• Dick Bains, Another System/38 Father, Dies at 64

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A computer architecture is only as good as the compilers that are created to take advantage of that, and the long and storied career of Dick Baines, one of the three key fathers of IBM‘s System/38 minicomputer, the great-great granddaddy of the modern Power Systems i platform, demonstrates this well. Just after The Four Hundred went off press in December for the holidays, Bains passed away after suffering a heart attack while visiting his son on December 13. Bains, along with Frank Soltis, the just-retired System i architect and the face of the AS/400 for decades, and Roy Hoffman,

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• BlueZone Gives Financial Firms Big Discounts on Emulators

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the biggest financial services firms in America and sometimes Western Europe have been getting all of the headlines with their failures or acquisition by competitors in recent months, there is a far larger number of small banks and credit unions who are just as integral to the global economy and who are hurting as credit is tightening. Not surprisingly to anyone who has been around the IBM midrange for a few decades, a lot of these smaller financial institutions have used proprietary minis or Unix boxes to run their back office systems for decades. Big banks, brokerages, insurance companies,

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• CDSoft Buys ACT Group for Midrange Expertise

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consolidation is not just happening with IT in America, but in every country and market. Irish IT services company CDSoft has plunked down 1.5 million euros to buy its way into the IBM server maintenance business by acquiring fellow Irish company, ACT Group. ACT Group has 25 people and revenues in the range of 3 million euros, according to CDSoft. The group had two units before CDSoft bought it. Blue Chip Ireland is, according to the company, the largest independent maintainer of IBM x64 and Power servers, and it actually does it the old-fashioned way by providing on-site maintenance. ACT

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• VAI Joins IBM’s SaaS Cloud Services Initiative

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It used to be called application service providing, and the idea didn’t take off because telecom costs were too high, network bandwidth between PCs and remote Internet-connected services was too low, and there were cost and availability issues. Now, we are at the cusp between changing buzzwords. 2007’s software as a service, or SaaS, is starting to give way to 2008’s cloud services. Call it what you will, and despite some minor technical evolution, the story is nonetheless the same: using other people’s remote systems and software to give end users what feels like a local experience. If you are

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• Avnet Partners with Sanko for Turkish Expansion

  January 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT master reseller Avnet is, like every other company on the planet, looking for new places to do business in this tricky global economy. That is one reason why the company’s Avnet Technology Solutions, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT products made by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others, has ponied up some cash to take a barely majority stake in an IT distributor in Turkey. Avnet has taken a 50.01 percent stake in Akora Technology and Industry Corporation, a reseller previously owned in full by Sanko Holding Group. Akora was founded in 2001, as the earlier IT recession

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• Soltis Exiting IBM, But He’s Not Leaving the ‘400

  December 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  This New Year’s Eve, three weeks from now, AS/400 fans around the world will raise a glass and say a toast to Frank Soltis, who is set to retire from IBM after an incredible career spanning five decades. And while there will be some mixing of tears and champagne–especially upon the frozen tundra of the Rochester campus–you don’t have to say your goodbyes just yet. Soltis aims to remain active in the System i community, as he explains to The Four Hundred in this exclusive one-on-one interview. Alex Woodie: So you’re leaving at the end of the month. That

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• A Little More Detail on the Smart Cube and Its Market

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, I told you that IBM has launched the Smart Cube appliance server and its related Smart Market for distributing systems and application software, in India rather than the United States. There wasn’t a lot of detail about the Power and X64 boxes that are being configured as Smart Cube appliances, since IBM is really just doing a test rollout in India now and, very quietly, with selected customers in America to get feedback on how to make it all better before a full rollout in the States later in 2009. The Smart Cube server appliances,

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• IBM’s Academic Initiative Partners with DeVry University

  December 8, 2008 Dan Burger

  With more than 65,000 students enrolled at nearly 100 locations in 26 states and Canada, DeVry University qualifies as one of the largest degree-granting higher education institutions in North America. So, for IBM to get its Academic Initiative program plugged into DeVry, there is reason to celebrate. Beginning in March 2009, students aiming for bachelor’s degrees in computer information systems have the option of taking enterprise business computing courses that will incorporate IBM i, AIX, and z/OS coursework. DeVry University is the first educational institution to incorporate multiple IBM Systems technologies into a single degree program track. As is the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Potlatch Season

  December 8, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  Ask any old Kwakiutl or young Kwakwaka’wakw, as these Native Americans of the Northwest are now called, and you will find that winter was the favored season for a potlatch. A potlatch is a ceremony that includes a variety of rituals, some involving the redistribution of wealth and others the destruction of wealth. It’s a bit like what is going on around the world as governments try to keep us warm and loyal during a severe economic winter. It’s a bit like what liquidators say is going on in the server business, too. A potlatch was a huge party thrown

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• Server Sales Decline in the Third Quarter

  December 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it didn’t take much of a crystal ball to figure out that this was going to happen. With the torrent of bad news coming out of the financial, banking, manufacturing, and retail sectors of the North American and European economies, and stock markets around the world freaking out, it will come as no surprise to most of us that server sales were off a bit in the third quarter as vendors slashed prices to try to move boxes. The box counters at Gartner and IDC released their stats for server sales and shipments for the third quarter last week,

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