• Deconstructing and Rebuilding IBM’s Q4 Server Sales

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it seems that I am not the only one who plays around with the limited amount of information that IBM gives to Wall Street analysts. As I said last week, when I tore apart IBM’s numbers from the fourth quarter and then tried to put them together as revenue streams, not percent changes, this game is more fun when lots of people play. Maybe we can use Newton’s Method of Approximation across a large group of people making estimates as a means of getting to the truth. (The wisdom of crowds, after all, can guess the number

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• Avnet Hit By Economic Downturn in Fiscal Q2

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As one of the two master resellers of IBM‘s Power Systems machinery in the world, the rise and fall of sales and profits of Avnet provide some insight on what is going on out there in the midrange channel. But because Avnet is such a large company with a diverse product set, you have to dig for clues. In its second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended in December, Avnet’s sales fell by 10.2 percent, to $4.27 billion; currency effects accounted for 3.8 percent of that decline, as the strengthening dollar made sales overseas balloon by less than they have

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• SAP Launches Business Suite 7, Reports 2008 Financials, and Cuts Jobs

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software giant SAP has had a busy time of late. Last week, the German company, which is the largest seller of application software on the planet, announced that it had upgraded its flagship ERP suite, Business Suite, to a brand, spanking new version 7. The company also braced Wall Street for some bad financial news a few days earlier and announced the ubiquitous layoffs that are hitting the IT industry as the economic meltdown works its way into the data centers of the world. The upgrade to Business Suite 7, which sports what SAP calls a new modular design

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• Demand for BI is High Says, HiT Software

  February 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  Making better business decisions is the goal. Building better business intelligence into information systems is the means to reach that goal. According to surveys by respected analyst firms such as Gartner, BI ranks at the top of most companies’ priority lists. Apparently that’s true in AS/400 shops as well. Last week, a press release from HiT Software noted a one-year, 400 percent increase in the number of product evaluations for its software that supports projects related to business intelligence, data warehouses, data marts, database synchronization, and database migration efforts. HiT’s accounting of a notable spurt in database integration was

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• IBM Cuts Price of BladeCenter S SAS Module in Half

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you haven’t gotten the message, small and medium businesses, IBM really wants you to use its entry BladeCenter S chassis as your entire data center and stop buying rack and tower servers and other gear. Now that the BladeCenter S has disk expansion thanks to a new SAS module, this is possible. But it is still pricey. And so, IBM has announced a special promotion, available for customers who buy directly from Big Blue’s online store, a 50 percent discount off the BladeCenter S SAS RAID controller module. The discount went live on February 3, and will be

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• Hogging the Ground Day

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might seem a bit illogical to do any planning for the future on the mood of a giant rodent living in a small rural town on the west end of Pennsylvania, but given the experience I have had trusting the whiz kids from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, I am beginning to think that maybe it would be a good idea for Punxsutawney Phil to be sitting in on boardroom meetings at the major financial services firms and perhaps attending Congress as a representative. He might even be able to run a division or two at IBM, now that

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• IBM Sunsets i5/OS V5R4, Kills Older 595 Iron

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time moves on, as it always does. And that means that IBM wants to start cutting older products in the Power Systems i product line as it peddles the current products and puts the finishing touches on whatever future products we can expect to be rolled out later in 2009 and maybe in early 2010. Last week, IBM warned customers that it was sunsetting i5/OS V5R4 and at the same time killed off some iSeries older iron. As it turns out, i5/OS V5R4 will be withdrawn from marketing on January 5, 2010. That release of the AS/400-style operating system was

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• MaxAva Gets Inventive With Subscription Model for HA

  February 2, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Maximum Availability will today roll out a new program that lets customers subscribe to *noMAX, its i OS high availability software, instead of buying it outright. By allowing customers to pay for their software on a monthly basis instead of shelling out $20,000 or more in upfront software license fees, MaxAva is helping customers fly under the radar of the budget director, while perhaps boosting its business in a tough economy. MaxAva also made a couple of new features available to *noMAX customers. The IT industry has been moving toward a subscription model for some time. The rise of on-demand

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• IBM Rejiggers Power Systems, System i and p Prices

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a tough economic environment out there, and with IBM trying to scare up a little midrange business, sometimes that means making more deals and sometimes that means raising prices so the deals you have give you a little more dough. As is usually the case, you have to have a lot of time on your hands to figure out exactly what IBM has changed prices on, and luckily for you, I did the work for you. IBM’s price change announcement letters remind me of an old joke I heard when I first started out as a cub reporter

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• Deconstructing and Rebuilding IBM’s Q4 Server Sales

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Yes, ladies and gentleman of the midrange and elsewhere in Server Land (because we know you are reading this), it is that time again in the quarter when we play the game called Guess What Big Blue Servers Sold, How Much, and When. Get out your stack of quarterly reports from IBM, your thinking cap, your fuzzy dice, and your spreadsheet program of choice, and let’s see if you can come up with better numbers than I did. As this newsletter reported last week, IBM’s worldwide sales in the fourth quarter declined by 6.4 percent to just

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