• Oracle Snaps Up Insurance Software Specialist AdminServer

  May 19, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Database and enterprise application software maker Oracle continued its acquisition binge last week, acquiring a relatively unknown but important and fast-growing niche player in the insurance sector called AdminServer. AdminServer, which is based in Chester, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Philadelphia), was a consultancy and programming services company when it was founded in 1998, and at that time it began developing a Java-based set of insurance policy and annuity management programs to take on the vast base of homegrown RPG and COBOL insurance applications running out there on midrange, mainframe, and other gear. AdminServer certified its Java applications, which is

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• The i Platform Roadmap Is a Work in Progress

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power Systems convergence more or less accomplished, on paper at least if not in the minds and data centers of System i and System p customers, and with Bill Zeitler, general manager of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group retiring on August 1 and the company’s supply chain expert, Bob Moffatt, taking over the server unit at that time, tongues are a-wagging about the long-term future of the i platform. It was a coincidence that Neil Palmer’s article in this newsletter last week, There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?, came out

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• IBM Loses Two Key Executives to Retirement–Really

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The deck chairs are changing once again at the good ship Big Blue, and this time, not only are the top brass moving into new roles at the company, but some heavy hitters at IBM are trading in their office chairs for Adirondack chairs at their vacation hangouts as they retire from the company. It is hard to get any bluer than Bill Zeitler and Nick Donofrio, but a new team of managers is now being given a chance to try now that these two are retiring from the company in the wake of their impending 60th birthdays. I know

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• Java Performance Is OS Agnostic on Power6 Gear

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back when, in the dawn of time–well, about a decade ago when IBM first caught the Java bug and decided that this would be the language of choice on its commercial servers and their operating systems–the software engineering teams in Rochester, Minnesota, and Toronto, Ontario, worked diligently to take advantage of the 64-bit addressing that OS/400 had and that many Unixes of the time lacked. The idea was simple: If Java was going to be the imposed lingua franca for future application development, then OS/400 would speak it fluently–and fast. At the time, when the 64-bit memory and symmetric

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• As I See It: Soothing the Savage Programmer

  May 12, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Dr. Masaru Emoto has a gentle, curious face and a facile mind with which he probes the bumpy intersection of science and metaphysics. Using a dark-field microscope with photographic capabilities, he researches the effects of external factors on the molecular structure of water. Not just such obvious influences as pollution, but much more esoteric factors not commonly thought to possess substance-altering properties, such as thoughts, words, and music. The notion that sound or thought could alter the molecular shape of water seems ludicrous, but Emoto’s extraordinary photos suggest otherwise. Water labeled with positive words such as “love,” “gratitude,” and “appreciation,”

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• IBM Goes Stateless and Cooler with iDataPlex Servers

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The evolution from tower to rack to blade to future servers continues apace, and IBM is cooking up a new line of custom-built servers called the iDataPlex that it hopes will make it the king of the so-called Web 2.0 hill. While the details on the iDataPlex server line, which will begin shipping in June, are sketchy, IBM is talking generally about the product and throwing around some pictures to get people interested in what is coming down the pike. The iDataPlex offering is being billed as a complete hardware, software, and services stack that is more energy efficient than

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• Reader Feedback on There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, as you might expect, Neil Palmer’s story last week, There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?, touched off some heated conversation last week about the future of the i platform. Contrary to one item of feedback that I saw posted on the Midrange-L forum, IT Jungle did not just publish Palmer’s comments to create some sort of artificial controversy. Ever since the late 1990s, IBM created controversy around the AS/400 platform by its own actions and inactions, and all we did was give Palmer a chance to voice his concerns about the future

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• Live Migration Will Make Virtualization Mainstream

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The ability to teleport running applications around the network–what most vendors are calling live migration these days, but which comes in various names and server virtualization flavors–is probably one of the coolest technologies to come along in the data center in quite some time. And it may turn out to be the technology that pushes server virtualization through its tipping point, finally making such virtualization truly mainstream. The ability to virtualize servers with a hypervisor and then get multiple (and sometimes incompatible) operating systems to share a single box was useful for server consolidation (getting rid of some boxes) and

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• IBM and HP Do SAP ERP Bundles for SMBs

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While application software giant SAP has made a lot of noise in recent months before and after the launch of its “A1S” Business ByDesign suite of online, SaaS-style applications, that software ramp is taking longer than expected and therefore SAP needs to double down with its existing licensed software products to attack the small and medium business space. And to do that well, SAP needs to rely on its key platform partners, particularly IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Last week, at SAP’s Sapphire customer event in Orlando, Florida, the company announced bundling deals with both IBM and HP that will see

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• Avnet Expands in the United Kingdom and Ireland with Horizon Buy

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and storage distributor Avnet has expanded its reach into Ireland and the United Kingdom by acquiring Irish systems reseller Horizon Technology Group. Horizon Technology, through its various divisions, is a big player in the distribution of servers manufactured by IBM and Sun Microsystems. The company is public, and its stock trades on the Dublin and London stock exchanges. The company was founded in Ireland as a reseller of Sun Unix gear back in 1991, and in 1994, the company expanded its Sun reseller business into the much larger market of the United Kingdom. In the past several

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