• IBM Focusing on i5 Account Sales, Not i5 Sales

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mark Shearer, the general manager of IBM‘s System i server division, gave the keynote address at the annual COMMON OS/400 and i5/OS user group meeting, which was hosted in Anaheim, California, last week. The fact that he attended his fifth COMMON event since taking over the division in January 2005–COMMON used to be held twice a year until 2007–and is architecting a stabilization of and maybe someday a recovery in System i5 sales have both been reassuring the OS/400 and i5/OS faithful. The AS/400, iSeries, and i5 line has seen some pretty big revenue declines and a revolving door

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• Dr. Frank Soltis at COMMON: A Show Worth Watching

  May 7, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Going to see Dr. Frank Soltis is a rite of passage for System i devotees. Like nobody else in IBM‘s System i division, the chief scientist embodies the dual spirits of intelligence and independence that the Rochester, Minnesota, organization is known for. Last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California, Soltis wowed the crowd again with his tales of past technological daring, his ill-conceived marketing plans, and promises of IT riches to come. Soltis seemed cautiously upbeat as he opened his well-attended “Vision for System i” session in a room at the Anaheim Marriott, which is adjacent to

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• i5/OS Curriculum Contingent on Job Prospects, Business Community

  May 7, 2007 Dan Burger

  The experience of learning and the experience of being educated are not the same thing. That’s why the IBM System i Academic Initiative is focused on bringing the business community into the program that is designed to fortify the ranks of college graduates with skills that will pay off for the users of System i. When the initiative got under way, the goal was reaching 20,000 students with a System i-related curriculum. That objective has been reached. Now, IBM wants to shift to building collaboration between students, colleges, and employers. “We are reorienting our initiative,” says Elaine Lennox, vice president

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• As I See It: Education–the Other Dysfunction

  May 7, 2007 Victor Rozek

  “For the cost of 15 B-2 bombers, we can give three million teachers real incentives to raise student achievement and stay in the classroom.” Now hold on. Before our more hawkish readers get their knickers in a bunch and accuse me of a commie liberal, weak on defense, America hating bias, it wasn’t Jane Fonda who made that observation, it was Louis Gerstner. Remember him? Former chairman, chief executive officer, and savior of IBM; the second coming of The Iacocca. On the surface, it was an odd thing for Gerstner to say seeing as how he now peddles more

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• System i Innovation Rewarded by IBM and COMMON

  May 7, 2007 Dan Burger

  Great ideas can be analyzed, concepts modified, directions re-thought, and pieces re-bought. You can refuse to change a thing or throw out nearly everything. But in the end, if your business is IT hardware, software, or services and you haven’t created something truly useful, you might as well wipe the slate clean and start over. Incremental improvements to existing products and services are undoubtedly beneficial. You can’t find fault with more performance and fewer bugs, but when in search of the most notable additions to the IT landscape, the aim is a bit higher. We look at categories like innovation,

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• New i5s Added to IBM’s Express Advantage Deal

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While most of the midrange was focused on what was happening at the COMMON i5/OS and OS/400 user group meeting last week, IBM was also hosting its annual PartnerWorld business partner event, which was in St Louis this time around. At that show, IBM announced that the new user-priced i5 515 and 525 servers have been added to its Express Advantage marketing program. The Express Advantage program was created for North American resellers and business partners last year, and was expanded to 23 additional countries last week. Express Advantage is how IBM takes on the small and medium business market,

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• A Post-Mortem on a Peppier COMMON and an APB for a Black Ford Mustang with a Big Dent

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thanks to grand jury duty last fall, I missed the COMMON conference in Miami Beach, Florida, last September. So my recollection of how last week’s COMMON event in Anaheim, California, turned out is based against my recollection of the spring 2006 event in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a year ago. If I had to guess–and I have to since no one at COMMON has given out the official numbers yet–there were probably 1,500 or so attendees at the show in Anaheim last week. If this turns out to be the case, it would represent a slight increase over attendance at the Minneapolis

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• IBM Grows Chips Like Snowflakes Using Natural Processes

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the dreams of the nanotechnology revolution is to harness natural forces and processes to create self-manufacturing products. (This is also, as it turns out, one of the nightmares that people have about nanotechnology.) Last week, IBM said that it has figured out a way to create a chip made from vacuum-insulated nanowires, and had manufactured the chip using processes nicked from Nature. The process that IBM has created for the Airgap Microprocessor emulates the same self-assembling processes that are used to create seashells, the enamel layer on our teeth, and snowflakes, according to Big Blue. As is typical

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• SOA Will Be Used in Half of the Enterprise Applications Created in 2007

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to research and analysis done by Gartner, the services oriented architecture (SOA) technique for creating composite enterprise applications is going to be all–well, to be more precise, more than half–the rage. By Gartner’s reckoning, more than half of the new mission-critical “operational applications and business processes” that companies create in 2007 will be created using SOA techniques. And looking further out, Gartner believes that by 2010, more than 80 percent of these applications and processes created that year will use SOA techniques. But don’t think the transition to SOA is necessarily going to be a smooth one, even

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• BCD Bringing PHP Generation to WebSmart IDE

  May 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  System i development tool provider Business Computer Design Int’l this week unveiled plans to add PHP to its WebSmart integrated development environment (IDE). With WebSmart PHP, which is scheduled to go to beta in June, System i developers will be able to develop Web-based PHP applications that will run natively on i5/OS and DB2/400, in addition to other operating systems and databases. The PHP scripting language is making strong headway as a Web development language on the System i. Since IBM announced its partnership with Zend Technologies last year and brought Zend Core for i5/OS to market, System i shops

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