• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Search Engine Scanning: The System i Wins a Few Deals

    March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The Internet is a wonderful thing in so many ways. One of them is that the Internet is somewhat self-aware, and if you tell it to look for certain patterns, it can find them. I did a trolling through some search engines last week, and ran across a few deals involving the System i that were woven in between all the references to content generated by IT Jungle’s writers. These deals are probably more representative of the kinds of sales that IBM and its business partners do every week than the big deals that make the trade press from time to time.

    A few weeks ago, I reported on two big deals that the System i platform had lost, one at the U.S. Mint and the other at AT&T Wireless. (See The System i Loses One Big Account and a Mid-Sized One, Too.) No one in the System i community likes to see this kind of thing happening, of course. And it takes a lot of small deals to balance out the big ones that Big Blue loses.

    According to a report that appeared in both CIO Magazine and Computerworld‘s New Zealand edition, Sheppard Industries, the maker of the Avanti line of bikes, is doing a million dollar upgrade to its ERP and manufacturing system, one that involves moving away from a Sun Microsystems Solaris platform running a 20-year-old application called Quanta to a suite of M3 manufacturing software (formerly known as Movex from Intential International and written in Java) running atop a System i platform. The Quanta package lost out even though Quanta Systems is located in New Zealand, just like Sheppard Industries is. You can bet that Sun was also keen on keeping the account, too. The exact configuration of the System i machine was not reported.

    A somewhat smaller deal was picked up in the Ocheyedan Press, the local paper in the Iowa town by that name, but this deal had one very important point in it that should give some hope to all of us out there in System i land. According to the report, Osceola County, where Ocheyedan is located, and apparently other counties in Iowa, are looking to upgrade their systems. And after reviewing six different proposals that ranged in price from $32,086 to $41,687, the county and its business partner, GMD Solutions of nearby Spencer, Iowa, had proposed a $36,187 configuration of a System i 515 user-priced system–and it won the bidding. Here’s the interesting bit about the deal: Osceola County is the trial installation for other counties in Iowa, according to the report. So this could lead to other installations down the road in Iowa. The newspaper reported that Osceola County was a “guinea pig” because GMD Solutions had not supported this kind of system before, but that has to mean a user-priced 515, not an OS/400 or i5/OS server, since this business partner has deep experience in the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platforms.

    RELATED STORY

    The System i Loses One Big Account and a Mid-Sized One, Too



                         Post this story to del.icio.us
                   Post this story to Digg
        Post this story to Slashdot

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags: Tags: mtfh_rc, Volume 17, Number 10 -- March 10, 2008

    Sponsored by
    ARCAD Software

    WEBINAR
    Unit Test Automation: Secure Application Quality on IBM i
    April 15, 12 p.m. EDT, 5 p.m. BST

    Unit testing is arguably the most effective element of your testing strategy, driving the quality of your application as it is being developed.  Yet how can unit testing benefit legacy applications on IBM i – and especially those containing ‘monolithic’ sections of code?

    In this Webinar we will demonstrate how specialized unit test automation can safeguard application quality and generate reusable test assets for both modular and monolithic code.

    You will learn how to automate the IBM i unit testing process within a standard DevOps stack., including RDi, JUnit and Jenkins.

    Using ARCAD iUnit, you’ll see:

    • Automated test creation for modules, programs and service programs
    • Code coverage results
    • Mock capability – simulates key components like data, files programs
    • Test execution history
    • Version control with Git

    Register today and secure the quality of your IBM i application.

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    ACOM Updates EZ Content Manager Solidcore Supports i5/OS with Real-Time Change Control

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

TFH Volume: 17 Issue: 10

This Issue Sponsored By

    Table of Contents

    • IBM Readies Big Power6 Boxes, New X64 Servers
    • System i Security: Lots of Room for Improvement
    • Server Virtualization and Consolidation Require More Resiliency
    • Thermometer Money: Changing a Business Partner Paradigm
    • Arrow Buys French Midrange Distributor
    • Search Engine Scanning: The System i Wins a Few Deals
    • Tango/04 Looks Ahead to 2008 as It Attains Record Results in 2007
    • SAP Shows Prototype X64-Linux-ERP Bundles
    • AIIM Survey Shows Companies Starting to Wrestle with Document Chaos
    • IBM Slashes Prices on Blade Server I/O Virtualization Software

    Content archive

    • The Four Hundred
    • Four Hundred Stuff
    • Four Hundred Guru

    Recent Posts

    • Query Supervisor Gives Database Engineers New Power
    • IBM Unveils New and Improved IBM i Services
    • 3 Takeaways from the 2021 PowerTech Security Report
    • Four Hundred Monitor, April 14
    • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 15
    • Big Blue Unveils Spring 2021 IBM i Technology Refreshes
    • Thoroughly Modern: Innovative And Realistic Approaches To IBM i Modernization
    • Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 2
    • Back To The Future With A New IBM i Logo
    • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 14

    Subscribe

    To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

    Pages

    • About Us
    • Contact
    • Contributors
    • Four Hundred Monitor
    • IBM i PTF Guide
    • Media Kit
    • Subscribe

    Search

    Copyright © 2021 IT Jungle

    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.