But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• December 6
• November 29
• November 22
• November 15
• November 8

• The word on the street is that IBM will revamp its Software Group next year so that half of its 13,000-strong sales force can focus on selling industry solutions based on IBM operating systems and middleware and third-party applications tweaked for specific industries, rather than just trying to push one product that is assigned to them. The change will mean that IBM will organize the many thousands of products it sells into solution stacks for a dozen industries. This solutions-based selling is going to be all the rage in IT very soon. Everybody has the same idea, since integration of IT hardware and software components consume nearly half of IT budgets the world over. Pre-integrating solutions and selling the whole shebang is simpler for vendors and customers. It also makes for bigger contracts.
  
  
• B.O.S. Better On-line Solutions, a holding company that makes and sells midrange connectivity, client terminals, and IP telephony products, announced last week that it has chosen Adiv Baruch as its new chief executive officer and president. Baruch is currently executive vice president of Ness Technologies and has extensive experience in the Israeli high-tech industry. Israel Gal, the founder of B.O.S., who has been serving as the company's president and CEO, will serve as a director on the company's board and will be focused on developing and marketing the company's products in its various units.
  
  
• looksoftware, an Australian company that sells iSeries application modernization and integration software, has opened its first office in the United States. The new subsidiary will provide sales, marketing, and technical support to the company's North American customers and partners from its headquarters in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Marcus Dee, looksoftware's director, says the expansion was necessary to ensure continued growth in the region. "Over the next year, we will be staffing the operation and transitioning sales, marketing, and support functions to the new operation, which, to date, have been handled via our operations in Melbourne, Australia," Dee says. Dee hired industry veteran John Munshour as president of the new subsidiary. More than 1,000 companies in 35 countries use looksoftware products, the company says.
  
  
• iSeries distributor Support Net has created a new sales division for its resellers to address the lucrative government IT market. The new Federal Government Sales Division will provide sales and marketing support, strategic development, technical support services, and customer and contract management to IBM resellers seeking government contracts. Support Net executives say there is tremendous growth and opportunity right now in serving the federal government's IT needs, but that resellers need to meet special government pricing requirements and prove that they can adequately support their government customers before they'll win any contracts.
  
  
• SSA Global will begin shipping the next-generation "Gemini" release of Baan's ERP suite by mid-2004, the company disclosed last month as part of its Baan product roadmap. This is good news for Baan customers, who have been awaiting word from their new vendor about what will become of Baan's much ballyhooed, but oft-delayed, project Gemini, which SSA Global's new roadmap calls for general availability, as Baan ERP 6, next July. SSA Global also appeased its Baan installed base when it announced that older versions of the ERP suite, called Baan IV and iBaan 5, would be receiving new enhancements, which is something that Baan's previous owner, Invensys, would not do, SSA Global says. The company has pledged to Web-enable the Baan IV and iBaan 5 ERP suites during the first quarter of 2004. About 70 percent of Baan's 6,000 users are still on Baan IV, and SSA Global is developing a collection of migration tools to make the move as painless as possible for Baan users. SSA Global's primary owners bought Baan, a Dutch company, from the English engineering firm Invensys in June for $135 million and then transferred ownership to the Chicago-based software company.
  
  
• Kronos has acquired time and attendance software from Financial Applications Consulting Services (which did business as FASTECH) for an undisclosed sum of money. FASTECH, based in Livonia, Michigan, developed the STARBase and STARWeb time and attendance products, which run on Windows servers as well as "character-based mainframe" systems that can support 50,000 or more employees, the company says. FASTECH had been in business for more than 20 years and had amassed hundreds of customers in financial services, government, retail, and manufacturing organizations. However, the company fell into bankruptcy earlier this year, and when a judge allowed the company to sell some of its assets to Kronos, a Chelmsford, Massachusetts, company that develops time and attendance software for a variety of platforms, including OS/400, FASTECH took the opportunity. Kronos bought FASTECH's software and its customer base, and said it will hire key FASTECH employees and put them to work at the Kronos FASTECH Group near Detroit, Michigan.
  
  
• Moore's Law is coming to an end. That's what a group of Intel scientists are hypothesizing following a study of the theoretical limits of the famous processing-growth axiom, which has held true for more than three decades following its postulation by Intel founder Gordon Moore in the 1960s. A paper entitled "Limits to Binary Logic Switch Scaling--A Gedanken Model," published in the November issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' journal Proceedings of the IEEE, says the main driver for the growth of processing power over the last 30 years may be coming to an end by about 2020. Because of the nature of electrons and a phenomenon called electron tunneling, chipmakers won't be able to shrink transistor gates much below the 5 nanometer gaps that will occur when Intel's 18 nanometer manufacturing process comes online, which is expected in the year 2018, the Intel scientists write. To surpass this obstacle and keep Moore's Law--which holds that processing power doubles roughly every 18 months--alive, researchers will need to make monumental breakthroughs in chip design.
  
  

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 another 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.