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  • As I See It: The Workplace Politician

    November 13, 2006 Victor Rozek

    Politics is a great tree burdened with rotting fruit, and there’s nothing like a recent election to remind us of why it can be so distasteful. If political ads are any measure of gravitas, politics is full of brash sound and feigned fury signifying rudeness. Although politics is associated primarily with governance, the term is also used in the workplace, where it describes the backroom and boardroom decisions that impact employees–often adversely–but have little or nothing to do with the actual running of the business.

    To be sure, the term “politics” is also used more loosely to describe a range

    …

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  • Marywood University and IBM Team on System i Curricula Development

    November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Marywood University, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, business and managerial science college that offers MIS degrees with a business bend, has been a staunch supporter of the IBM midrange platform for a very long time. And as a means of reinvigorating its MIS program, which is now being transformed into a Bachelor’s of Business Administration degree with a focus on Business Information Technology, the university is working with IBM to create System i-specific course material that could be the basis of college and university courses around the world some day.

    Marywood is located on a 115-acre parcel of land in the

    …

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  • IBM Lowers Interest Rates on Low Rate Financing Deal

    November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Big Blue is jerking around the interest rates on its Low Rate Financing deal again, and this time, it is lowering the rates it is charging to finance IT hardware, software, and services so it can boost sales in the fourth quarter.

    On September 19, IBM raised the financing rates on the Low Rate Financing deal for the second time in 2006, and now the rate has gone down. Interest rates have, by the way, been more or less stable during this time, so IBM is clearly using its ability to borrow money very cheaply to help customers finance gear,

    …

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  • Arrow and Agilysys Cite Weakness in Proprietary Server Sales

    November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Two of the biggest master distributors of IBM‘s servers, Arrow Electronics and Agilysys, have turned in their financial report cards for the three months ended September 30, and as you might expect, both companies cited weakness in the sale of proprietary servers–meaning mostly System i5 products and some mainframes.

    Arrow, of course, has a vast distribution business, including electronic components as well as IT gear (much like rival Avnet, the other “A” of the three A-named companies who are master resellers of the System i platforms. During the third quarter, Arrow had revenues of $3.45 billion, up

    …

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  • Power.org Organization Announces Merged Power Instruction Set Architecture

    November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    As promised, the Power.org organization that IBM created to promote and standardize the Power processor architecture and build of the ecosystem of hardware and software based on the Power chips has rolled out a new instruction set architecture, or ISA, for the Power platform.

    Power ISA Version 2.03 and the related Power Architecture Platform Requirements (PAPR) specification were both announced last week, and Power.org also unveiled a roadmap for the Power architecture and the processors that use it.

    The new ISA merges the architectural elements of IBM’s Power and PowerPC processors with the vector processing extensions created by Motorola before

    …

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  • Online Backups Business Treating EVault Well

    November 13, 2006 Alex Woodie

    Things seem to be going well for EVault, the provider of online backup and recovery solutions for the iSeries and other platforms. According to the company, which is privately held and therefore not required to disclose financial data, fiscal year 2006 saw revenues increased by 44 percent while the number of customers increased by more than a third. What’s more, EVault says the momentum continued into the first part of fiscal year 2007.

    EVault, which was founded in 1997, was one of the first companies to commercialize online back ups and recoveries. In 2004, the company introduced support for

    …

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  • Thoma Cressey Strikes Again: Buys iTera to Merge with Vision Solutions

    November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The buying spree continued last week in the i5/OS and OS/400 community, as Thoma Cressey Equity Partners announced that it was acquiring System i high availability software specialist iTera to merge it with competitor Vision Solutions. The merger of these two companies is something that has been on the minds of the top brass of these two companies for many years, according to sources, but it took a private equity firm’s deep pockets to broker a truce between these two fiercely competitive HA software providers.

    Back at the fall COMMON expo, there were some rumors around that iTera was

    …

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  • Bang for the Buck: User-Capped i5 520s Versus Windows X64 Servers

    November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Nearly a month ago, IBM made a big deal about its new i5 520 Solution Edition for SAP applications, which offered dramatically better bang for the buck than regular i5 520s, and quietly announced what I am calling the user-capped i5 520 Solution Editions. Big Blue emphasized the wrong products in its announcements and public relations campaign. While an SAP box is interesting for a small number of customers, the entry user-capped i5 520 box does something more interesting: it actually competes head-to-head, and user-for-user, with Windows-based X64 servers.

    No kidding. Well, at least not on the initial 20-user

    …

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  • PowerTech Issues Third Annual State of i5/OS Security Report

    November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The security of any system is only as good as the methods companies use to implement access to applications, data, and operating system resources. Anyone with a PC on his or her desktop knows this intuitively these days, with the maelstrom of malware and viruses that are attacking us. But, according to the third annual state of security on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform put out by security software maker The PowerTech Group, some System i shops are not being diligent about the security of their systems.

    Part of the problem that i5/OS and OS/400 shops are facing is

    …

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  • The X Factor: Form Follows Function

    November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    In nature, the shape of an animal or a plant is the result of the interplay between the organism and its environment–the latter being the sum result of the forces at play, the competitive pressures between competing life forms, and the materials at hand with which to build and sustain the life form. In the data center, similar competitive pressures are at work on computer designs, and instead of working at periodic timescales, evolution happens over a human generation or less. But sometimes evolution is stalled by greed.

    While there has been plenty of evolution under the skins of servers

    …

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