• System i Announcement Wrap Up

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know about you, but I got the distinct impression that the split up of the System i division, the launching of the Power6-based System i 570, and the preview of the upcoming i5/OS V6R1 operating system was a bit hurried two weeks ago. Which is a bit odd for a set of announcements that I would have said were better timed for late 2006, not spread out from the summer of 2007 through maybe spring 2008. You can never be sure what is going on inside Big Blue, but I would guess that the timing of yet another

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• IBM Upgrades System i Storage with SAS Drives

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ask and ye shall receive–well, at least some of what ye asked for, anyway. Only a month ago, I was ranting on behalf of the System i base that Serial Attached SCSI disk drives had gone mainstream and were offering other server customers performance and benefits that Ultra320 SCSI disks do not offer, including 2.5-inch form factors that consume a lot less energy. IBM may not be the first out the door with new disk technology, as it used to be in days gone by, but with July’s System i announcements, the company is at least starting to play catch

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• As I See It: Policeware

  August 6, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Is it just me or is the Federal Bureau of Investigation running out of clever names for its clever software? I mean, first we had Carnivore, which conjures up something toothy and predatory; then we had Magic Lantern, which evokes mystical, Harry Potteresque powers; and now we have CIPAV, which sounds like, well, like it was written by IBM. CIPAV is short for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier, and we might never have heard of it if it wasn’t for the foolish antics of Josh Glazebrook. Glazebrook was a troubled student at Timberline High School near Olympia, Washington.

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• EPA Says American Data Centers Can Cut Power Use Dramatically

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As instructed to do by the U.S. Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency has made its formal report to lawmakers regarding the energy consumption of servers, storage, and other gear at the data centers in America. The EPA has been instrumental in getting Americans to use energy-efficient appliances and in getting manufacturers to build them through its Energy Star program, and it is hoping to do the same in data centers. Back in December 2006, Congress passed a law and President Bush signed it requiring the EPA to report back to Congress within 180 days with an analysis the use of

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• IBM Takes Its Own Server Consolidation Medicine

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server maker IBM has been banging the drums about infrastructure simplification, server consolidation, and the economic benefits of the mainframe platform as a consolidation platform for so long that its arms must be tired. Someone in the hierarchy at Big Blue finally figured out that maybe the company should look at its own data centers and take a little of its own medicine. And having done that, IBM is about ready to collapse a whole bunch of RISC and X86 servers–most of them running Unix and none of them running Windows–down to a much smaller number of mainframes. As you

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• ‘What Gets Measured Gets Managed’ Applied to ERP

  August 6, 2007 Dan Burger

  You would expect companies that have major investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to have an advantage over companies that don’t. Well, you might not want to bet on that. Bigger is not always better and what you pay for something is not always an indicator of what it’s worth. “To achieve best-in-class performance, manufacturers must not let their maintenance dollars go to waste,” cautions Cindy Jutras, a vice president and group director of ERP research at Aberdeen Group. “While it may be acceptable to skip a release, or run one release behind the most currently available, do

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• Thoma Cressey Bravo Puts Another Iron in the Fire

  August 6, 2007 Dan Burger

  Thoma Cressey Bravo, the private equity firm that we’ve become familiar with since its acquisition of System i high availability vendors Vision Solutions, iTera, and Lakeview Technology, has acquired a majority stake in the enterprise content management (ECM) software firm, Hyland Software. TCB also has an equity investment in Sirius Computer Solutions, a large System i reseller. Hyland’s claim to fame is an ECM product called OnBase, which integrates with the majority of current server platforms. It has been designed for dedicated integration with products from tier-one application providers, such as suites from Lawson Software,

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• JDA’s Sales and Profits Boosted By Manugistics, Organic Growth

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After having gotten off to what it called a “flying start” in the first quarter, retail application specialist JDA Software has continued its momentum in the second quarter, driven by both organic growth in its JDA products and by the acquisition of supply chain software specialist Manugistics a little more than a year ago. For the second quarter ended June 30, JDA said that sales were up 75 percent to $90.8 million, and that software license sales were up 80 percent to $10.4 million. Manugistics accounted for $40.1 million in total sales and $6.9 million in software license sales in

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• BOS Boosts Sales in Q2, Bottom Line Hit by Note Conversion

  August 6, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange connectivity software and thin client business is doing better by Better Online Solutions. The Israeli company reported a substantial increase in sales in the second quarter ended June 30, and the company would have showed profit increases, too, if an investor had not cashed in convertible notes during the quarter, too. During the second quarter, BOS had total sales of $5.7 million, up 27.6 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. The company’s product sales backlog was $7.8 million as well, up 28 percent compared to the beginning of 2007 and foreshadowing what could be improving sales in

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• Mainframe Vendor BluePhoenix Ready to Purchase ASNA

  August 3, 2007 Dan Burger

  ASNA, one of the oldest of the System i independent software vendors, is very close to being purchased by BluePhoenix Solutions, a software and services vendor with a history in the mainframe market. The letter of intent covering the merger of the two companies was announced August 1 in a press release posted on the BluePhoenix Website, a day after the publicly held company reported its financial results for the second quarter. Officials at ASNA are not commenting on the pending deal until it has been finalized, which is expected to occur by August 15. ASNA, short for

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