• Steel and Lace: Lawson Upgrades M3 for Equipment and Fashion Industries

  December 1, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Lawson Software last month rolled out separate updates to its i OS-based M3 ERP suite that pertain to its customers in the equipment and rental industry and the clothing industry. A new release of Lawson for Equipment Service Management & Rental (ESM&R) brings configuration enhancements that should speed deployments, while a standardized interface between M3 and Lawson’s product lifecycle management (PLM) software for the fashion industry should boost supply chain efficiency. Lawson rolled out the ESM&R version of the M3 ERP suite a year ago to help companies in this field automate industry-specific processes pertaining to sales, claims and warranty

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• Equipment Dealer Lauds Attunity for Speedy DB2/400 Replication

  December 1, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Atlantic Detroit Diesel Allison (Atlantic DDA), a distributor of heavy equipment in the Northeast, has benefited from the use of Attunity data collection and replication software, which captures changes made to a DB2/400 database and forwards them to an Oracle-based system. According to the customer, revenues in the service department have doubled as the result of the improvements in application response times. From its headquarters outside of New York City, Atlantic DDA sells and services a full line of Detroit Diesel, Mercedes-Benz, and MTU engines, as well as Allison transmissions. The company operates eight locations, employs more than 200

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• First Option Goes SaaS with iSeries Watchdog

  December 1, 2009 Alex Woodie

  First Option, a System i outsourcer-turned-software developer, is now selling access to its iSeries Watchdog systems monitoring software as a service over the Internet. Version 2.0 of the product, which was recently announced, also brings several new i OS monitoring capabilities requested by customers. Massachusetts-based First Option debuted the iSeries Watchdog as a new business venture in spring 2008. The company, which makes most of its money by running System i and iSeries servers for its clients, decided to market and sell the entry-level server monitoring software it developed to monitor its customers’ environments. The first release of

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• IBM Slashes Power Systems Memory Prices

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue’s desire to kick Sun Microsystems when it is down in the Unix business as the Oracle acquisition and Sun’s failed “Rock” processor have left customers wondering about the platform, and to steal some accounts away from Hewlett-Packard where customers are perhaps are a bit annoyed by the delays in the “Tukwila” Itanium servers, is playing into the hands of Power Systems i shops, who some days seem to be an afterthought for IBM. Here’s the deal, and actually, what IBM is doing really is a deal. Last week, as noted in announcement letter 309-879, the company

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• A New Look for the COMMON Session Grid

  November 30, 2009 Dan Burger

  The session grid at the COMMON Annual Meeting is almost 100 percent filled as the organization’s biggest event of the year takes shape in light of financial belt tightening, a scaled back educational schedule, reduced compensation for volunteers (particularly speakers), and questions about how the user group should be defined. Ever since the convergence of IBM‘s traditional AS/400 and AIX hardware platforms into the Power Systems division, there have been debates about whether COMMON should remain all i. IBM makes no bones about its indifference to platform specific-ness. Religious wars on IT turf can never be won, Big Blue

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• SSD Performance: Be Careful Before You Buy

  November 30, 2009 Doug Mewmaw

  The other day I was at an office supply store picking up a flash drive for my wife. As a teacher, the inexpensive technology is just perfect for her storage needs. Did you chuckle when I said the technology was inexpensive? I remember when a flash drive cost over $50, and now they are practically giving them away. I purchased a 4 GB flash drive for less than $10! Does any remember what we paid for our first VCR? As a passionate golfer, I see this phenomenon in the golf club industry, too. At the beginning of the year, the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Fox in IBM’s Storage Henhouse

  November 30, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Moshe Yanai became successful by taking enterprise storage business away from IBM. He led the team that created the EMC Symmetrix, which became the leading storage product at IBM’s glass house accounts. EMC and Yanai parted ways in 2001 and after a decent interval Yanai founded a new storage venture, XIV (pronounced Ex Eye Vee). IBM acquired XIV at the start of 2008, naming Yanai an IBM Fellow. Yanai may be able to clobber EMC for IBM, but to succeed he will also have to kill off IBM’s flagship DS8000 array with his XIV boxes. The reason XIV

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• How Does 800,000 CPWs in a 2U Server Grab You?

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At the SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon, last week, I got a tour of the very first Power7-based server that IBM is talking publicly about. It is called the Power7 IH supercomputer node, and it is one of the 2,048 nodes in the “Blue Waters” massively parallel machine that Big Blue is building for the University of Illinois. There is not a lot of i5/OS angle to this machine, I will admit, but some of the nifty chip and networking technologies that IBM is deploying in Blue Waters can–and probably will–be deployed in commercial servers running AIX, Linux,

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• Reader Feedback on IBM Smart Business Moves into Italy

  November 30, 2009 Dan Burger

  If you want to get the juices flowing, just talk about how one might revive the Power Systems i platform. In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we did a story on how IBM was expanding its Smart Cube i appliance into Italy and growing its Smart Business application portfolio in the United States and India. (See this link for that story.) Here’s what one reader had to say: I quote: “When you look at what the application-centric approach did for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i, and you bring the attributes into the context of a solution,

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• IBM Pushes Smarter Mid-Market IT Projects with More Financing

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last year, IBM started offering enhanced financing deals to IT shops in the United States who would be bold and buy gear even though the global economy was on the skids so they could take advantage of an accelerated depreciation scheme set up by the Bush administration and extended by the Obama team. In June, the company said it was allocating $5 billion in funding to chase “smarter infrastructure” projects around the globe, which generally have an IT component. Now, IBM is aiming some financing deals at mid-market shops and expanding the financing it is offering to cover more regions

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