• The Business Case for the System iWant

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Excel spreadsheet associated with this article is available for download Last week, I fleshed out a hypothetical user-capped System i5 line that is based on the machines that IBM announced in October and that, as far as I can tell, represent the most cost-competitive alternative to Unix, Windows, and Linux servers that Big Blue has fielded running OS/400 and i5/OS in the past decade. I would be the first to admit that the so-called System iWant user-capped machines have some issues, but still, I wanted to build a business plan and see how these machines might help or

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• Phishing, Zero-Days Top Symantec’s Security List

  December 11, 2006 Alex Woodie

  Symantec last week issued an end-of-the-year report on the state of IT security, and the findings may surprise you–or they may not, depending on how closely you’ve followed the security goings-on during the last 12 months. In any case, if one had to pick the two most important security trends for 2006, it would be tough to beat the meteoric rise of phishing and zero-day exploits. Phishing, an activity engaged in by criminals to perpetrate identity theft and the financial misdeeds that inevitably follow, increased dramatically in the first half of 2006, when Symantec detected close to 900 unique phishing

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• Q4bis Teams Up with SM Consulting for Business Intelligence

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Business intelligence software provider Q4bis continues to push into the North American small and medium business market, and has inked a deal with SM Consulting to provide integration services for the Q4bis suite. The Q4bis is a suite of business intelligence tools run on Microsoft‘s Windows Server and a multidimensional database created using SQL Server, as well as a Windows front end, and various ETL and mobile tools that run in Windows. But Q4bis was intentionally extended, through a set of templates for major RPG-based ERP packages for OS/400 and i5/OS platforms to be able to interface with DB2/400

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• Lotus SameTime Connects With Major IM Communities

  December 11, 2006 Dan Burger

  When IBM‘s Lotus division announced on December 6 that its SameTime instant messaging software is available with gateways to two immensely popular IM networks–AOL‘s AIM and Google‘s Google Talk–the boundaries of collaboration were seriously expanded. In a few weeks, a third major network, Yahoo! Messenger, will be added and another major step on the road to instant messaging integration will have been taken. According to IBM, this will put more than 157 million instant messaging users into one community. That’s not the same as saying “no boundaries,” but it’s a leap from multiple proprietary networks, which

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• Evans Data Cases Programming Language Popularity

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two recent reports from Evans Data have provided some insight into what is going on in the programming profession these days. One report, released in late November, is based on a poll of programmers in North America and gets a sense of the programming languages they use to create applications. But the other report, from October, is perhaps more stunning. It shows that by 2009–if Evans Data’s projections are right–there will be a lot more programmers in the world from places other than North America, and what they do might matter a whole lot more. According to the latest North

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• Forrester Predicts IT Spending Slowdown in 2007

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again. One IT budget cycle is ending, and another one is beginning, and everyone is trying to figure out if the market for information technology will grow again in the coming year. Growth in IT spending is a leading indicator for all of the vendors, companies, and IT personnel who participate in the commercial computing realm, so there is a lot riding on how IT spending goes up or down in any given year. The analysts at Forrester Research are the early birds for IT spending forecasts for 2007, but that forecast was embedded

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• Azul Systems Revamps Compute Appliances with 48-Core Vega2 Chip

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server appliance maker Azul Systems is not letting its legal battle with Sun Microsystems stop innovation with its Compute Appliance servers, which offload Java workloads from general purpose servers. Last week, Azul announced four new systems that are based on its 48-core Vega2 processor, which doubles the scalability of the Compute Appliances. According to Scott Sellers, one of the co-founders of Azul Systems and the company’s chief operating officer, the second generation of the Compute Appliances includes some other tweaks, such as using common system boards across the line, to make them upgradeable in the field. He says Azul Systems,

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• As I See It: Sweating the Little Stuff

  December 11, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was in a hurry. The year was 1961 and he was running weather simulations. Lorenz plugged equations into his computer and waited. And waited. He was working on a Royal (as in typewriter) McBee LGP30, a 740-pound “portable” desk system, and the going was slow. Today, of course, computers crunch numbers with the efficiency of an elephant stomping on a peanut, but in the 1960s, computers crunched numbers with all the vigor of a squirrel gnawing on a coconut. So when he decided to run one last simulation, he took the numeric results from the middle of

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• Saving the System i: Fight Pervasive with Pervasive

  December 11, 2006 Brian Kelly

  In a few years, there will be nobody sitting at a desktop or laptop PC anywhere in the world whose machine bears the letters “IBM.” Can this really be good for IBM? Does the principle of “out of sight, out of mind” jump out at anyone? The information technology adepts (fondly referred to by peers as “geeks” and “nerds”) who run Windows, Unix, and Linux shops on non-Blue systems will see no little letters “IBM” in the whole of their organizations. This would not simply be because there are no IBM servers, X64 or otherwise, but because there are no

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• Rocket Software Inks Deal to Buy Seagull Software

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What do you get when you cross a rocket with a seagull? Newtown, Massachusetts-based Rocket Software, which has been on an acquisitions tear for the past few years as it builds up its software business, is about to find out. Rocket last week announced that it was willing to spend more than $55.7 million to acquire Seagull Software, a provider of host connectivity and SOA-related middleware tools for mainframe and i5/OS platforms. The acquisition is yet another big deal in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem. Software companies from outside this market have been swooping in to take over

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