• Jack Henry Sees 10 Percent Revenue and Profit Growth in Fiscal Q1

  November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a good thing to see independent software vendors that push the System i platform doing well. And in its most recent quarter Jack Henry & Associates, which specializes in selling software to financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions, said that sales were up 10 percent. Jack Henry ended its first quarter of fiscal 2007 on September 30, and reported sales of $150.6 million, up 10 percent from the $137 million it booked in the prior year’s first quarter. Software license sales were actually down in the quarter, however, falling 8 percent to $15.5

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• LANSA Partners with IONA Technologies for SOA Enablement on System i

  November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  LANSA, a tool vendor with expertise in rapid application development and i5/OS and OS/400 legacy application modernization, and IONA Technologies, which has positioned itself in the center of the services oriented architecture (SOA) arena with its Artix implementation of the Enterprise Service Bus idea, last week announced that they have partnered to help make SOA-style application modernization easier for System i shops that are coping with distributed application architectures. IONA is based in Dublin, Ireland, and has been focusing on object-oriented programming and then Web services for the past decade. The company’s Orbix product implements the CORBA object

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• IDC Says Virtual Tape Library Sales to Double in Five Years

  November 6, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The market researchers at IDC have polished up the crystal balls they have dedicated to the storage market, and last week predicted that sales of virtual tape libraries would double in the next five years, hitting $1.4 billion in sales by 2011. Perhaps even more astounding than that revenue increase is the expectation that the amount of capacity under management by VTL solutions will increase at a compounded annual growth rate of 47.4 percent of that five year period. This is a huge increase in data, and it seems to indicate that companies that have loved tape archiving for decades

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• SoftLanding Systems Acquired By CICS Specialist Unicom Systems

  October 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another cornerstone company in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem has been bought by an outsider. Late last week, SoftLanding Systems, the Peterborough, New Hampshire, provider of software change management and related development tools for the System i platform, announced that it has been acquired by Unicom Systems, a company based in Mission Hills, California, that has carved out a strong niche for itself in the mainframe market and is looking for new markets in which to grow. Both SoftLanding and Unicom are privately held companies, so the financial details of the transaction were not announced. With the exception

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• VP of System i Marketing Talks Strategy

  October 30, 2006 Dan Burger and Alex Woodie

  Elaine Lennox is happy and excited to have a job that comes with a uniform. It’s red and white with concentric circles and a big blue bull’s eye in the middle of her back. Most people would describe it as a target. But Lennox, who also wears the title of vice president of marketing for the System i division at IBM, isn’t hiding from anyone. She’s used to the rock throwers, the outspoken critics with pointy sticks, and the heat about below average marketing of the platform. Lennox has a marketing budget that a lot of us believe is

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• Who’s Using Linux on the System i?

  October 30, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  IBM first announced the availability of Linux on the iSeries in May 2001–more than five years ago. With great fanfare, Big Blue has consistently touted this Linux capability as a means for shops to realize cost savings and simplicity by capitalizing on the huge (outside the System i community) movement towards open source software and through server consolidation. All the appropriate heads nodded at the time, and certainly no one is arguing that the System i’s ability to run Linux or other operating system partitions is in any way a bad thing. Yet it’s unclear just how many System i

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• As I See It: Behavioral Redlining

  October 30, 2006 Victor Rozek

  “We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files; we’d like to help you learn to help yourself.” –Simon and Garfunkel Ever since people began gathering information about each other, the gatherers have used the data to control and punish the gatherees. King Herod, for example, used census data to hunt down families with infants hoping to preempt the coming of Christ by killing all of the male babies in Bethlehem. For centuries thereafter, birth records were used to determine social status–noble or commoner, free or slave, tax beneficiary or tax payer-and to keep common

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• Sun Getting Ready to Open Source Java

  October 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sun Microsystems, the server and operating system maker that also created the Java programming language and the Java Virtual Machine that supports those applications, Sun’s top brass confirmed at the Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco last week that it is between two and three months away from taking Java open source. In 2005, Sun took its Solaris 10 Unix operating system and its Java Enterprise System middleware stack open source. It had already acquired the open source StarOffice office automation suite and given it to the community as OpenOffice. Sun even went so far as to open

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• IBM Researchers Borrow from Mother Nature to Cool Chips

  October 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Power and cooling issues are taking center stage in the data center these days, and researchers at IBM working in its Zurich, Switzerland, laboratories are looking to help from Mother Nature to teach them how to better cool the chips that are going into computers. The fastest processors on the market today are basically hotplates that happen to do computing (yes, that is hyperbole), and while no one is suggesting converting a supercomputer cluster into a grill at the local McDonalds (at least not yet), there are other ways to attack the cooling issue. (Actually, IBM says that chip thermal

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• Server Reseller Avnet Shows Good Numbers in Fiscal Q1

  October 30, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As one of the largest distributors of electronic components and a master resellers of IT systems that sits between the largest vendors and their downstream reseller partners, the financial ups and downs of Avnet are a good indicator of what is really going on in the IT economy. And, if Avnet’s first quarter of fiscal 2007 is any indication, the IT economy did pretty good in the third calendar quarter. But the fourth calendar quarter could be tougher than many expect. For the quarter ended September 30, Avnet said that it had sales of $3.65 billion, up 11.6 percent over

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