• Bang for the Buck: Baby i5 Servers Versus Windows and Linux Boxes

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since IBM announced a revamped Power5+ System i5 line in late January, I have been itching to put together price/performance comparisons with Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms to get a sense of how the new i5s compare to these alternatives in the entry, midrange, and high-end of the server market. But, with so many new processors and server designs coming out the door this summer, I thought it best to wait until everything was out. So now, Intel has its dual-core “Woodcrest” Xeon 5100s and its dual-core “Montecito” Itanium 9000 processors out, and they are making their way into

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• The Blogosphere Says the IRS Uses the iSeries to Manage Bill Gates’ Personal Taxes

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maybe they should have renamed the box the IRSeries? While I was searching for something on the Internet, I accidentally ran across a posting in a news blog portion of a site with the unlikely name of Suicide Girls that had a blogger who claimed that the Internal Revenue Service is using an iSeries server to keep track of Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates’ tax returns. The Suicide Girls site is very weird, and I would not suggest that you click on the link below and especially not the site’s home page, while at work. If you want to

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• Logility’s Sales Rocket Skyward in Fiscal Q4

  July 31, 2006 Dan Burger

  When you turn in an annual report that shows software license fees increased 107 percent compared to one year earlier, there’s good reason for excitement. That was perhaps the most telling number among many positive trends as the supply chain collaborative software vendor Logility rang up record revenues and earnings in its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2006 reports. According to Logility’s president and chief executive officer, J. Michael Edenfield, company records were broken in the categories of annual revenues, operating earnings, and net earnings. Edenfield also noted a record 88 new customers during the fiscal year. That, along with

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• Lawson Reports Preliminary Q4 Results, Loses CFO, and Buys CAS

  July 31, 2006 Dan Burger

  Lawson Software, in its first quarterly financial report since finalizing the acquisition of Intentia International, is expected to report a net loss of between $9.3 million and $12.8 million. The company reported late last week that these numbers were “preliminary” and are pending the completion of tabulations of Intentia’s financial figures. Lawson acquired Intentia on April 24, 2006. The information released is also based on unaudited results for the legacy Lawson operations. Lawson’s fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended May 31. According to a Lawson press release, the company expects consolidated (Lawson and Intentia) revenues between $125 million

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• IT Shops Expect iSCSI and Fibre Channel to Co-Exist

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you look at the history of network connectivity, what you will see is that any protocol that comes up against Ethernet, no matter how good it might be initially, eventually succumbs to Ethernet and is supplanted. But that may not be the case until someone creates something I will call iFC, which is short for Internet Fibre Channel. Let me explain. A few examples illustrate the point. In many ways, IBM Token Ring was technically a better protocol, offering higher bandwidth, better error correction. So what? In the long run, Ethernet improved, and because non-IBM shops–like the service providers

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• Everybody Loves SOA, Aberdeen Survey Says

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Service oriented architecture, or SOA, is hot, hot, hot. And if you are a cynic, as I can be sometimes, you might even say that this is the natural evolution of software development from stove-piped applications running on host mainframe and midrange servers from days gone by to a multi-tiered Internet infrastructure. But saying so is a buzzkill–and buzzword kill–for the software development and middleware vendors who are trying to make a living out there in IT Land, so just pretend I didn’t say that and read on. In any event, the IT consultancies are also riding the SOA bandwagon

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• Agilysys Blames Fiscal Q1 Sales Weakness on IBM ‘Proprietary Servers’

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As one of the three master distributors of the System i5 platform, you can bet that Agilysys is keenly aware of when sales of the platform are going up or going down. Agilysys last week announced its preliminary financial results for its first fiscal quarter ended June 30, and blamed IBM’s “proprietary servers” as one of the causes for an expected revenue decline. The company also revised its revenue guidance downward for fiscal 2007. The Enterprise Solutions Group at Agilysys is one of the main distributors in the world for both IBM and Hewlett-Packard servers; this unit also peddles a

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• As I See It: Productivity and Relationship

  July 31, 2006 Victor Rozek

  It has become an axiom of American life that the more successful you are in business, the less likely you are to have a successful relationship. “The job” is often cited as the villain in relationship failures but, more accurately, it is the single-minded dedication to the job that leaves little time for the demands of partnership. But if jobs can destroy relationships, then the loss of a relationship can also effect a person’s ability to perform on the job. People in the throes of dissolution are usually pained, distracted, and performing at less than optimal levels. Simply stated, productivity

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• New Vendors Join SOA Collaboration Group

  July 31, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Late last year, IBM and seven other companies–BEA Systems, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP, Siebel Systems (since acquired by Oracle), Sybase, and Zend Technologies–all joined forces with the objective of creating standardized specifications for Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) software development, the latest thing that vendors are pushing to make programs more flexible. Last week, the group, which still does not have a formal name as yet and whose member continue to refer to themselves simply as “the group,” announced that it has added several new partners, including: Cape Clear, a Massachusetts-based player in

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• IBM Creates a Performance-Based Pricing Scheme for Software

  July 31, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an effort to make its software pricing methods more rational in a world where there are many different kinds of server processor architectures, IBM has put a stake in the ground and marked out a new pricing methodology for software that is more closely aligned to the performance of various processors than current per-socket or per-core pricing methods. The key words here are “more closely.” It is not a one-to-one ratio. Here’s the deal. Effective November 10, IBM is withdrawing its current per-processor (by which IBM means a processor core) licensing charges on some 350 products and 1,300 part

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