• As I See It: Shocking

  September 24, 2007 Victor Rozek

  This is a story about accidental discovery, inspired breakthroughs, resentful rivalry, and the execution of an elephant. It is also a story about what is arguably the prime driver of modern civilization and the life-force of computing. As with many significant achievements of western culture, it began in ancient Greece some 2,600 years ago. The details are a bit fuzzy. It may have started with a shepherd polishing a piece of amber with a woolen cloth, or a scholar experimenting with “invisible fields of attraction.” Regardless, someone was vigorously rubbing a chunk of amber with a patch of wool and

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• IBM Is Looking for Some Help on the V6R1 Rollout

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Intrepid readers of The Four Hundred fired off a series of emails to me last Monday, letting me know that IBM had just posted the details on a new Redpaper Residency program in Rochester, Minnesota. If you want to get the inside scoop on the upcoming announcements and you don’t mind helping put together the documentation for the announcements, then Big Blue Wants You! You can see all the details about the residency program here. IBM is only requiring that the techies who join the residency have average System i skills; you don’t have to work in the labs

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• IBM Cuts User Prices on User-Based CBU Editions

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There hasn’t been a lot of announcement activity from IBM in recent weeks on the System i front, but I did want to alert you to the fact that the company did trim two prices on user-based software access on its new Capacity BackUp (CBU) editions. Specifically, IBM cut prices on user activations for 10 users on i5/OS on the CBU based on the i5 525 from $2,000 to $1,000; this is i5/OS (5722-SSC for user-based licensing, feature code 1602). IBM also cut the price to convert a base user-priced i5 525 CBU to an unlimited number of users in

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• Security Attacks and Breaches on the Rise

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two reports by organizations that track attacks on corporate networks released last week will probably not make network and security administrators sleep any better. But, given all of the malware, worms, and other nasty stuff out there in the electronic world, they probably were going to sleep with one eye open and one hand on the BlackBerry anyway. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) recently commissioned a survey of IT organizations to try to find out how severe the security breaches they are seeing in their systems are. The severity level is on the rise, according to those companies survey.

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• Oracle Sales Go Boom in Its First Fiscal Quarter

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Software maker Oracle‘s application acquisition strategy and recent upgrade cycle for its middleware and database is clearly paying off. In its first quarter of fiscal 2008 ended August 31, Oracle reported that its sales rose by 26 percent to $4.5 billion, besting the estimates that it had encouraged Wall Street to set earlier this summer. Net income rose in lockstep, by 25 percent, giving Oracle $840 million that fell to the bottom line. Oracle’s total software sales were up 26 percent in the quarter, to $3.5 billion, with new software license sales rising even faster, up 35 percent to

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• Onstor Survey Confirms Data Centers Running Out of Juice and Space

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT vendors try to make money off trends, just like the rest of us. Power and cooling issues are big deals in data centers these days, so it comes as no surprise that vendors of all manner of IT gear are trying to figure out how to capitalize on concern over power use in general and specifically at data centers that are running out of power and cooling as they expand their infrastructure faster than they can get power into existing or new data centers. Clustered network storage vendor ONStor recently commissioned a survey of IT decision makers to get

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• A Little Application Humor, Thanks to Lawson Software

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If Number Two always has to try harder, as car rental company Avis used to say in its commercials, then imagine how hard you have to try when you are number six behind SAP, Oracle, Infor, Sage Group, and Microsoft. Even if you don’t count Sage and Microsoft as providers of enterprise-class applications, Lawson Software is still up against some pretty tough competition. Which is why, perhaps, the company–or someone who has invested money in Lawson stock–has put out a stealth marketing video on YouTube, which you can see here, describing how three companies–Elcaro,

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• SAP Plants Its Flag in Mid-Market Territory with SaaS Apps

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software giant SAP certainly is not the first company to bring hosted applications to market on a subscription basis to the midrange market, but the German company’s top executives made it clear at the launch in New York last week of the forthcoming “A1S” product line, officially called Business ByDesign, that SAP intended to dominate the mid-market much as it currently does for applications aimed at the largest enterprises in the world. The stakes are high, and SAP took great pains to explain why it has moved slowly and deliberately as it chases the mid-market with a software as

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• A1S Is to Applications What AS/400 Was to Systems

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Product demonstrations by IT vendors during product launches are by necessity short, sweet, and convincing to whatever point that the vendor is trying to make. Provided there is not a system or software crash, of course. Instead of going to Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week, which I would normally do, I decided to sit tight in New York and attend the launch of SAP‘s project “A1S” software suite, the company’s first Web-based, online, full application suite for midrange businesses. I know that I only saw as much of the A1S product, which will be sold under

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• EGL: At Least It’s Not Java, But It Ain’t RPG, Either

  September 24, 2007 Brian Kelly

  As soon as I read the article, EGL: The Future of Programming for the System i?, from last week, I knew there is nothing I can do but complain. I am upset–very upset, in fact–that I have to use PHP and the other stuff that is used on other platforms in order to get my System i shops to the Web. It did not have to be this way. From years of observation, I know that IBM is very stubborn, often arrogant. And when IBM digs in, it is usually incorrect. In choosing to create a new language for

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