• Bunn-O-Matic Brews Up Intuitive BI with WebFOCUS

  November 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Bunn-O-Matic knows a lot about brewing coffee. The Springfield, Illinois, company has been in the coffee maker manufacturing business for more than 50 years, with both commercial and consumer lines. But when it came to building, running, and distributing reports from business applications, Bunn-O-Matic’s employees would typically find an IT expert to help them. That has changed as the result of a recent implementation of software from Information Builders. Because Bunn-O-Matic relies on an AS/400-based ERP system and a SQL Server-based system to run its service center, it has experienced difficulty in getting the two systems to talk to

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• Carpet Maker Finds a Comfy Spot with S2K 5.0

  November 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  VAI last week announced another longtime customer, carpet manufacturer Syntec Industries, has gone live with S2K 5.0, the newest release of the vendor’s RPG-based ERP application. Syntec expects the software to help improve its year-end processing, while managing its seven warehouses. Based in Rome, Georgia, Syntec Industries makes carpets that serve a variety of needs, including marine, recreational vehicle (RV), and general housing. In addition to carpeting, Syntec sells trims, vinyl, leathers, suede, fabrics, logo mats, and adhesives. Syntec first installed S2K more than 10 years ago, and the i5/OS-based software has served the company well, says Joann Marvin, a

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• A Chat with Ross Mauri, Power Systems GM

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of IBM‘s Dynamic Infrastructure announcement blast on October 20 that we told you about in last week’s issues of The Four Hundred and Four Hundred Stuff, and which we continue to chew through in this week’s newsletter, Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division, put out a short statement on the IBM i site that encapsulated the upcoming i 7.1 release and the future Power7-based servers. It is something of an annual ritual for the general manager to re-up the commitment for the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i platform. Since the

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• IBM Slashes Prices on Power Core Activations

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The U.S. economy may look like it is coming out of the Great Recession, at least according to the economists who work for Uncle Sam, who said last Thursday that gross domestic product in the States rose by a 3.5 annualized rate in the third quarter. That is better than the 2.7, 5.4, 6.4, and 0.70 percent declines that mark the trough of the Great Recession in the prior four quarters, for sure. But very few people–including economists and server makers–think the recession is really over. And hence, they wheel and deal. Just like IBM is doing with the–inhale now–Power

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Can Mashups Save the Advanced Economies?

  November 2, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  IBM wants to be your mashup company. Of course, it helps if you know what IBM means by mashup. It also helps if you prefer to pay for development and testing services sold by Amazon. Try not to let the free starter services offered by Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Bing distract you. IBM might be onto something good. And if you have to pay a little extra, well, what’s new about that? But I’m getting ahead of the story. So, let’s start at the end. Mashup is the current term of endearment for a Web site that

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• Soltis Says iManifest Needed to Promote IBM i

  November 2, 2009 Dan Burger

  Who’s going to tell the story of what the IBM i can do? You can bet your database it’s not going to be IBM. Platform-specific marketing is not the game plan at Big Blue. If you want i-centricity, you better look someplace else. That’s brought us to iManifest, a plan in search of an organization, a structure, to help it fly. It’s already off the ground in Japan, and last week the fledgling efforts in the United States got wings with the addition of Frank Soltis to the board of directors. Soltis is just the kind of high-profile person who

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• IBM Bundles RAID into BladeCenter S i Edition, Adds Lots of Networking

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October 20 Dynamic Infrastructure announcements, IBM made a number of important changes to the BladeCenter blade servers, and many of these tweaks impact i shops that have or are planning to move to blade form factors. The first change is that the preconfigured i Edition for BladeCenter S now has a version that includes the RAID SAS switch module for local disk storage for the JS12 blade in the configuration. As with the prior i Edition, the i 6.1 operating system is preconfigured on a JS12 blade server. The original i Edition of the blade bundle,

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• Smart Cube Software Stacks for i, Linux Get Revved

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remember the Smart Cube appliances for small business? Whatever happened to those? IBM launched these Power and X64 server appliances with some (but not a lot of fanfare) in the United States this past May running the i 6.1 and SUSE Linux 10 SP2, and then we never really heard much about these appliances again. As part of the Dynamic Infrastructure announcement blitz on October 20, IBM updated the software stacks at the heart of these appliances. The most important update in the stack is that the Smart Business Software Pack for i V1.2.0, which runs on the Power version

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• Former Server GM Moffat Leaves IBM Under Scandal Clouds

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM told employees of its Systems and Technology Group in an internal memo last Friday that Bob Moffat, who has been linked to an insider trading scandal that erupted two weeks ago in New York, has left the company. Big Blue did not elaborate much on the situation, as has been the case since the insider trading scandal centered on two hedge funds–Galleon Group and New Castle Group–came to light on October 16. That Friday, Moffat, who was previously senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, was arrested by the FBI and charged by the

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• Big Blue Ponies Up $9.2 Billion for Share Buybacks

  November 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Penn State only being established in 1855, and there not being much ivy growing on the buildings and the scent of corn and cows all around, I wouldn’t exactly call myself old school. But I guess I am, since I most definitely believe that when companies buy back their shares to prop up their earning per share numbers, this is a load of cow hockey. Particularly when the money could be used for a lot of other things, such as paying better wages, building better products, or maybe doing a little marketing. IBM is at it again, moving huge

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