Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, a long-time supporter of the AS/400 and successor platforms, hired a new president and chief executive officer last week in the wake of a recapitalization earlier this year. And, to the chagrin of i enthusiasts the world over, the company also announced a new platform strategy that will see IBS push its IBS ERP suite on Windows platforms rather than on i 6.1 and its successors.

But don’t panic just yet, AS/400 folks. The majority of the 5,000 customers that IBS has are running RPG or Java versions of its eponymous ERP

Throughout the summer, The Four Hundred has been examining how the Power Systems i Edition machines in rack and blade form factors compare to their predecessors and, for entry and midrange machines, compare to Windows boxes. This week, we climb one step higher on the Power Systems ladder and compared the System i5 570 machines from 2006 with the new Power 570 machines of 2008. Basically, IBM is offering more performance for more money for customers who need it, or the same performance for a little less money.

We all know, of course, that last July IBM announced an interim

When BluePhoenix Solutions acquired ASNA 13 months ago, it made building the services side of the business a priority. Pieces of that puzzle have been added since the merger, and the latest move has been to put a new president in place. Last week, ASNA announced Greg Schottland would be taking command of the .NET-oriented application modernization software company that has refocused its approach to helping customers with modernization projects.

Modernization projects are under way in a fair number of IBM i shops, but the traction that many people predicted in the application modernization area has not taken hold. Schottland

After the Fed bailed out AIG with 85 taxpayer billions, William Greider said something that caught my attention the way a near-death experience does. Greider is no blowhard. He is a serious journalist with a deep understanding of the backroom workings of the economy. Among other things, he’s written a weighty volume about the inner-working of the Fed called Secrets of the Temple. He knows of what he speaks. In the aftermath of the AIG bailout Greider wrote: “For the first time in this unfolding financial crisis, I felt personally scared by the news. Not about my money, but

Business Computer Design Int’l has added a trio of new partners to its reseller program, including Deltacare of The Netherlands, Dagessa of Poland, and evolveIT of Irvine, California. All three new partners will be selling the array of BCD’s application modernization and transformation products for the IBM i operating system.

BCD markets a collection of integrated i OS solutions, which includes the WebSmart PHP and ILE development environments, the Presto screen modernization tool, the Nexus Web portal, the Catapult spool file delivery system, and the Clover reporting and query tool. BCD sells its solutions through a business partner program, which

The economic woes in the financial services and housing markets are putting a pretty significant damper on life inside the data center and out, and taking a break from the seriousness that we are all facing thanks to the global nature of the economy is more important than usual. It is in that spirit that we report on an utterly silly survey of chief information officers by IT headhunter Robert Half Technology, which asked the CIOs what were the weirdest questions that their help desks have fielded.

We have all heard the one about the end user who mistook

Sales and shipments of servers in the European, African, and Middle Eastern region of the world grew faster than the global average in the second quarter of the year, according to statistics released by IDC, pushed upward by sales in Central and Eastern Europe and providing economic sanctuary for U.S.-based server makers. Server revenues in Q2 rose by 8.7 billion to $4.5 billion, and shipments rose by 12.4 percent to nearly 700,000 units.

According to IDC, x64 machinery accounted for 95.5 percent of total server shipments in the quarter throughout the EMEA region, a statistic that has been pretty

Sometimes, I think of myself simply as a journalist and analyst, reporting on what is happening or what will happen soon in the IT racket. Sometimes, I feel a bit like the Greek chorus in a comedy or tragedy in the ancient world. And so it was last week as I watched Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announce a co-developed data warehouse appliance called the Database Machine at Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco.

The HP-Oracle machine is based on HP’s ProLiant DL360 G5 servers–five of them in a rack, to be specific, each with two sockets and using four-core Xeon processors

Ocean Computer Group, a solutions provider of equipment, APC power, software, consulting, and services for mid-market computer customers throughout the metropolitan New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia areas has added VAI‘s S2K enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite to its product line.

This announcement comes a week after VAI launched S2K 5.0, a new version of its flagship IBM i OS-based ERP system for manufacturing, distribution, retail, metals, food and related service industries. The release includes many new features, including a new Java client, an updated warehouse management system (WMS), new Web portal programs, and a new iPhone interface.

So much for your grand plan to make your retirement nest egg in one fell swoop by selling shares in IBM short. Last week, the list of companies in which short-selling is no longer allowed swelled, and now includes Big Blue.

Two weeks ago, when the U.S. economy was led to the window ledge, the Securities and Exchange Commission created a list of 800 financial services, insurance, and related companies in which short-selling would be prohibited. (Let’s face it, short-selling has created some of the mess that we are in, and these days, shorting financial stocks is like fishing in