Volume 15, Number 13 - March 27, 2006 Archives

Evans Data Poll Says J2EE Hits Tipping Point in the SMB Space

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Java programming language has been around for more than a decade, and the high-end Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) implementation of that language, which is used to make Web-style applications as well as serious enterprise applications–including ERP suites, was a bit overkill for most small companies and a lot of midrange firms who had considerably more sophisticated experience with third-generation programming languages like COBOL and RPG as well as a smattering of C or C++.

Market researcher Evans Data spends all of its time taking the pulse of developers around the world, and according to its latest poll at

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IDC Makes Predictions for Software as a Service for 2006

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IT market watcher IDC knows a good opportunity to dice and slice an emerging market, and that is why it last week announced a new report on the advent of Software as a Service, or SaaS.

IDC is predicting that service-based software offerings, where vendors host their own applications or work with third parties to host them on behalf of customers, is going to have a disruptive effect on various subsectors of the software industry in 2006. IDC is projecting that the largest ISVs, seeing the impending threats of upstarts who only deliver SaaS products, like Salesforce.com, will spin-off

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The OS/400 Cooperative

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may not seem like it sometimes, but the end user companies, the IT professionals that work in them, the resellers and software partners, and the IBMers that comprise the OS/400 community have it pretty good, and they enjoy a certain amount of rapport and treat each other with a fair amount of respect. As an organization that serves the OS/400 community, but also participates in the Unix, Linux, Windows, and mainframe communities, IT Jungle probably has a more three-dimensional perspective than someone operating largely within the OS/400 community has.

In my experience as an editor and an analyst, I

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IBM Readies More i5-Friendly DS8000 Arrays

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to substantially beef up its DS8000 series of disk arrays to better support iSeries servers, which stands to reason given the licensing agreement between Big Blue and rival EMC that we report on elsewhere in this issue.

In October 2004, in the wake of the “Squadron” Power5-based i5 and p5 server announcements, IBM delivered a disk array based on the same electronics as the i5/p5 570 server that provides either two or four mirrored processing cores to run disk array and other add-on software functions. The DS8100 has from

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EMC Licenses i5 Interfaces from IBM for Symmetrix Support

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The minute storage area networks, or SANs, took off as a technology, some sort of truce between IBM, which controls the OS/400 platform, and EMC, one of the four major suppliers of external disk arrays that are commonly at the heart of SANs, was probably inevitable. But it is difficult to get two stubborn competitors to cooperate, and the several hundred big iSeries shops that use EMC’s Symmetrix arrays undoubtedly did a little arm twisting to get these two companies to work together.

Neither EMC nor IBM, of course, will come out and say that, of course. But

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Sales and Profits Up at Idion Technology Holdings

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The high availability and clustering software for the OS/400 platform has always been a major driver of platform sales, but because the HA players are generally privately held firms, we generally do not know how business is going. To be sure, from time to time, vendors give a peek inside their books to highlight when things are going well, but only DataMirror and Idion Technology Holdings, the parent company of HA software provider Vision Solutions, are public companies.

It was Idion’s turn to report financial results recently. Idion, which is a South African company that is traded on

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Does the World Need Another ERP Suite? iCAP Thinks So

March 27, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

ERP software is not exactly a hot topic any more–or is it? The conventional wisdom is that the ERP market is a “mature” one, dominated by a well-defined list of vendors that have just about tapped out anyone and everyone who is remotely interested. ERP news is largely about new versions and enhancements and, in recent years, about acquisitions–hostile and otherwise–and the occasional major glitch or faux-pas in implementations.

So, you might be thinking, what might compel a company to launch a new ERP product today? Does the world need another ERP vendor? Yes, according to Carlos Aguado, CEO of

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Lakeview Technology Partners with Ares Group in France

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hoping to get some more traction in the market for high availability and replication software in the French market, Lakeview Technology announced last week that it has inked a partnership with Ares Group, a large IT services firm located in France.

As it turns out, Ares is one of the top five distributors of iSeries machinery in France. (Although we don’t know it’s exact ranking, if it was number one or number two, you would expect Ares to say that, which probably means it is number five.) Ares was established in 1986 and now has 15 branch offices around

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As I See It: The Last Day

March 27, 2006 Victor Rozek

He drove into the familiar lot, nosed his car toward the oleander bushes, and parked just as he had for the past 17 years. He liked the oleander. It held its bloom for a long time, much like he had. As was his habit, he parked away from the building and walked toward the entrance, in no hurry, enjoying the morning air. Living life indoors was, in an evolutionary sense, a very recent development, and some days it felt unnatural to him. As often happened, several people passed him in a rush, intent on getting to their desks and making

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Sam Palmisano Invites Me to India

March 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It’s not every day that I get an email from IBM‘s chairman and CEO, so when such an email came in to my mailbox last week, after giving it a look over to make sure it wasn’t spam, I opened it up and had a gander at what Sam Palmisano wanted to talk to me about.

As it turns out, he invited me to go to an IBM meeting in Bangalore, India, one of the hottest hot spots in high tech these days. And, as it turns out, he wasn’t inviting me personally, but me generally as part

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