• Infor Opens Center of Excellence for System i Customers

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Infor, which has the largest installed base of customers using the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform among ERP players, has every intention of keeping them–and keeping them happy. To that end, the company will announce today that it is opening a System i center of excellence, which will bring all of the hardware and software expertise embodied in the many acquisitions that Infor has made over the past several years into one resource that customers can tap into. “Our customers rave about the reliability, convenience and low cost-of-ownership of their IBM System i platform and they want to

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• Is Egypt The Next Offshoring Giant?

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As one of the cradles of earlier generations of information technology based on hieroglyphs and papyrus and as the former center of the civilized world many thousands of years ago, Egypt might seem like a logical place for computing to have started. But it didn’t start there, because no civilization gets to ride at the top for long at historical timescales. However, if the analysts at Yankee Group are right, Egypt may get a second chance at being a center of technology. Last week, when the news was a bit slow, Yankee Group put out a reported entitled Is the

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• DataMirror’s Shows Continued Growth in the First Quarter

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  DataMirror chief executive officer Nigel Stokes said his company is continuing to build momentum based on technological advances relating to its flagship product Transformation Server/ES and a growing customer base in Europe. Stokes’ remarks came as DataMirror, a high availability and data integration software maker with a customer base that includes System i shops, announced its financial results for the quarter ended April 30. According to the report, revenue increased more than 22 percent during the company’s Q1 fiscal 2008, at $12.6 million. License revenue in the quarter was $5.65 million, a 60 percent jump from a year ago. Net

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• IBM’s Rumored System i Power6 Server Plans

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that the first Power6-based server has been launched by IBM–one bearing the System p 570 label and largely based on the existing design of the p5 570 using Power5+ processors–the OS/400 and i5/OS community is naturally beginning to wonder what IBM has in store for them when it comes to Power6 technology. Aside from talking very generally about processors over the past year, IBM has been pretty mum to the press about its plans–for obvious reasons. But IBM does talk to customers and its software development and reseller partners, and there is usually someone who likes to help

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• IBM Tries Online Discounts to Move Server, Storage Gear

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is always a tension between direct sales and indirect sales among IT vendors, and it is a difficult tightrope to walk. Not every acquisition by an IT manager should involve a lot of human interaction, particularly now that the Web is a decade old and people are well accustomed to buying stuff online. IBM had not often given customers big discounts on servers and other gear when bought through its online store or through its telesales operations–the two are actually linked as one these days–but under a deal announced last week, Big Blue is giving it a try. The

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• The Market for Servers in Europe Is Hot

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, the box counters at IDC and Gartner provided their quarterly estimates of global server sales by server type, operating system, and vendor. But IDC also went the extra mile and provided some insight into server sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In what must seem like something of a dream for server makers, Europe is going strong right now. According to IDC, sales of server across all architectures rose by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2007 to nearly $4.3 billion, and the number of server units sold increased by 8 percent to 600,000 machines.

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Missing Inaction

  June 4, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  IBM, which is neck-and-neck in the server trade with Hewlett-Packard, formerly made typewriters, disk drives, printers, and personal computers. Over the past two decades it shed many of the products it used to manufacture, by continued to grow by creating a huge services group and absorbing a number of software companies. Except for its typewriters, none of the products IBM dropped have disappeared, the way DB Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, or Judge Crater vanished. Today, IBM still manufactures some servers and storage devices, and perhaps it doesn’t have to manufacture anything at all. IBM acts as if

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• TMW Systems Acquires Fleet Management Software Rival TMT Software

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  TMW Systems, which has a set of truck dispatch and fleet management software for i5/OS and Windows platforms, has continued on its acquisition strategy. Last fall, TMW Systems bought one of its rivals, Maddocks Systems, and last week the company bought another rival, TMT Software. TMW Systems was quietly acquired by two private equity firms, Wachovia Capital Partners and Peppertree Capital Management, back in September 2005, and this is where the company is getting its capital to make acquisitions. Wachovia Capital Partners is the equity investment arm of Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in America, and Peppertree is a

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• Top Tech Firms Score Big in AMR Supply Chain Rankings

  June 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We at IT Jungle often write about the vendors of supply chain management software, the way that SCM has been integrated into ERP systems over the past decade, and how SCM has been a major driver of IT sales–servers, storage, software, services, and networking gear–in the past decade. But it is a rare moment when you can try to ascertain how well the suppliers of a technology are at using the technologies themselves. But AMR Research has put together a new Top 25 list, ranking the supply chains of manufacturers, giving us some insight. Tech companies are not prominent on

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• VAI-VeriFone Partnership to Deliver Retail Application Integration

  June 4, 2007 Dan Burger

  If you are keeping an eye on electronic payment technology for retailers, the recent partnership between VAI and VeriFone has resulted in the integration of payment transaction middleware and point of sale (POS) software that leaves the best products of only a few years ago in the dust. Officials at VAI, formerly known as Vormittag Associates, describe the partnership as “part of a larger strategic effort by VAI to increase the firm’s global reach to customers in the retail market.” In the retail marketplace, VAI’s leading product is S2K for Retail. It provides POS, accounting, inventory management, customer relationship management,

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