• Ask TPM–Who, or Where, in the World Buys All Those Servers?

  October 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I had a quick question. Your articles cover worldwide server sales by vendors in great detail and I have enjoyed reading them. One piece of information I have not been able to find is what portion of the worldwide server market is from the United States. If there are between 30 and 35 million installed servers worldwide, where are they? I have looked all over for this information but have had no luck. Any help from you will be appreciated. –Sanjay You’re right. This information is hard to come by, especially since IDC and Gartner like to get paid lots

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• Tom Jarosh, Former AS/400 General Manager, Dies at 55

  October 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tom Jarosh, the IBM executive who took the AS/400 line through the Y2K crisis, the MRP-to-ERP upgrade cycle, and the dot-com at the end of the 1990s, passed away on October 17. Jarosh spent his career at Big Blue, and was still intimately involved with Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group. The cause of death was melanoma; 55 is far too young for Jarosh to be gone. Jarosh was raised in Pittsburgh, and was the oldest of 10 children in the family. He got his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and in 1975, he

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• Another AS/400 User Group Powers Down

  October 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, after 26 years of being a community for AS/400 developers, the Application Systems Users Group of Greater Cleveland announced that it was powering itself down. The move follows the relatively recent closures of AS/400 user groups in the Denver and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Andy Gladys, the ASUGGC’s founder and president, posted a message to members and the rest of the AS/400 community explaining why he founded the user group in the wake of IBM’s announcement and delivery of the System/38 midrange system back in 1981. “With such advanced features and functionality, it was a herald for the great

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• SMBs in Europe Expected to Spend $7.6 Billion on Servers, Networking

  October 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In our ongoing effort to try to case out the small and medium business arena as it relates to IT, we this week bring you a report from Access Markets International Partners about the expected spending on server and networking gear in Western Europe in 2008. According to estimates made by AMI-Partners, which is based on surveys it conducts around the world about buying plans, SMBs (by which AMI means companies with under 1,000 employees) in Western Europe are expected to shell out $7.6 billion on servers and networking gear in 2008. (Western Europe, in AMI-Partners’ definition includes the United

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• A Minor Tweak in Power 520 Pricing

  October 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM continued to tweak its product pricing for the Power Systems i and System i product line. The price of the base 9407-M15 (that’s the original Power Systems Power 520 i Edition) and the 8203-E4A (that’s the converged i-AIX-Linux box announced on October 7 that has twice the Power6 cores) was dropped by $299. Then the price for the feature 7112 and 7113 deskside covers for these two boxes was raised from $300 to $599, and the price for the rack-mount drawer rail kit for these two machines was upped from $150 to $300. This could be the

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• Some Servers Take a Dive in IBM’s Third Quarter

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM preannounced its revenues and earnings as the market was swooning two weeks ago in an effort to calm a staggering and falling Wall Street, the company’s overall numbers gave the impression that Big Blue was nonetheless weathering the financial storm. While this may be true in the aggregate, to IBM’s credit (don’t say credit) as an IT supplier, certain portions of its business–particularly certain server lines–didn’t do so well. Decide for yourself if this is some kind of leading indicator for the rest of 2008 and maybe 2009. IBM’s sales for the third quarter came to $25.3 billion,

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• Infor CEO Preaches Business Darwinism, Prepares for Hyper Business Future

  October 20, 2008 Dan Burger

  Taking a page from Eric Marks’ book, Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, Infor chairman and chief executive officer, Jim Schaper, gave the attendees at his company’s Inforum user conference last week his preview of business in the year 2015. Infor, the ERP super group that has assembled a collection of major and midrange ERP software firms that specialize in the manufacturing and distribution businesses, is in the early stages of shifting its application development to a service oriented architecture. The move to what Infor calls its “Open SOA,” a technology framework with middleware built in, has the aim of

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• Ask TPM: Isn’t It Time for the i OS to Catch Mono?

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Timothy, I read in a recent eWeek article that the Mono 2.0 release, which implements the features of .NET 2.0, was announced on October 6. Is there any news regarding whether IBM will ever support Mono in IBM i? (I would assume not.) We have a mixed shop here: Power Systems for our main business application and Windows/Sharepoint/.NET for our Website and intranet. I am doing both RPG and C# development. It would be great if we could one day run C# apps and Web services on the IBM i to potentially update our RPG program front-ends and interface with

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• IT Shops Are Getting Wise to the Unified Communications Hype

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the underlying technologies that allow us to reach out and touch someone through the telephone networks have changed dramatically and continuously over the past 50 years, the convergence of computer and telephone networks and new software to merge business applications seamlessly with telephone networks has led to much enthusiasm about so-called unified communications. And companies are getting wise to the hype. IT analyst firm IDC has done its fifth annual Voice over IP with InfoWorld magazine (which is owned by the same company as IDC and a slew of other IT trade rags, including ComputerWorld), and has used

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• IBM Helps Partners Learn New Data Center Skills

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as I have been watching the IBM midrange, the company has been trying to push more and more gear through its reseller channel and put the burden of training for sales, configuration, and support onto the partner channel. Business partners grouse about ever-lowering margins, and the pressure that comes from Moore’s Law, which makes all aspects of computing that have to do with electronics cheaper as people costs go up every year. The spread between the two is where the growth in the IT market has come from. But, if you are a business partner or an

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