• Ask TPM: System i5–Good Investment or Not?

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With this issue of The Four Hundred, I am introducing a new kind of column. I get a lot of questions from readers regarding tactical and strategic advice in the server, operating system, and related systems and application software areas, and I usually reply to these in private. But the questions that readers ask are often very good ones, and I think that it would be useful to answer these questions publicly in this newsletter. This is exactly the thing that the programming and system administration experts who put together our Four Hundred Guru do for readers regarding technical

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• IBM Tweaks Various System i5 Server Deals

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s marketeers have been taking their grease pencils to the System i5 playbook, and in recent weeks have made some tweaks to existing deals to help them better make deals. IBM has tweaked a special rebate offering that has been on the books since May 2 that gave customers cash back if they upgraded selected iSeries 8XX or System i5 models or bought new System i5 machines entirely in conjunction with application software from key i5/OS application software vendors. Last week, IBM rejiggered the machines that were eligible for the rebates on this ISV deal, and also changed the

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• Details Emerge on Possible “Work Stream” Entry i5 Server

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of us in the i5/OS and OS/400 community have been asking IBM to take the fight for customers’ hearts, minds, and budget dollars directly to Microsoft‘s Windows stack. At the COMMON user group meeting a few weeks ago, IBM’s top brass hinted that they were thinking about a more aggressive i5 machine or line, possibly code-named “Work Stream,” to go into smaller shops and win some deals. Apparently, IBM is listening, and details on the Work Stream project have surfaced. So what is Work Stream? Well, the code name certainly is a bit odd, but fishing could be

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• Gartner Says a Quarter of Software Sales to Go SaaS By 2011

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at Gartner have been playing with their crystal balls again, and they have looked into the future and see lots and lots of companies will be renting their software as a service rather than acquiring license fees. Gartner hosted its Symposium/ITexpo event in Orlando, Florida, last week and one of the highlighted prognostications the IT market researcher threw out to the audience is that by 2011, 25 percent of all new licenses to application software for running businesses will be acquired under a Software as a Service, or SaaS, model. Gartner’s definition of SaaS is this: one set

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• System i Vendors Merge as Help/Systems Acquires ASC

  October 9, 2006 Dan Burger

  Acquisitions of the magnitude of J.D. Edwards-PeopleSoft-Oracle are not the only business dealings capable of sending a rumble throughout the i5/OS community. Help/Systems, a systems automation software vendor, turned a few heads by announcing last Tuesday that it had acquired Advanced Systems Concepts (ASC), a company best known for its data access product. Both firms have established reputations for quality products and service in the System i independent software vendor ranks. Both companies are privately owned, so the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Help/Systems develops, markets, and supports automated operations software for the IBM System

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• Lawson Software License Sales Miss Expectations in Q1 Fiscal 2007

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Lawson Software reported the first full quarter of financial results since its acquisition of Swedish ERP software provider Intentia International. The merger of the two companies has allowed Lawson to report big revenue increases, of course. But as is the case with a lot of mergers, Lawson is struggling with some issues. Lawson completed its acquisition of Intentia in April, and in July the company acquired Competency Assessment Solutions, a provider of Web-based performance management software for the healthcare industry. The company also said at the time that Robert Barbieri, the company’s chief financial officer, would step down. Last week,

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• Legacy Application Modernization Strategies Hinge on SOA

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aberdeen Group has just completed a detailed study of the legacy application modernization plans of small, medium, and large enterprises, and not surprisingly, companies are looking to the services oriented architecture (SOA) approach to creating distributed applications to help them both modernize their legacy applications and to make their composite applications more flexible and therefore giving their businesses more agility. Some companies, however, are looking to simply get rid of legacy applications on mainframes, i5/OS and OS/400, and Unix servers to get rid of the legacy problem. To reach the conclusions in a just-released report called The Legacy Application Modernization

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• JDA Emphasizes VARs to Attack the Retail Sector

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having completed its $213 million acquisition of supply chain software specialist Manugistics at the end of July, JDA Software, which sells applications aimed at retail companies that use Windows or i5/OS platforms, is looking to expand its value-added reseller (VAR) channel to boost its sales. Specifically, JDA is creating a VAR program that allows resellers to target local retailers in their regions with under $100 million in annual sales, which are often called tier three and tier four retailers. Under this sales program, VARs are allowed to promote, price, sell, and implement JDA’s Portfolio solutions; JDA will also sell

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• As I See It: History Makers

  October 9, 2006 Victor Rozek

  In the early 1960s, when IBM abruptly bolted from New York City, Armonk was a remote and barely inhabited woodland. On my only visit to the IBM mothership nearly two decades ago, I remember wondering why a big-city company would select such an out-of-the-way site to house its world headquarters. Like guys with a Rolex, successful companies enjoy showing off their architectural bling-bling. Power and status find their expression in steel and glass and are typically flaunted, not hidden. Cheap land, I thought, may have been an inducement, but uber-wealthy people don’t buy things just because they’re cheap. There were,

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• COMMON Picks Dufault as New President

  October 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The board of directors of the COMMON midrange user group have chosen board member Randy Dufault to the presidency of that organization. Dufault was first elected to the COMMON board in the fall of 2003. COMMON announced only a few weeks ago that Dufault, who was serving his first term on the board of directors, had been named treasurer. Dufault works at MBS Technologies, a midrange business partner from Minneapolis, Minnesota, that is an expert on building content management systems for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. Dufault has been at MBS for 23 years, and started out as a

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