• Dick Bains, Another System/38 Father, Dies at 64

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A computer architecture is only as good as the compilers that are created to take advantage of that, and the long and storied career of Dick Baines, one of the three key fathers of IBM‘s System/38 minicomputer, the great-great granddaddy of the modern Power Systems i platform, demonstrates this well. Just after The Four Hundred went off press in December for the holidays, Bains passed away after suffering a heart attack while visiting his son on December 13. Bains, along with Frank Soltis, the just-retired System i architect and the face of the AS/400 for decades, and Roy Hoffman,

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• BlueZone Gives Financial Firms Big Discounts on Emulators

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the biggest financial services firms in America and sometimes Western Europe have been getting all of the headlines with their failures or acquisition by competitors in recent months, there is a far larger number of small banks and credit unions who are just as integral to the global economy and who are hurting as credit is tightening. Not surprisingly to anyone who has been around the IBM midrange for a few decades, a lot of these smaller financial institutions have used proprietary minis or Unix boxes to run their back office systems for decades. Big banks, brokerages, insurance companies,

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• CDSoft Buys ACT Group for Midrange Expertise

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consolidation is not just happening with IT in America, but in every country and market. Irish IT services company CDSoft has plunked down 1.5 million euros to buy its way into the IBM server maintenance business by acquiring fellow Irish company, ACT Group. ACT Group has 25 people and revenues in the range of 3 million euros, according to CDSoft. The group had two units before CDSoft bought it. Blue Chip Ireland is, according to the company, the largest independent maintainer of IBM x64 and Power servers, and it actually does it the old-fashioned way by providing on-site maintenance. ACT

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• VAI Joins IBM’s SaaS Cloud Services Initiative

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It used to be called application service providing, and the idea didn’t take off because telecom costs were too high, network bandwidth between PCs and remote Internet-connected services was too low, and there were cost and availability issues. Now, we are at the cusp between changing buzzwords. 2007’s software as a service, or SaaS, is starting to give way to 2008’s cloud services. Call it what you will, and despite some minor technical evolution, the story is nonetheless the same: using other people’s remote systems and software to give end users what feels like a local experience. If you are

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• Avnet Partners with Sanko for Turkish Expansion

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT master reseller Avnet is, like every other company on the planet, looking for new places to do business in this tricky global economy. That is one reason why the company’s Avnet Technology Solutions, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT products made by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others, has ponied up some cash to take a barely majority stake in an IT distributor in Turkey. Avnet has taken a 50.01 percent stake in Akora Technology and Industry Corporation, a reseller previously owned in full by Sanko Holding Group. Akora was founded in 2001, as the earlier IT recession

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