• Lawson Back in the Black as Fiscal 2007 Closes

  July 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ERP software maker Lawson Software celebrated the one-year anniversary of its acquisition of sometime rival Intentia International by getting back into the black during its fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, which ended on May 31. For the quarter, Lawson booked sales of $212.9 million, up 69 percent mostly because of the addition of Intentia. More importantly, as far as Lawson shareholders are concerned, Lawson had a net income of $8.1 million in the quarter, a lot better than the $4.8 million loss it had a year ago. During the quarter, software license fees rose by 111 percent to $40.6 million,

  …

  Read more

• IBM Ready to Announce Power6-Based System i Box

  July 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During IBM‘s conference call with Wall Street analysts last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, confirmed the rumors that have been going around that IBM would be soon announcing a Power6-based server with the System i moniker on it. Specifically, Loughridge said it would be announced later in the third quarter, but he might just as well have said sooner in the third quarter because the announcement is, in fact, tomorrow. IBM has only announced one Power6-based server so far, a System p 570 server that has been tweaked to support the Power6 chip instead of the

  …

  Read more

• IBM Ready to Announce Power6-Based System i Box

  July 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During IBM‘s conference call with Wall Street analysts last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, confirmed the rumors that have been going around that IBM would be soon announcing a Power6-based server with the System i moniker on it. Specifically, Loughridge said it would be announced later in the third quarter, but he might just as well have said sooner in the third quarter because the announcement is, in fact, tomorrow. IBM has only announced one Power6-based server so far, a System p 570 server that has been tweaked to support the Power6 chip instead of the

  …

  Read more

• IBM Ready to Announce Power6-Based System i Box

  July 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During IBM‘s conference call with Wall Street analysts last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, confirmed the rumors that have been going around that IBM would be soon announcing a Power6-based server with the System i moniker on it. Specifically, Loughridge said it would be announced later in the third quarter, but he might just as well have said sooner in the third quarter because the announcement is, in fact, tomorrow. IBM has only announced one Power6-based server so far, a System p 570 server that has been tweaked to support the Power6 chip instead of the

  …

  Read more

• IBM Creates New Power, SMB Server Divisions

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past decade and a half, IBM‘s two midrange server lines–formerly the AS/400 proprietary server line and the RS/6000 Unix server line but now known as the System i and the System p, respectively–have been on a course to merge. First, they started supporting similar APIs, then similar Power processors, then the exact same hardware, including Power processors, memory, disks, and other peripherals. Then, they started supporting each others’ respective i5/OS and AIX operating systems. It would be logical to assume that eventually the System i and System p brands would eventually fall by the wayside and there

  …

  Read more

• Rumor Du Jour: i5/OS on Other Platforms? Not!

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange press was abuzz a little last week about the prospect of IBM porting the i5/OS operating system to other platforms. While this would be an interesting development, and one that would quite possibly breathe some new life into the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, it turns out, alas, that such talk is not true and is the result of a misunderstanding of some comments made by an IBM executive at a user group meeting. It all started when Elaine Lennox, the vice president of marketing for what has been called the System i division until last Thursday and which

  …

  Read more

• IBM Turns In Its Best Second Quarter in Six Years

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT industry bellwether IBM had a tough first quarter in 2007, with its business in the United States slowing down. But in the second quarter, Big Blue’s U.S. unit rebounded as much as IBM said it might earlier this year, while overseas markets continued to grow as the U.S. dollar continued to be weak. The upshot is that IBM has turned in its best second quarter in revenue and profit growth since 2001, when the bloom was just coming off the dot-com rose. In the second quarter, IBM had sales of $23.8 billion, up 8.6 percent, with three of its

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: Lawyers, Lies, and Statistics

  July 23, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Here’s a statistic guaranteed to curdle the cream in an IT professional’s coffee. The huge populations of China and India have produced a correspondingly huge crop of offsprings–628 million kids under the age of 15, give or take a village. That’s a lot of young people who will soon (if they haven’t already) enter the global labor market. Americans, on the other hand, have sired some 60 million moppets, who blissfully haunt the nation’s malls, unaware of the approaching competitive tidal wave about to engulf them. That’s a 10 to 1 disadvantage. Not good odds for future job seekers or

  …

  Read more

• Shearer Talks About System i Sales, Server Reorganization

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long time since the i5/OS and OS/400 platform has been the bright spot in IBM‘s quarterly financial results. Two decades ago, when we were just starting to exit the System/3X era and beginning the development that would result in the AS/400 era in IBM’s midrange systems, it would have been hard to predict with any certainty just how popular the AS/400 would turn out to be. And it would have been equally hard, only a few years later, to predict how tough the entry and midrange server market has become for the venerable OS/400 platform,

  …

  Read more

• IDC Expects Virtualization Services Market to Double by 2011

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the stone age of computing technology, whenever a new technology came to market, customers spent a fortune acquiring it and then vendors eagerly helped customers install it as part of the product’s acquisition cost. In the modern computing era, products are relatively inexpensive and wickedly complex, and customers have to pay a fortune to get a vendor or a third party to help wrangle with the installation and configuration of the products they buy. So it will be, according to IDC, with virtualization products. Generally speaking, virtualization involves taking servers or storage and slicing them up into

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles