sun Software in Brazil, and Informatikk in Sweden. CCSS has its own subsidiaries in Germany (in Bonn) and in the United States (in Raleigh, North Carolina).

Evans Data Survey Says Companies Are Developing New Code--Finally!

According to surveys of application developers in North America performed by Evans Data, companies are beginning to work on new applications--finally--and are starting to do so with 64-bit technologies. Evans Data surveyed 400 developers in North America for its October 2005 survey, and found that client/server application development (by which they mean two-tiered application) surged by 30 percent in the past six months; client/server technologies had been in decline among developers in the past three years, because they were apparently working on other problems. The survey also finds a 19 percent increase in developers who are spending the bulk of their time writing new code. And, significantly, development for 64-bit architectures has exploded by 61 percent since the fall 2004 survey, driven in large part by the adoption of 64-bit memory extensions for X86 chips, but also by the prevalence of 64-bit architectures for other machinery.

The latest survey pegs Java as the most commonly used programming language, with 48 percent of developers in North America using it for development. Evans Data didn't specify what the other programming languages were popular (you have to pay to see that data), but clearly Visual Basic and .NET come in as number two, probably followed by C and C++ and then other languages like RPG and COBOL. Interestingly, Evans Data found that 70 percent of developers are working mobile applications of one sort or another.

Lakeview Hires New Marketing Top Gun

High availability software maker Lakeview Technology announced last week that it has hired a new vice president of worldwide marketing, Edward Vesely. He will be responsible for managing the marketing and product management of Lakeview's MIMIX Division, and reports to executive vice president and general manager Marty Leamy. Vesely was senior vice president of marketing at Click Commerce, a provider of e-commerce software tailored for sales and order management, supply chain management, service parts optimization, and compliance optimization. Vesely rebranded the company and was instrumental in growing the firm from $3 million in sales to $40 million in sales, which resulted in it going public in 2000. (After going public, the dot-com boom burst and it has taken several years for Click Commerce to find its footing.) Vesely was also vice president of marketing at Platinum Technology (which was acquired by Computer Associates, and where he was a co-founder of three product lines that had sales of $10 million and grew to $200 million. He was previously director of product marketing and international business development at IT consultancy Accenture, where he quadrupled sales in his lines of business to $90 million.

If it is not obvious, Lakeview seems to be interested in growing its revenues.

Vesely started his career at IBM over 20 years ago as a systems and applications software developer. He got dual bachelor's degrees in computer science and journalism/public relations at Northern Illinois University and has an MBA in marketing from DePaul University. He is also author of the book entitled "Code to Commerce, High Technology Marketing for Maximum Brand Performance."