The Business Case for the System iWant
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, I fleshed out a hypothetical user-capped System i5 line that is based on the machines that IBM announced in October and that, as far as I can tell, represent the most cost-competitive alternative to Unix, Windows, and Linux servers that Big Blue has fielded running OS/400 and i5/OS in the past decade. I would be the first to admit that the so-called System iWant user-capped machines have some issues, but still, I wanted to build a business plan and see how these machines might help or hurt the revenue and profit stream of the System i5. READ MORE >

Rocket Software Inks Deal to Buy Seagull Software
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

What do you get when you cross a rocket with a seagull? Newtown, Massachusetts-based Rocket Software, which has been on an acquisitions tear for the past few years as it builds up its software business, is about to find out. Rocket last week announced that it was willing to spend more than $55.7 million to acquire Seagull Software, a provider of host connectivity and SOA-related middleware tools for mainframe and i5/OS platforms. READ MORE >

Saving the System i: Fight Pervasive with Pervasive
by Brian Kelly

In a few years, there will be nobody sitting at a desktop or laptop PC anywhere in the world whose machine bears the letters "IBM." Can this really be good for IBM? Does the principle of "out of sight, out of mind" jump out at anyone? The information technology adepts (fondly referred to by peers as "geeks" and "nerds") who run Windows, Unix, and Linux shops on non-Blue systems will see no little letters "IBM" in the whole of their organizations. READ MORE >

As I See It: Sweating the Little Stuff
by Victor Rozek

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was in a hurry. The year was 1961 and he was running weather simulations. Lorenz plugged equations into his computer and waited. And waited. He was working on a Royal (as in typewriter) McBee LGP30, a 740-pound "portable" desk system, and the going was slow. Today, of course, computers crunch numbers with the efficiency of an elephant stomping on a peanut, but in the 1960s, computers crunched numbers with all the vigor of a squirrel gnawing on a coconut. So when he decided to run one last simulation, he took the numeric results from the middle of a prior run, rounded off the values in order to hasten the calculation process, and restarted the simulation assuming there would be a slight but negligible impact on the results. READ MORE >