• i5 Innovation Effort Shifts from Getting Modern to Making Money

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a year since IBM launched its iSeries Initiative for Innovation, a broad development and marketing program–funded with hundred of millions of dollars–that was designed to breathe some life into the OS/400 ecosystem. And, if software vendor count and enthusiasm are any measure, then it looks like that investment has paid off for Big Blue. According to Joyce Bordash, director of worldwide ISV and business partner sales for the System i division at IBM, the co-marketing and co-development efforts by the company in conjunction with iSeries partners–which is now called the System i Initiative for Innovation–has significantly ramped

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• Storage Vendor GST Resells Bull Unix Servers in the States

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  GST, a storage vendor located in Southern California with deep knowledge of the IBM iSeries platform that has expanded into selling and supporting storage for Big Blue’s pSeries Unix line, has gone one better and is now an authorized reseller of the Escala line of Power-AIX machines from French server maker Bull. GST sells tape drives, storage arrays, and memory modules that are compatible with the iSeries and pSeries line and are therefore compatible with the Bull Escala server line, since they are all based on the same exact hardware. Bull is a licensee of IBM’s Power server

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• Infonetics Says Midrange Businesses Lose Lots of Dough from Network Downtime

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s a story we hear time and time again from server makers, the software providers who make high availability clustering software, or the companies that provide disaster recovery products and services: downtime, even a little bit, costs companies a lot of money. They talk about the servers, but they often don’t talk about the broader network that links them together, to end users, and to the outside world. Often, the statistics that these vendors cite is based on statistics culled from the largest enterprises in the world, which obviously have more complex IT infrastructures and more money at stake for

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• SSA Global Reports Q2 Financials, Acquires Provia Software

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having warned Wall Street two weeks ago that its fiscal second quarter was a bit bumpier than expected, ERP software supplier SSA Global put the numbers up on the board for the quarter last week as it announced yet another acquisition. For the quarter, sales were $187.9 million, up 6 percent compared to $178 million in the second fiscal quarter ended January 31 last year. Software licensing sales was $56.8 million, which was up 11 percent compared to the same quarter in fiscal 2005 and increasing the share of licenses as a share of total sales to 30 percent, up

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• PartnerWorld Brings New Incentives for IBM’s Software Partners

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM hosts its annual PartnerWorld event for its vast reseller channel in Las Vegas this week, and a lot of the talk is expected to be around software. The company is rumored to be making announcements to help software companies move their applications out of the perpetual licensing world and into Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, which is just another fancy way of saying Application Service Provider. (Remember that?) But while IBM wants partners to sell their application software as a service, Big Blue wants them to continue to sell its own software stack, including DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli,

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• Server Consolidation, Power Issues Are Hot Server Issues for 2006

  March 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No, none of the major server vendors wrote the following study, but they could have. According to a server study performed by TheInfoPro, a New York market research firm, server consolidation is the top priority for IT managers in 2006 and power and energy consumption are their biggest concerns. The study, which is based on in-depth surveys of 133 large enterprises in the Global 2000 class, indicated that server utilization and energy issues are converging with the advent of inexpensive server virtualization to the point where in many IT manager’s minds, the two are becoming synonymous. Still, not everyone

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• iTera Gets Thumbs Up in HA and DR Markets

  March 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  Of the high availability (HA) and data replication (DR) vendors that service the OS/400 customer base in North America and internationally, iTera has enjoyed a meteoric rise during these first few years of the 21st century. With its aggressive pricing, it has led a charge primarily into the small and midsize business (SMB) market, where few HA and DR vendors used to be found. Where iTera once traveled virtually unnoticed, it now has competitors on all flanks. Regardless of the increasing competition, iTera is still putting up some big numbers. The fact that the other vendors in this field are

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• As I See It: The ‘M’ Word

  March 13, 2006 Victor Rozek

  She was a tall, solid woman, with burnt copper skin and tribal features. “Write your name on a piece of paper,” she told us. “Go ahead, do it several times. Notice how simple, effortless, and familiar it is. Now put the pen in your other hand and sign your name again. How does that feel?” It felt awkward, frustrating, unfamiliar, and harder than it should have been. “That,” she said, “is how people from foreign cultures feel when navigating the dominant white culture.” She had come to teach 10 white people what it was like not being white; an impossible

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• Xperia Takes on Tier One ERP Vendors in the SMB Market

  March 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  Where do small- and mid-sized businesses find ERP systems when they have outgrown the ones they have or can’t afford to maintain the ones they have? There are niche ERP software vendors that know the requirements of a specific industry and have applications that are not very modern; there are large ERP application makers with reputations for not being very supportive or very cost effective for midrange shops. Getting the right fit of function and finances is not easy, but a software company called Xperia Solutions thinks it has what OS/400 shops need. There have always been questions about how

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• Offshore Outsourcing and the OS/400 Ecosystem

  March 13, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  “I think that just about every tech company has considered the use of offshore outsourcing resources to reduce costs,” says Henry Martinez, chief technology officer for Vision Solutions. If that is true (and I believe it is), most of them–at least in the iSeries world–aren’t talking about it. In the course of preparing this article, I contacted approximately 25 iSeries ISVs, most of them sizable, and almost all of them took a pass. The standard reply went something like, “Thanks for considering us, but we have no comment on this topic. Please consider contacting us in the future for

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