• Power Systems Division Eyes Cognos Deal; Business Systems Shrugs

  November 26, 2007 Dan Burger

  For the typical System i shop, the ramifications of IBM‘s acquisition of business intelligence software provider Cognos two weeks ago will have less effect than tossing a cup of water in the ocean. Not now, not next month, or next year. That’s not because there is little or no interest in business intelligence among the users of i5/OS and OS/400. Business intelligence, regardless of how you define it, is a factor in the IT planning within many System i-centric companies–the bigger the company, the bigger the BI factor. It’s pretty safe to say that the IBM-Cognos deal will only

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• As I See It: The Sick Guys in Your Wallet

  November 26, 2007 Victor Rozek

  If you’ve been employed for the past six years, without being officially notified you have been given a 30 percent pay cut. That’s what happens when the dollar drops by nearly one-third of its value. What also happens is that your $300,000 home loses $90,000 of its value; your savings are worth 30 percent less, and your groceries cost 30 percent more. As any driver knows, the price of a barrel of oil is over five times what it was just six years ago. One sure sign that the guys pictured on our currency are in poor health is how

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• Reader Feedback on Native .NET for System i

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I solicited some information from readers of The Four Hundred to see if having some sort of native .NET programming environment on the System i machine would be a benefit to the System i platform. A number of vendors were pondering the idea, so I threw it out to the base to see not only if this was important, but if the lack of .NET support was in any way driving people off the i5/OS and OS/400 platform and onto Windows. Here’s a sampling of the responses IT Jungle received, starting with a question: I am having a

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• IBM Slashes Linux SupportLine Prices for System i and p

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the key differentiators that IBM has always brought to bear on the midrange is well-regarded technical support for operating systems and related systems software. OS/400 and AIX have always had top-notch tech support–at least compared to their peers on other platforms. The advent of Linux, which is not controlled by Big Blue, presented a bit of a challenge to the company. But IBM has woven Linux into its SupportLine tech support services on its System i and System p Power-based platforms. Last week, the company dramatically reduced the cost of Linux support. For several years now, IBM has

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• Is There an NSA Back Door in Encryption Algorithms?

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In general, security is not a beat we cover very deeply at IT Jungle. The enterprise-class platforms we cover are all designed with many different kinds of security, and we let experts worry about the very hairy details that go into securing platforms, much as end users themselves do when they trust encryption, antivirus, firewall, and other kinds of code. But what happens when the encryption code behind these products is flawed. A recent story in Wired magazine had a title that jumped out like a criminal wielding a gun: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?

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• Top Execs at TomorrowNow Depart, SAP Hints at Sale

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ERP software giant SAP said last week that several top executives at its TomorrowNow unit, which sells third-party support for various Oracle ERP suites, have resigned. The company also said in a statement that it was exploring its options for the TomorrowNow unit, including selling it. TomorrowNow offers independent support for customers using PeopleSoft, JDE, and Siebel software suites. No software company is happy when a third party is offering support for its products, but Oracle was obviously unhappy when SAP acquired TomorrowNow in January 2005. SAP did not explain in its statement the reasons why Andrew Nelson, TomorrowNow’s chief

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• BluePhoenix Raises a $35 Million War Chest

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  BluePhoenix Solutions, the Herzliya, Israel, software company that provides legacy application modernization tools for the System i midrange and System z mainframe platforms, said last week that it is raising a $35 million war chest. Specifically, BluePhoenix says it is selling 2 million shares at $17.50 a pop in a private placement, which is a different way of raising money than from a public offering. BluePhonix is already a public company, of course, and is traded on the NASDAQ National Market. But of the 17.97 million shares the company has controlling its ownership, only 6.3 million of them are

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• Lawson and IBM Target Retailers and Manufacturers in Germany

  November 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ERP software supplier Lawson Software has a much tighter relationship with IBM these days after it acquired European ERP software supplier Intentia International and after Oracle ate PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel Systems. IBM’s latest thing in the midrange is precision customer targeting, and Lawson is, like other independent software vendors, trying to dance to the tune that Big Blue is calling. In February, IBM and Lawson inked a general deal to sell more software and server iron to SMB customers across the world, and then following in the spirit of IBM’s Vertical Industry Program (VIP) for System i sales,

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• Be My Guest

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like most people who have been following the server racket for a long time, I have been singing the praises of server virtualization as a means to make servers more efficient and thereby help companies not only get more for their money, but hopefully–if not now, then in future years–to actually save some money that they can spend on other things. While virtualization is a great advancement in server technology, it is breaking down a lot of barriers even as it erects virtual ones inside servers of all stripes and sizes. For one thing, the barriers between platforms are eroding

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• Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top For every generation of AS/400, iSeries, or System i servers and the related OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems, there is a person who, more than anyone else, is associated with the technology that IBM delivers. This person has historically been in charge of steering the development of the hardware and software for the product line and managing the operations of the factories that made the AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers and the supply chains that fed them. This is a big job, and for my money, a much tougher job

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