• The Shape of the System i Business

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A decade or more ago, there were various services that did an excellent job of polling IT establishments in North America and Europe to find out what kinds of computers people used and the applications they ran on them. The one that I had complete and unbridled access to was the Computer Intelligence service, which is now owned by Harte Hanks. With this tool, you could get a good feel for the AS/400 installed base. I miss it a great deal. The original publisher of The Four Hundred was Hesh Wiener, who you all know as the Mad Dog

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• AS/400 Maintenance Fees Go Up July 1

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All server makers use the carrot and stick approach to compel customers to keep current with their server technologies. The carrot is the improved price/performance they deliver as they roll out their new platform; the stick is ever-increasing maintenance prices on aging equipment. In the middle of March, IBM jacked up maintenance fees on vintage AS/400 gear by approximately 9 percent. That would be the stick part after the Power5+ System i announcements at the end of January. You can see the price changes in this document and this other one. The maintenance price hikes apply to the entry

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• The Lowdown on S/36 and S/38 Compilers in i5/OS V5R5

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since the end of January, I have been trying to get the official details on exactly what IBM was planning with regard to the System/36 and System/38 compilers in the WebSphere Development Studio application development tool. I hooked up with George Farr, technical development manager for System i development tools at IBM’s Toronto software labs, late last week and he explained the situation to me. As I have previously reported, with the January refresh of the i5/OS platform and the Power5+ System i5 machines, IBM put a statement of direction at the end of the i5/OS V5R4 announcements that has

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• iSeries i5 Machines Withdrawn from Marketing

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are interested in getting an iSeries i5 machine, you better do it before June 1, because after that, IBM will stop making and selling them. Last week, IBM withdrew the first generation of Power5 machines from marketing, and the last day you can order one of these boxes from IBM is May 30. That gives these Power5 machines an economic life of about two years. IBM is also removing from marketing the OS/400 Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, HA Edition, Solution Edition, and Domino Edition variants of these boxes. Processors for these machines will also be discontinued. IBM’s withdrawal

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• Oracle and IBM Work to Rebuild the JDE Channel

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is safe to say that it has been a tumultuous couple of years for the users of software created by the former J.D. Edwards. The acquisition of JDE by PeopleSoft for $1.7 billion in June 2003 was upsetting to the JDE business that was largely associated with the iSeries platform, and the $10.3 billion hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle that was finalized in January 2005 was shocking to the iSeries faithful. Now, IBM and Oracle want to work together to get the JDE business back on its feet. JDE used to be one of the largest ERP players

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• Big Blue Clarifies Software Pricing for Multicore Machines

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When is a processor core not a core? When your software vendor says so, that’s when. The advent of processors with multiple cores has made a mess of software pricing, and chip makers, operating system providers, systems software suppliers, and application software vendors all have a different take on how they think software should be priced in this multicore world. Now, it is IBM‘s turn to “clarify” its position on software pricing. The newsy bit of this announcement is the fact that IBM, like Oracle, is being generous in regard to the multicore “Niagara” Sparc T1 processor from

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• IBM Unleashes a Barrage of SOA Announcements

  April 10, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  If quantity is in any way connected to quality or importance, then IBM’s announcement last Monday new software and services to help customers adopt service oriented architecture, or SOA, was a humdinger. All in all, Big Blue rolled out 11 new products (some of which had been previously announced, and not all of which have yet been released) and 20 enhancements to existing products–all designed to speed up adoption and implementation of SOA. Leading off the announcement, Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM’s Software Group, explained that “an SOA can play a strategic role in any

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• IBM Discounts WebFacing/HATS Combo Price by 60 Percent

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM announced a 60 percent discount off the combined WebFacing and Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) software for modernizing legacy green-screen applications. Or at least I think it is. I am sure of the 60 percent discount, which runs until September 30, but I am not exactly sure of the channel. The announcement was written in a foreign language that I think is somewhere between System i5ese and Esper-Domino. Here’s what IBM said: “For a limited time only, the commercial Passport Advantage Relationship Suggested Volume Prices (RSVP) and Passport Advantage Express Suggested Retail Price (SRP) for selected eligible

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• As I See It: Women

  April 10, 2006 Victor Rozek

  There were rumors that Margaret Thatcher was actually a woman, but they were never proven to my satisfaction. She wasn’t called “The Iron Lady” for nothing. She often seemed hard and unsympathetic, and stubbornly belligerent as only people who are convinced of their own superiority can be–sort of like Ronald Reagan without the aw-shucks charm. I recall being disappointed, but this was the 1980s and I was naive and actually thought that having women in positions of political power might soften the world. I felt the same disappointment in the workplace. The ascendancy of women to positions of corporate power

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• System i Shops Win Innovation Awards

  April 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the festivities at the COMMON midrange user group meeting two weeks ago, IBM handed out its second annual IT Innovation Awards to System i customers. More than 50 companies applied for the awards, and five took home the prize. IT Jungle was invited to the awards dinner, but we missed it because we were a little thin on the ground at COMMON. That was because Alex Woodie, our products editor extraordinaire, was off on his honeymoon after a wonderful wedding ceremony in San Diego with his lovely bride, Carol, that Saturday in San Diego. (Alex had planned

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