TFH Volume: 15 Issue: 18 Archives

Merrill Lynch Estimates IBM iSeries and System i Sales for Q1

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Because IBM doesn’t give out sales figures for its various server product lines as part of its quarterly financial results, we have to rely on the sales models developed by analysts like IDC and Gartner or brokerage houses like Merrill Lynch to try to get a sense of what happened in Big Blue’s server businesses. IDC and Gartner tend to look back a quarter, but Richard Farmer at Merrill Lynch got his estimates out the day after IBM reported its financials. And the numbers are interesting.

Two weeks ago, IBM reported that System i and iSeries server sales were down

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NetManage’s First Quarter Disappoints

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With Attachmate and WRQ united as a single private company, the pressure has been pretty intense for competitor NetManage. The host connectivity and Web integration markets have been tough for the past five years or so, and NetManage just finished a pretty rough first quarter.

NetManage said that for the first quarter ended March 31, license fee sales were $2.7 million, down 49 percent, while services sales were $5.8 million, down 15 percent. Total sales were $8.5 million, down 30 percent. While NetManage had a loss from operations of $1.05 million in the quarter, it booked $308,000 in interest

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UC4 Sales Rocket Skyward in the United States

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cross-platform job scheduling software supplier UC4 Software said last week that its sales in the United States exploded by 80 percent in the first quarter, with license sales up by 87 percent. UC4 is a privately held company, so it doesn’t report its financials officially, but said that worldwide sales were $8.6 million in the first quarter and that it now had in excess of 750 customers.

Last year, UC4, which is headquartered in Germany, said that it was going to start moving into the U.S. market, and appointed Mark Loehr as the chief operating officer of the U.S. unit.

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Fox Television Stations Unplug the iSeries for Sun Unix Boxes

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Perhaps more than other server makers, Sun Microsystems likes to gloat. It has always been a rough-and-tumble, cocky, mouthy IT vendor, but one that has also done its share of innovating and money making, thus proving that it deserves some respect. Sun likes nothing better than to knock out IBM mainframe and OS/400 servers from key accounts, and last week was crowing about how it has just displaced the iSeries at a division of News Corporation.

According to Sun, which made an announcement at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show last week in Las Vegas, Fox Television Stations,

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Merrill Lynch Estimates IBM iSeries and System i Sales for Q1

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Two weeks ago, IBM reported that System i and iSeries server sales were down

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The Hardware Foundry

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes in life, you have to put up or shut up. You have to put your money where your mouth is. You have to lead, even if you don’t have the time. You have to try something that you think is right–or, might be right, but you’re not sure–even if a lot of other people say you are crazy, or if they listen quietly and are not enthusiastic about the idea because they don’t see what you do. This happens a few times in a good life, and that is what I face as I launch something I have called

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IBM and Partners Target Casinos with the System i

May 1, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

There was a time when the casino industry was the exclusive turf of the OS/400 platform, thanks to a number of strong and established application providers who provided the hotel and gaming industry with the core solutions they needed to turn the key with software on a secure and reliable platform. To be sure, the industry is still dominated by OS/400 applications, although Microsoft has been blasting some holes in the fortifications of one of the iSeries’ biggest strongholds. IBM and its partners are fighting back.

Chip McClelland, IBM’s senior marketing manager for System i, claims that the iSeries is

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AttachmateWRQ Pays $495 Million for NetIQ

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The consolidation continues apace in the software industry, and last week privately held AttachmateWRQ announced to its customers that it has acquired public company and security software provider NetIQ for a tidy sum of $495 million. This marks the third big acquisition that a group of venture capitalists have teamed up on together, beginning with WRQ in December 2004 and Attachmate in April 2005.

It also marks the end of the public and independent life of NetIQ, which was founded in September 1995 in San Jose, California, and which went public just as the dot-com boom was roaring at full

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Migration RPG: Another Option for RPG II Shops

May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I bet I can make you laugh. As you are aware from reading this newsletter, IBM has warned customers that it is planning on removing support for the System/36 RPG II and System/38 RPG III compilers in the next release of i5/OS, which presumably will be called i5/OS V5R5. The plan is to charge customers for a special, unwarranted version of the RPG II and RPG III compilers in cases where they need to make changes to their RPG II and RPG III applications.

Now, if you happen to be a heavy user of RPG II, I suspect a few

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