• Help/Systems Celebrates 25th Birthday

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  The AS/400 isn’t the only entity in the midrange celebrating a birthday these days. Help/Systems, the systems management tool vendor headquartered up in the North Star State, recently celebrated its 25th birthday. Janet Dryer, CEO of Help/Systems, attributes the company’s success to several factors. “First and foremost, a business must have customers,” she says in an e-mail announcement. “Our customers are a loyal bunch. Some of them have been with us since the System/38 days. And, the word of mouth of a happy customer is wonderful thing. Our customers are great evangelists for operations automation and business intelligence. “What

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• Xangati Detects Application, Network Problems with New Appliances

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A new company called Xangati this week launched its first product: a rapid problem identification (RPI) appliance designed to pinpoint the sources of application and network performance problems, so administrators can fix them before they affect worker productivity. Getting a good jump on application performance problems can make the difference between a fruitful interaction with the help desk and the beginning of a trouble-ticket nightmare. According to industry analysts at the Yankee Group, about 90 percent of the time spent troubleshooting network problems is used to identify and locate the sources of problems, completely dwarfing the time it takes

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• IBM Kills Off System i ServerProven, Standard Edition Rebates

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long-running rebate program that the System i division has sponsored to give customers who buy OS/400 and i5/OS servers plus systems and application software created by independent software vendors and certified through IBM‘s ServerProven program has been canceled. IBM made the announcement last week. IBM also killed off another rebate program for customers buying certain System i machines running i5/OS Standard Edition. The last time that these two deals were tweaked was back on January 30, when the ServerProven rebate program was modified to allow governments, not just commercial institutions, to get rebates. At the time, the

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• VoIP and the Search for Single Points of Failure

  June 25, 2007 Dan Burger

  At its most basic level, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is about moving verbal communications from phone lines to the Internet. In an article last week, Terry Boulais, the director of business development at Key Information Systems, began our introduction to VoIP by explaining its benefits and providing an overview of the technology that could usher a new era of application integration that takes advantage of corporate data and communication efficiencies. At Key Information Systems, Boulais is intimately involved in helping organizations deploy VoIP. His focus begins with network infrastructure, yet is closely tied to business planning, and

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• As I See It: Dare to Be Rich

  June 25, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Let me preface this by saying that what I’m suggesting may be illegal. Which is not to say that there aren’t a lot of wealthy people and corporations doing it. It’s called sheltering income and those who shelter theirs do so because they can; and they can because wealth provides them with a level of immunity from the laws they find restrictive-an exemption not generally available to toi and moi. So if you want to join the chorus singing Gimme Shelter, it may be necessary to adopt the same swagger and contempt for equity exhibited by the ruling

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• The CIO Is the Hammer, and Everything IT Vendors See Are Nails

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are the formerly largest supplier of IT products in the world–and definitely the dominant data center player if you don’t count Hewlett-Packard‘s printer business as IT–as IBM is, you have to use your access to the boardroom as well as to the data center to your advantage. And that means doing lots of surveys and studies to try to prove that IBM knows a thing or two about business and how chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers should work together to make their businesses run better and deliver more revenues and profits. Apropos

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• IBM Offers Virtualization-Friendly Pricing for RHEL 5 on Power

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its announcement that it was beginning to ship the Power variant of Red Hat‘s new Enterprise Linux 5 server operating system, IBM last week said that it was going to offer customers using Power-based machines a per-server license rather than the per-core pricing that IBM has used in the past to peddle RHEL 4 and earlier Red Hat Linuxes. The per-server price for RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 is meant to make it easier for IBM’s customers to cope with licensing in an increasingly virtualized environment. The licensing that the company announced last week applies to

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• IBM Previews Virtualization Management Tool for Power-Based Boxes

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the use of virtual machine and logical partition hypervisors becomes more common at the data centers of the world, the hypervisors themselves are rapidly becoming commodities. They are not, as you can tell from the prices that you have to pay for IBM‘s Virtualization Engine or VMware‘s ESX Server, quite yet commodities, and are certainly not free, but it is clear to just about everyone in the industry that over the long haul, the software that gets layered onto such hypervisors is going to be where money is made and where vendors are going to try to

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• Database Sales Grew By 14.2 Percent in 2006, Says Gartner

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The annual stats for the relational database market have come out from Gartner, and despite the advance of inexpensive and often open source databases that have modest support license fees, sales worldwide for databases grew by 14 percent in 2006, hitting $15.2 billion in sales. By relational database management system, Gartner is restricting its comparison universe to those databases that have SQL front ends, which means sales of flat-file databases (such as those that are popular on mainframes) are not included in the mix. As has been the case for many years, Oracle held its dominant position in the

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• Lawson Expects Better Results for Fiscal Q4 Than Anticipated

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are two times when public companies talk out of turn with Wall Street: when things are going unexpectedly wrong, and when things are going unexpectedly right. ERP software giant and midrange player Lawson Software has sent out a note to Wall Street and to its investors to let them know that its fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31 went better than expected. Lawson will report its final financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 on July 26, but wanted to let everyone know that sales are looking up. In the third quarter, Lawson went into the red,

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