• Does Your IBM i OS Matter? I Think So

  February 6, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we search far and wide and look high and low for things that matter to your Power Systems-IBM i shop. We may wander off on a tangent or two here and there as we think about the IT market (especially in the As I See It and Mad Dog 21/21 columns, which have this wandering as their purpose), but we take pride in the fact that we always bring it on home. I don’t mean to pick. Really I don’t. But it really bothers me when IBM completely forgets about the IBM i operating

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• Big Blue’s Software Gurus Rethink Systems

  January 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 Division and its affiliated Rochester Lab and manufacturing facility has brought some of the key innovations in systems to market ever created by IBM–dense DRAM, magnetoresistive disk heads and dense disk drives, 64-bit PowerPC processor, relational database technology, server virtualization hypervisors, the list goes on–and that made Big Blue a player in the systems market when they were on the cutting edge and that still make it a player today. But the reality of the situation is that Rochester is no longer a center of gravity for systems in the way it was in the past. The

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• IBM Throws The Books At Big Power7 Shops

  January 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are shopping for a big bad box to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux–or a combination of the three–then Big Blue has a deal for you on its enterprise-class Power 770, 780, and 795 servers. The deal that IBM offered to customers of System p5 590, System p5 595 machines in October 2007 and then in March 2010 on the Power 595 in the wake of the initial Power7-based servers, which came out a month earlier. In announcement letter 312-011, Big Blue has rolled out the Power Systems 2 For 1 Power 7 Processor Book promotion. If

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• Fiserv Alleges FIS Infringed On Patents For Online Payment Software

  January 30, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Fiserv this month filed a lawsuit in federal court against rival IBM i banking software provider Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and its Metavante subsidiary over alleged violation of its patents relating to online payments. The alleged violations involve patents held by Fiserv’s subsidiaries, CheckFree and CashEdge, that describe online financial activities, such as conducting account-to-account transfers, creating electronic transaction “pick lists,” and making payments on behalf of others. Fiserv made a big investment in electronic bill and presentment technology in 2007 when it spent $4.4 billion to buy CheckFree, which at the time processed more than 75 percent of

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Angry Hurd

  January 30, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  Oracle sure has headaches. It is not selling enough software to please investors. It isn’t making its numbers in hardware, either. It is governed by a two-headed executive reporting to CEO Larry Ellison. One of the presidents, Mark Hurd, is trying to get beyond the airing of a lawyer’s demand letter that turned his private folly into public obloquy. As a result, loyal Larry Ellison is saddled with his distracting, maladroit prince when he sorely needs to be fully focused, playing at the top of his game. All this unfolded in late December, beginning on the 20th when, after the

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• Anyone For LPAR?

  January 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  Among the IBM i user base, you often hear about the great technology being used by the customers at the enterprise end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, in the small to midsize shops, you hear complaints that the technology is too complex. The functionality could be put to use, but the complexity is prohibitive. Logical partitioning, or LPAR in the IBM mainframe and now Power Systems lingo, is one of the technologies that fits that description. You’ll find LPARs being used in just about every large enterprise that depends on the IBM i for core business applications. When you explore the

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• Reader Feedback On IBM’s Move On Up To Power7 Upgrade Math

  January 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, TPM: Best wishes for 2012! In the table in your story, IBM’s Move On Up To Power7 Upgrade Math, taking into account the last supported release that can could run on that model, can you update this with input from this link from IBM: http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/i/planning/upgrade/osmapping.html Nobody in their right mind will pay software maintenance for machines that cannot run a release that is supported. For example, the iSeries 170 and 250 machines can run V5R3 at the latest, and there is no point (apart from sympathy for IBM, ha!) to pay software support if the right for

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• IT Budgets To Crunch This Year In North America And Europe

  January 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were expecting for IT spending to go up this year and for new projects to get going and perhaps get a pay raise, the consensus is building that this is not going to happen. That’s the bad news. The good news would seem to be that instead of being asked to do more with less, IT shops will be asked to do a lot more with a tiny bit more dough. But it’s not that simple, so don’t jump to conclusions. IT market researcher Gartner spends a lot of time with CIOs to try to help them figure

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• Take One Tablet And Call Your IT Manager In The Morning

  January 30, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  The explosion of tablets is enough to give even the most savvy IT managers a splitting headache. Almost everyone would agree tablets are cool, and those lucky enough to own one can’t say enough good things about them, but the introduction of tablets into the workplace raises legitimate concerns about security and application access. Cisco Systems recently commissioned a global survey of IT managers and executives in a wide variety of global companies of all sectors and sizes to assess attitudes, fears, and hopes for tablets in the workplace. All 1,500 of the respondents were either primary IT decision makers

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• SAP Stamps Its Mark On 2011

  January 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  When you’re the world’s largest business applications vendor, your financial report card stands as a bellwether for the IT industry. Of course, economic uncertainty adds to the drama and brings an even larger crowd to the stage. Last week, SAP delivered a powerful performance by announcing it beat all expectations for not only the final quarter of 2011, but for the entire year as well. SAP may not be the largest IBM i software provider in terms of customer base or revenue stream, but there are several thousand customers, and some of the largest IBM i shops in the world,

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