• Recent Acquisitions Helping the BOS Cause

  June 9, 2008 Dan Burger

  Energized by the successful acquisitions of two companies specializing in RFID solutions Better Online Solutions (BOS) posted hefty increases in both revenue and sales during the first quarter of 2008. At the October 2007 announcement that his company was purchasing Summit Radio, Shmuel Koren, president and chief executive officer of BOS, called the acquisition “an important addition to BOS’ international activities, especially in the United States.” He wasn’t wrong. He went on to describe Summit’s business as “highly synergetic with the business of our supply chain division” and viewed it as a pathway to “expand supply-chain sales to major international

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• More Power Transitions Are on the Way

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The ink is not dry on the latest round of Power6-based Power Systems servers and IBM, its reseller and distributor partners, and soon its customers are already thinking about the next and final transitions coming to the converged Power Systems product line. Even though IBM has, for all practical purposes, merged the somewhat independent System i and System p server lines, they are still distinct in many ways. But apparently, according to my sources, that is going to change, once and for all, later this year. While many of us are happily unaware of many of the changes that

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• U.S. Drags Down Server Sales in Q1, But Weak Dollar Helps

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Depending on how you want to look at it, the United States both helped and hurt sales in the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics compiled by the box counters at IDC. The jittery economy in the United States has caused companies large and small to pull back on server spending, but at the same time the weak dollar compared to currencies in overseas markets that are experiencing decent growth in server sales as their economies build up and are amplifying the revenues as those sales are booked back in the States for

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• Server Branding 101: Big Name, Big Game?

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For kicks and giggles a few weeks ago, I spent some time monkeying around on the three top search engines seeing how many pages out there on the Internet relating to various IBM server brands and operating systems were being indexed with those terms. As I fully admit, this is a thoroughly unscientific way to try to gauge the relative importance of brands, but it seems to me to be as valid as doing a random poll by telephone–and has the virtue of being done in a few minutes. Now, let’s compare all the big server brands and their vendors.

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• Java Compute Appliances Upgraded by Azul Systems

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Azul Systems, the maker of hardware appliances that have been specifically designed to run Java virtual machines that are offloaded from general purpose servers and their applications, has announced the third generation of its Java processors, the Vega-3. With this new chip, Azul is adding more cores to the chip and adding other tweaks to make its Compute Appliances even more appealing to IT shops running Java applications who are sick of paying high prices for servers just to run JVMs. The chip designers at Azul Systems have boosted the number of processor cores on the Vega family of

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• Survival of the Fittest: Ensuring IT Is Providing You with an Innovative Edge

  June 2, 2008 Paul Hollingsworth

  Seemingly it’s the old, old problem of how to have your cake and eat it. Chief information officers are being asked to ensure that IT is continuing to function efficiently, to comply with legislation and regulation, and to be secure against an ever-wider range of threats. They’re also expected to perform the usual upgrades, renewals and maintenance on legacy infrastructures, and to “manage” (as in maintain or reduce) IT budgets. But as if doing all of this were not enough, IT is now required to “innovate” to support businesses that are being fundamentally re-engineered for the new economy. All of

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• Mainline Buys Systems Integrator CompServ

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, server reseller Mainline Information Systems, of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California, bringing together two of IBM‘s largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Last week, Mainline reached across its home state of Florida and snapped up reseller and systems integrator CompServ. CompServ, which is located in the Tampa suburb called Clearwater and which was founded in 1998, is an IBM reseller that pushes i5/OS, AIX, and Linux platforms as well as IBM’s storage products, but which does not, like Mainline or

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• Interesting Mods and Add-Ons for Office Blade Servers

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back in the day, I think maybe when I was a baby–I mean that literally–the idea of office computers had as much to do with office as it did with computer. Despite the fact that they included a whole lot of electromechanical whooziwhatits and thingamabobs, vendors like IBM tried to create computers and workstations (that used to be where you sat to use the computer, not at a machine) that blended in with the colorful and trendy offices of the time. With the advent of rack-based server computing, small and medium businesses could not deploy lots of gear in

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• Tape Backup: Obviously, a Whole Lot Greener than Disk Backup

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some technologies are very hard to kill. Long before there was disk, there was tape, and the ridiculously cheap disk capacity that is available has allowed many companies to do their archiving on disk-based archiving systems that look like tape to servers even if they are not. But using disk-based archiving comes at a very high operational cost. Disks need to spin to be useful, but once a tape has data archived on it, it pretty much stops using power until it is specifically required to get a bit of data for an application or to archive another data set.

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• IBS Issues New Shares to Raise Capital, Reorganizes Operations

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Swedish ERP software provider International Business Systems, a long time supporter of the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, has announced that it is working with investors to issue new shares in the company as a means of building up a pile of cash that will fuel its ongoing reorganization efforts and gird its loins to do battle globally against its competitors in the midrange market. Back at the end of April, IBS said in an announcement in Europe that it was proposing to raise as much as 400 million Swedish krona (around $68 million at exchange rates last week) through

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