Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Big Executive Shakeup and Shakeout at SAP
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHeads were rolling and chairs were moving at German application software giant SAP last week. The changes were implemented in the wake of the global economic meltdown, difficulties in getting a SaaS product called Business ByDesign to market, and an uproar in the SAP customer base as the company was getting set to jack up maintenance prices. Customers balked, SAP blinked, and gave SAP shops a two-tiered maintenance plan that probably has plenty of customers still grumbling.
On February 7, SAP announced that Leo Apotheker, who had been the company’s sole CEO for the past seven months, resigned from the
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IBM Launches Servers For Truth Campaign
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn its ongoing and escalating campaign against Oracle and in anticipation of a lot of mudslinging (or worse) as the Power7-based machines start coming to market, IBM has launched a spoof of political campaign advertising promoting the new Power Systems and slapping Oracle for cheating on benchmarks tests.
The site, which is on Facebook here and which has a YouTube video there, is about as amusing as these things tend to be. (What can you expect from a couple of marketeering people, a modest artistic budget, and a few bottles of wine?) IBM is once again trying out viral
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VOIP and Other Apps Dropped From i/OS Catalog
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM always announces its partnerships for bringing new kinds of applications to the i/OS platform with much fanfare, and being optimistic, we at The Four Hundred cover these launches with attention and hope. Sometimes, IBM’s love affair with ISV wares as well as with its own code seems to end abruptly.
So it seems to be with some software withdrawals that happened as part of last week’s rollout of the initial Power7-based servers. In announcement letter 910-002, IBM told i/OS shops that effective May 31, it would stop selling the 3Com Telephony software for the System i platform (5639-3CM)
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Existing Power Systems Get a Few Storage Tweaks
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe four new models of the Power Systems lineup based on the Power7 processors were not the only thing that IBM cooked up in the engineering labs. As usual, the drumbeat of change continues a-pace for the various subsystems that are used with the new as well as existing systems, and in this case, some storage features have been upgraded.
First up is a new DAT320 tape drive for archiving data and distributing software that is intended for entry and midrange boxes. Feature 5661, as the device is warmly known, slides into selected Power 520 and Power 550 servers as
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Power7: Yields Are Good, Midrange Systems A Go
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhenever a new chip comes to market, there’s always a question about how many good chips are coming off the wafer baker lines–what is known in the chip industry as the yield. Whenever a company shifts its chip making processes at the same time as the overall design changes radically, this is a bit nerve wracking. But apparently not with the eight-core Power7 chips that are the brains in the new Power 7XX line of servers from IBM.
At the launch event for the four new Power7 systems last week in New York, which was held on the 36th
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A Little Insight Into the Rest of the Power7 Lineup
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the rollout of the first wave of Power7-based Power Systems servers last week, IBM provided a little insight–and mind you, I did not say a lot of insight–about what the future entry and high-end products would look like. As usual, Big Blue issued some statements of direction concerning these bookends of the Power Systems lineup, and as usual, they didn’t really say enough to help customers make plans.
If you are expecting IBM to say a lot more about the high-end of the product line than it already has, you did get a few more morsels of
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IBM Fired Up About Power7-Based Smarter Systems
February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou are probably wondering why IBM started the Power7 systems rollout in the middle of the line instead of rolling the line out at once as it did in days gone by with the AS/400 and RS/6000 machinery. It is really simple. IBM has dominant market share in the high-end of the midrange lineup represented for the past six years by the 570-class machines–iSeries, pSeries, System i, System p, and Power Systems all–and the company wants to keep it that way.
According to Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division within IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, the 570-class
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TPC Benchmarks Track Energy Usage Now, Too
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe members of the Transcation Processing Council last week ratified and announced a new add-on feature of the popular TPC suite of tests for measuring online transaction processing and data warehousing performance. For years, the TPC tests have measured performance and bang for the buck. But now, thanks to the TPC-Energy specification, vendors now have a consistent way to measure, audit, and report how the systems they test consume energy as they run benchmarks.
According to Mike Nikolaiev, who is the manager of the systems performance unit at Hewlett-Packard and chaired the TPC-Energy committee, this is the first specification that
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OS/400: Is It IBM i, i OS, i 6.X, i/OS, Or What?
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe people behind the Four Hundred stack of newsletters live and work all over the country, and that means email and instant messaging are our equivalents of the water cooler. It is where we talk about what we are up to both personally and professionally, and it is also where we deal with the smaller issues that are facing us and can be solved without a phone call. (Both email and IM are essentially free, and Guild Companies is frugal.) Like many of you out there in AS/400 Land, we are confused about how to talk about the platform. Here’s
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Brace Yourself For A Bevy Of Server Chip Announcements
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s either feast or famine in the processor racket, and this week will see two server chips being announced and others being previewed for launch later in the quarter. All of the new chips coming out have their enthusiasts–some will even buy systems that use them!–and each chip will find its niche or volumes, as the case may be, despite the homogenization pressure in the systems sector.
As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, IBM is rolling out the first of its Power7-based systems today in New York as part of a much wider Smarter Planet marketing