• Wherefore Art Though, O Power Blade Services for i?

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As many iSeries and System i shops have found out, the move to Power6-based blade servers and the Virtual I/O server that is required to support the i 6.1 operating system is a bit tricky compared to the OS/400 installation and migration procedures that they are accustomed to. That’s one reason why I was a bit surprised by a recent IBM Power Systems announcement. The announcement, which is a set of implementation services for Power Systems JS12 and JS22 blade servers running AIX 6.1 or Linux, did not include the other operating system supported on the blades. That being the

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• Former IBMer Blocked from Taking Job at Apple

  November 10, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A Federal Court judge on Friday granted a temporary injunction preventing Mark Papermaster, the former IBM executive who helped build the Power processor architecture, from joining Apple, where he had taken a job leading the hardware engineering teams working on the iPhone and the iPod. IBM filed a lawsuit against Papermaster in late October to prevent him from joining Apple, which it claimed would violate the non-compete clause Papermaster signed in 2006. As its “top expert” on the Power architecture, head of the blade server unit, and a member of an elite group of IBMers that set strategic goals

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• Web 2.0 Internet Apps: Spyware, Malware, and Trojans Galore

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IT departments are understandably excited about the possibilities of so-called Web 2.0-style online applications and how they might be used within their organizations, these same IT shops are equally perplexed about how they are going to control and secure the use of these online applications among their end users. In a way, this is an echo of how the commercialized Internet first entered corporations in the mid-1990s. And it did not enter from the data center, but from the end user desktops. And ditto for the wide use of PCs in the mid-1980s and then graphical user environments in

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• Agilysys Touts Cost Cutting Ahead of Financials

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s been a rough couple of months for the U.S. economy, and it has also been tough on i platform reseller and application software developer Agilysys, which four weeks ago said it wasn’t going to make its numbers in the quarter and then two weeks ago did a management shakeup that saw four top executives leave the company. Last week, Agilysys wanted to let everyone know it is getting its financial house in order–and fast. The company, which is publicly traded, will report its second quarter of fiscal 209 results on November 20, but wanted to let everyone know

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• IBS Under Pressure in Q3, Divests Brasilian Unit

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As readers of The Four Hundred are aware, Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, has been rejiggering its management and business model in an attempt to get its midrange hardware and application software revenues growing again. The third quarter ended in September proved difficult for IBS, as it was for most companies thanks to the economic crisis. In the quarter ended in September, software license sales fell at IBS by 12 percent to 89.4 million Swedish krona. (SEK is the accepted abbreviation for this currency, which is valued at about 13 cents as we go to press on

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• Is the Smart Cube the New i?

  November 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While I have been watching IBM for longer than I have done just about anything else in my life except watching Penn State football and marveling that I can get paid to do the job I do, even after all these years, sometimes Big Blue does something that surprises me. Sometimes, the surprise is caused by the company’s utter stupidity, or incompetence. Sometimes, it is the genius of its engineering. Sometimes, it is just the way IBM puts something and then the coffee comes out my nose. So it is with announcement letter 108-904, which you can read here for

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• You Can Still Walk Upgrade Paths with Power Systems i

  November 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the server racket, the term upgrade has a lot of different meanings. In general, it involves some means of boosting the processing capacity of a machine, be it from additional processors, memory, disk spindles, or I/O capacity. But when most people talk about upgrading their AS/400, iSeries, System i, or Power Systems i box, they are talking about adding processing capacity. And sometimes, that means a little change inside a server or swapping out most or all of the guts in a box to make a change to the system. Even with a substantial amount of engineering change in

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• IBM Sues to Block Server Executive from Joining Apple

  November 3, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week filed a lawsuit to prevent former executive Mark Papermaster from taking a job at Apple. IBM claims that, as its “top expert” in the Power architecture and head of development for X64-based blade servers, Papermaster would use his knowledge to hurt IBM’s server business as he helps expand Apple’s fledgling server business, and thereby violate a non-compete clause along the way. Papermaster told his supervisors on October 20 that he would leave Big Blue for Apple after 26 years with the company. IBM says it tried hard to stop him, offering him a “substantial increase” in

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• The i Gives Manufacturers and Distributors Cost Control

  November 3, 2008 Dan Burger

  You make and distribute products. That’s your business–one, the other, or both. But the pressure is on to squeeze more efficiency out of operations and drive more profits to the bottom line. You may have your choice of dragons to slay, but the decision to improve transportation planning, shipment execution, financial settlement, and tracking visibility are popular choices. Not coincidentally, this is one of those IBM System i strongholds. Transportation management is closely tied to demand management, increased service levels, and more frequent inventory turns. But from the IT perspective, it is mostly about integration. Integration with enterprise resource management

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• Forrester CEO Weighs In on IT Spending for 2009

  November 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you had a crystal ball, or any inanimate object (such as a computer running a simulation like nothing Earth has ever seen and likely never will), and you could predict IT spending in the coming year, you could make yourself a whole lot of money. But you don’t. So that means we have to listen to what the experts have to say and then try to reckon our own way through their prognostications, perhaps with a little of our own input. As the chief executive officer at IT market research firm Forrester Research, George Colony speaks to a

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