• Goodbye, AS/400, Old Friend

  April 7, 2008 Brian Kelly

  The AS/400 is dead. Long live the AS/400. This phrase as associated with my favorite “midrange system” has changed over the years to meet the many successor systems that IBM has put forth to replace our good ole AS/400. In fact, even before the litany of replacement systems, the AS/400 itself was involved in a replacement act of its own when it was brought forth to succeed both the System/38 and the System/36. As we in this “AS/400 community” well know, nothing was and nothing will ever be as revolutionary to the world of computing as the System/38 in its

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• Most CIOs Say 2008 IT Budgets Are Stable, So Far

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even with the confusion and consternation going on in the economies of the world, many of the chief information officers responsible for the corporate computing purses say that their IT budgets for 2008 are holding, albeit at a lower growth rate than we have seen in prior years. The analysts at Gartner, who want to get their piece of the $1.2 trillion global IT pie as well, recently polled 1,011 CIOs to take the pulse on IT spending. The survey, which Gartner conducted in the first quarter of 2008, shows that 62 percent of CIOs say their budgets will

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• COMMON Prepares for the Power Systems Evolution

  April 7, 2008 Dan Burger

  Without the System i, what will become of COMMON, the largest user group dedicated to the OS/400 and i5/OS–and now the i for Business–operating system? It’s well beyond a pretty safe bet that COMMON won’t disappear. It’s a certainty. After all, it’s only the System i brand that’s been erased. The newly rechristened i 6.1 (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) runs on Power Systems servers, along with Linux and AIX, so nothing changes as far as COMMON is concerned, right? Not exactly. Randy Dufault, the president of COMMON, says there have been and will continue to be evolutionary changes

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• You Win: IBM Makes Power Blade Software Tiers Make Sense

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In late January, when IBM announced delivered i5/OS V6R1 for the System i platform, now known as i 6.1 for the Power Systems platform, the company also announced that it would support that operating system on the four-core Power6-based JS22 blade server for the BladeCenter chassis. This was great, except for one thing: IBM put the JS22 in the P20 software tier. As you might imagine, despite the substantial computing performance embodied in the JS22 blade, which has four 4.7 GHz Power6 cores and which I estimate to have between 3,800 CPWs and 14,500 CPWs of OS/400, i5/OS, and i

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• IBM Temporarily Banned from U.S. Government Deals

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Given the shaky state of the economy in the United States and IBM‘s dependence on services contracts and sales to the Federal government, any kind of interruption on the flow of deals is something that Big Blue wants to avoid. But for a couple of days last week, IBM was barred from bidding on contracts with Uncle Sam. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which was echoed later by a press release put out by IBM and elaborated on not at all by a separate statement that the company sent to its PartnerWorld partners, the

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• Linden Lab, IBM to Take Virtual Worlds Corporate and Private

  April 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To many, the true promise of the Internet is not email, Web pages, and blogs, but an all-encompassing virtual world experience that allows people, corporations, and other kids of organizations to interact despite their physically dispersed bodies. This is what the Second Life virtual reality created by Linden Lab is all about. But imagine if you could create your own virtual world for your own purposes and not have to play in The World already created by Linden Lab? That is what the partnership between Linden Lab and IBM announced last week for the Second Life Grid is all about.

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• Progress Is Our Most Important Product

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the 1960s, when General Electric was still a maker of computers in addition to lots of other gadgetry, the company had a catchy slogan, one perhaps even more famous than IBM‘s “Think” admonition from its stern founder, Thomas Watson. That GE slogan–“”–has become as much of the modern business lexicon as the suggestion that we should think outside of boxes or that team does not have an “i” in it. This is all particularly ironic to me as I sit here on a cloudy New York Friday afternoon, mulling over IBM’s tactics and strategies for the OS/400 and

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• i5/OS V6R1: Raining on the Armadillo Day Parade

  March 31, 2008 Dan Burger

  I would estimate that 99 percent of System i users did not have March 21 circled on their calendars. The release date of i5/OS V6R1 came and went with considerably less fanfare than Armadillo Day (October 18), which is to say there was very little fanfare at all. And that’s not to say V6R1 is less exciting than an armadillo. It definitely is more exciting than an armadillo. It’s just that in the i5/OS world, the availability of a new operating system does not cause long lines of excited customers eager to get their hands on it. The reason I

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• Oracle’s Business Grows in Fiscal Q3, But Not As Much as Expected

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are the second largest provider of ERP software in the world, the leader in databases, and the contender for the leadership position in middleware, people watch how your business is going, particularly with so much talk about a potential or actual recession in the U.S. economy these days. And so it was as Oracle announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter last Wednesday and gave Wall Street a bit of a disappointment. Most companies would kill to have Oracle’s numbers, but the company’s earnings were lower than expected and its warnings about future growth prospects put

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• As I See It: Misera Plebs Contribuens

  March 31, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Greetings, misera plebs contribuens! It’s what the Hungarian people started calling themselves after King Andreas II exempted the nobility from taxation–an immunity which, like one, long, baronial happy meal, lasted from the 13th to the 19th century. It means “miserable tax-paying people,” and if you’ve already prepared this year’s return, you probably feel like one. Sucker. One third and perhaps as many as one half of eligible tax filers either cheat on their returns or don’t file a return at all. And their numbers, like springtime pollen counts, are exploding. In 1985, there were 3.4 million nonfilers. Just two

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