• Readers Pipe Up On the STG Reorg and System i Wish List

  January 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week’s issue featured a story about IBM‘s plans for its Systems and Technology Group in 2008 as well as reader feedback on the “Official 2008 TPM System i Wish List.” Three weeks ago, as our 2008 publishing year was getting under way, we reported on the reorganization Big Blue did in its STG organization in early January. The feedback on these issues keeps coming in, and if you have something you want to say, don’t be shy. This is the AS/400 community, and no matter what name you give it, it is still a community. It’s deja Blue,

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• IBM Tweaks Prices on BladeCenter H and Power Blade Networking Gear

  January 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Support for the i5/OS V6R1 operating system on the JS22 Power6-based blade server is expected some time soon, and so is the general availability of the new BladeCenter S blade server chassis that is aimed at small and medium business customers–the kind who like the i5/OS platform but who also have Windows and sometimes Linux and AIX in their shops. To help spur a little business with its current product line, IBM last week rejiggered prices on networking components used in the Power blades and the BladeCenter H chassis. IBM did, however, increase some prices, too. Specifically, IBM raised the

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• IBM Buys AptSoft, Bringing Yet Another Twist to the SOA Story

  January 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM bought yet another small, esoteric supplier of software–this one called AptSoft–that is being billed as yet another piece of the SOA software empire that the company is trying to build as hardware becomes less relevant in the IT market. AptSoft, which is based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a provider of software that does complex event processing, or CEP, which is a kind of functionality that we used to call mid-level manager. You know–the living, breathing one who was given access to computers over the past several decades and who made decisions about the raw materials,

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• The Model 270: Of Course It Runs V5R4, But Now What?

  January 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 and iSeries Model 270 entry servers are historically part of the same AS/400 line that was called the Model 8XX series. The Model 270s were the kickers to the “Invader” Model 170 machines that helped provide a significant boost in entry AS/400 sales in the late 1990s. And the Model 270s indeed run i5/OS V5R4, contrary to what I said in in a recent story. That said, they are long in the tooth and have been replaced many times in the past eight years. The Model 270s came out in the third quarter of 2000 and were

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• System i Recruiter Nate Viall Does NBC Nightly News

  January 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, if you were watching the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams on January 17, you might have seen a familiar System i personality on the broadcast. Nate Viall, a long-time recruiter and compensation expert from the AS/400, iSeries, and System i market based in Des Moines, Iowa, was interviewed for a segment of the newscast that talked about the gender pay gap. This theme is one that Viall has discussed from time to time, and it is somewhat controversial to suggest that there is no gender pay gap in the IT marketplace. Back in May 2007, Viall did an

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• Bytware Announces i5virus Winners

  January 28, 2008 Dan Burger

  Case closed. For two months at the end of 2007, System i users from around the world were on the trail of cyber criminals who compromised the security of several financial organizations. Justice, you’ll be happy to learn, has been served. Fictionally speaking, that is. Bytware, a System i vendor specializing in system management and security solutions, used this well-developed and highly publicized cyber crime game as a marketing tool to bring attention to security issues surrounding the use of PHP on the System i and, of course, to associate the company with antivirus protection. It worked as easily

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• Weak Dollar, Services, and Power6 Give IBM a Solid Fourth Quarter

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After pre-announcing on last Monday morning that it would have better than expected profits in its fourth quarter, giving Wall Street a helping hand as it tries to climb up the steep cliff it has tumbled off in recent weeks, IBM reported its full and official financial results for the quarter last Thursday afternoon after the market closed. This turns out to be one of the best quarters IBM has turned in during the past decade, in terms of both revenue and profit growth. The big hero for the quarter is probably the increasing prices for oil, which is driving

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• IBM Aims for Server Expansion in 2008, Including System i Reincarnation

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past several years, I have ended each work year by attending a server technology conference hosted by UBS, which typically draws the top brass from the major server divisions of the tier one server makers. This year, because of the high cost of putting on the event, UBS decided to not do it. But some of the server makers did attend the Global Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by Lehman Brothers in December. One of them was IBM, and Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president in charge of Systems and Technology Group, had some interesting things

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• Readers Riff on the 2008 System i Wish List

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I did a stream-of-consciousness rendition of a wish list I had for the System i product line for 2008. Making my own list is fun–well, if you like banging your head against a wall, as most of us in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem apparently do–but the real reason I do it is to try to solicit ideas from readers of this newsletter and publish them so one set of readers of this newsletter–the executives at IBM–can see what we are all thinking. A number of you responded to my

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• Sun Casts a $1 Billion Net to Catch MySQL

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The 2008 IT market was looking a little boring so far this year, but server and operating system maker and software powerhouse wannabee Sun Microsystems woke everybody up early last Wednesday morning with the news that it would spend $1 billion to acquire open source database maker MySQL. This is arguably one of the smartest moves Sun has made in a decade, and probably rivals the decision it made in the mid-1990s to buy the carcasses from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and the Cray Sparc-based server business. That is a qualified “probably” because Sun’s early embrace of Internet technologies,

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