• IBM to Ditch SRAM for Embedded DRAM on Power CPUs

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a presentation that chip designers from IBM made last week at the IEEE’s annual International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, the company has perfected a way to embed Dynamic RAM, or DRAM–the normal kind of main memory used in computers–into microprocessors rather than having to resort to the much more transistor-intensive Static RAM, or SRAM, commonly used in on-chip L1 and L2 cache memories. IBM has been testing the embedded DRAM concept for microprocessors for a while, and in fact used embedded DRAM in the variants of the stripped-down PowerPC 440 cores that are the heart

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• Lawson, IBM Target the SMB Market Together

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Everybody seems to be courting the small and medium business market these days. Not necessarily with a lot of success, but with a lot of talk and even some coordination between partners to share resources to take on the burden of attacking a market that has millions instead of a few ten thousand customers. Last week, ERP software supplier Lawson Software and systems maker IBM said that they would work together to bring solutions to market aimed at SMB customers. Of course, when IT vendors say SMB, they mean customers with fewer than 1,000 employees. But they generally do not

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• In Formation: Q&A with Infor Chairman Jim Schaper

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In Formation: Q&A with Infor Chairman Jim Schaper Because servers and operating systems are the backbone of the data centers of the world, IT Jungle spends a lot of time talking to the vendors of these products. But ultimately, if these products are working correctly in the data center, end users do not even know they exist. (This is obviously an idealized situation, given that operating systems are cranky and servers sometimes fail.) What end users think of as “the computer” for their company is actually the application software that runs on top of it, whether it was built in-house

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• Oracle Users Say App Support Is Good, Fusion Plans Still Up in the Air

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of Oracle‘s “Applications Unlimited” upgrade to four of its five software suites that happened two weeks ago, it seemed appropriate to reach out to the Independent Oracle Users Group to see what the users it represent think about Oracle and how it is taking care of them. As previously reported, two weeks ago Oracle launched updates to four software suites: J.D. Edwards World A9.1, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9.0, and Siebel Release 8.0; late last year, Oracle rolled out J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12. This is the most comprehensive refresh of Oracle’s

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• GST Says Buy Cheaper i5 Disk Controllers and Lots of Disks

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Any time IBM puts new disk controller or disk drive technology into the field, that is a time when IT managers have to start looking at their iSeries and System i5 machines and figure out if the new offerings can be deployed to improve system capacity or responsiveness–either immediately, if disk usage is an issue, or during the next budget cycle when funds will be available for upgrading storage as well as other parts of the systems. Two weeks ago, Big Blue launched a new RAID 5 disk controller and new extended SCSI enclosures, and I talked to GST,

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• Manhattan Associates Grows Smartly in 2006, Settles Customer Lawsuits

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Supply chain and warehouse management software supplier Manhattan Associates has reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2006 and the full year, and says that sales and profits were up in the double digits and giving the company some new sales records to beat in 2007. The company also said that it has settled two lawsuits, one brought by a customer in the United States and the other in Germany, that were implementing its warehouse management software and that were not happy with the installation, and so they sued. In the fourth quarter, Manhattan Associates said that total

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• Chip Makers Strut Their Stuff at ISSCC

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Chip geeks and semiconductor mavens from around the world converged on San Francisco last week to show off their latest innovations at the annual IEEE’s International Solid State Circuits Conference. This is one of the two annual events where a lot of advances in chip design are first revealed to the world–the other being the Hot Chips conference hosted in the summer. At last week’s event, Intel, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, and PA Semi showed off future server microprocessors. IBM’s dual-core Power6 chip was the first chip to be detailed at ISSCC. The Power6

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• IBM’s Low Rate Financing Deal for Hardware and Software Changes–Again

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  That on-again, off-again Low Rate Financing deal that IBM uses to help push its hardware, software, and services has been tweaked once again. Back in November 2006, when IBM dropped the interest rates on financing to help stimulate sales, I said that if history was any guide, then if sales were sluggish in December or January, the company would lower its financing rates even further to try to boost sales. This is indeed what has come to pass. Big Blue finances so much hardware and software on behalf of customers and resellers that it has among the lowest interest rates

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Paved With Good Intentions

  February 19, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  It’s a milestone. By midyear, Seagate Technology and Hitachi will offer 3.5-inch disk drives that store a terabyte of data. Other disk makers are right on their heels. Processor makers with multicore offerings will reach other technology milestones, as will network gear providers whose products will foster ever-faster communications. It’s hard to think of so many metaphorical milestones without recalling the originals, stone pillars that marked thousand-pace distances on the vast web of Roman Empire roads. These highways linked Rome to the rest of Europe, spanned Britain, and even crossed Asia Minor, producing dramatic consequences, both intended and unintended.

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• IBM Challenges Microsoft Lock-In with ‘Open Client Solution’

  February 19, 2007 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled its “Open Client Solution,” a bundle of existing desktop productivity applications that will run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh PCs. While the bundle doesn’t include any new software, IBM says internal deployments have showed it how to efficiently deploy the same products across multiple operating systems, which, in turn, will help customers avoid vendor lock-in–an arrow aimed squarely at Microsoft and its monopoly on the desktop. The IBM Open Client Solution includes a hodge-podge of products from IBM and its business partners, including Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Sametime, WebSphere Portal, Mozilla‘s Firefox, and the

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