• Reseller Mainline to Acquire Competitor Cornerstone

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The consolidation crunch in the server reseller space continued last week as Mainline Information Systems of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California. The combination of the two firms brings together two of IBM‘s largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Both companies have unashamedly referred to themselves as “True Blue” resellers, and focus exclusively on IBM’s servers, operating systems, databases, and middleware or software that is officially pushed by IBM itself, such as Linux or VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor for X64 iron. Mainline has also used

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• COMMON Belgium Shifts Focus from i to IBM SMB

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, this will come as no surprise to most people considering IBM‘s rejiggering of its server product lines and marketing groups over the past year. COMMON Belgium, the midrange user group in that European country that is part of the larger COMMON Europe umbrella organization, has announced that it will be broadening its scope from the OS/400, i5/OS, and i platform to cover the entire range of small and medium business customers that use systems from IBM. The move is a logical one, considering that there is no longer a System i division within IBM’s Systems and Technology

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• That Windows-on-Power Rumor Surfaces Again

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know exactly how this rumor got started up again, but it did. Some people contacted me late last week and said that they heard from someone who heard from someone who attended the COMMON Europe Conference in Barcelona that ran in mid-May that IBM and Microsoft were working on a port of the Windows operating system to the Power6 processors. According to one telling of the rumor, Mark Shearer, the former general manager of the former System i division and now vice president of marketing and offerings for IBM’s Business Systems division, told people at COMMON Europe that

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• CDW Survey Says IT Shouldn’t Wear Green on Its Sleeves

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT professionals are, by nature, a pretty skeptical lot. You’d expect that, after being told so many promises about how such and such a technology was going to make their lives easier, and maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, and, to be fair, after making their own predictions about the impact of their own code or IT architecture, which may or may not have panned out for end users. And so it is during the new energy crunch and this whole “green IT” phenomenon. People sometimes over do it. That is not to say that large data centers are

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• Magic Software Boosts Sales, But Profits Under Pressure in Q1

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The impending announcement of its new Rich Internet Application Platform were not to blame for earnings pressure at Magic Software Enterprises in the first quarter ended March 31, but from the numbers, it looks like the effects of currency exchange rates have pushed up sales and administrative costs relative to sales levels. This is what happens when IT companies sell into the United States when the dollar is dropping in value; the reverse happens, of course, when U.S.-based IT companies do a lot of sales overseas but have their administrative costs booked in local dollars. Anyway, in the first quarter,

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• The IT Services Business Keeps On A-Growing

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maybe it is because I have 10 gallons of London Porter homebrew gurgling behind me in my office as I write this–hopefully it will be ready to bottle by the Memorial Day weekend–but it occurs to me, watching IBM as I do and Hewlett-Packard‘s proposed $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, that the services sector of the IT racket is like a sprinkle of yeast in a giant vat of sugar water. It is perhaps going to keep growing until it eats all the sugar in the pot. While the market researchers at IDC and Gartner probably

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• The Demographics of i Sales and Shipments

  May 19, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the server business was still called the systems business and there really were not commercial applications beyond basic print and file serving running on X86-based servers; when Unix and the whole open systems push was just getting going, Windows was not even a viable server platform, and Linux was not even an annoying idea in the head of a young nerd named Linus Torvalds; and when the mainframe still got the respect it deserved, even when it didn’t have an IBM label on it because there were lots of mainframe makers, it didn’t take very many machines or very

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• The i Edition of the BladeCenter S Finally Launches

  May 19, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been talking up the single-socket, dual-core JS12 Power6-based blade server and its BladeCenter S wall-powered blade server chassis pretty hard in recent months, and beginning on May 30, the company will start shipping the so-called i Edition Express prebundled and discounted version of this machinery expressly for supporting the new i 6.1 operating system and its RPG and COBOL workloads. This will be the first blade server that actually meets the needs of the vast majority of the OS/400 and i5/OS server installed base, with last fall’s two-socket, four-core JS22 blade server being wicked overkill for i shops

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• HP More Than Doubles Services Biz with EDS Acquisition

  May 19, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To say that Hewlett-Packard has wanted to be a powerhouse in IT services is a bit of an understatement. Almost straight out of the gate in 2000, then-new chief executive officer Carly Fiorina, the first non-HPer to run the company, tried to do a $17 billion deal with the IT consultancy arm of accountant PriceWaterhouse Coopers and failed, which IBM accomplished two years later with $3.5 billion just as HP had taken a left turn and acquired Compaq for $20 billion in 2001. The Compaq deal gave HP enterprise servers, storage, and some services. But nothing like the $13.9 billion

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Saying No No No

  May 19, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  Nancy Reagan made quite a point of saying, “Just say no.” Amy Winehouse sang that she said, “No, no, no.” And “No” is what Microsoft seems to be hearing a lot of lately, too. The software giant has heard it from Yahoo, which it tried to acquire, and it heard it from a lot of prospective PC customers, to whom it wants to sell Vista rather than Windows XP. It’s not surprising when Microsoft must fight to reach its goals. But this time its struggle seems a bit different because there’s a cultural change underway in the computer industry.

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