• Infor Acquisition of SSA Global Sparks a Lawsuit

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just as everyone was preparing for the Memorial Day long weekend, lawyers for Steven Fisch, an investor in SSA Global, were putting the finishing touches on a class action lawsuit against SSA that seeks to halt the $1.36 billion acquisition of SSA by privately held Infor . The Infor acquisition was announced May 15, and has capped several years of massive consolidation in the application software industry. Fisch’s lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, specifically in its Chancery Division, and among other things, it alleges that the managers and venture capital owners of SSA

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• OCEAN User Group to Host Annual Tech Conference on July 11

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The OCEAN iSeries and System i5 user group is hosting its annual Technical Conference and Expo at the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, California, on July 11, and if you are in the OC and you like the OS/400 platform, then the Orange County Educational Advancement Network wants you to stop by and spend the day at the conference. OCEAN is one of the largest and most active OS/400 user groups in the world, and it draws all of the big name experts in the OS/400 community. Malcolm Haines, the minister of System i5 propaganda at IBM, will be giving

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• Revenues Down in Fiscal Q1 at Better Online Solutions After Divestitures

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Better Online Solutions, the long-time vendor of connectivity software and thin clients based in Israel, sold off some business units last year, which dropped its sales in the first quarter of fiscal 2006 ended March 31 to $5.1 million, down 30 percent. However, after divesting those businesses and cutting other costs, BOS was able to book a profit of $137,000, which is a big improvement over the $1.6 million loss it had in the year ago quarter. BOS said that it sold $567,000 in connectivity products, with an incredible gross profit of $418,000 and an operating profit of $47,000.

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• Seagull Says Fiscal 2006 Looks a Lot Better Than Last Year

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Seagull Software, which makes software to modernize the interfaces into legacy OS/400, mainframe, and Unix applications, announced preliminary financial results for its fiscal 2006 year ended on April 30, and reports that it expects to have annual sales of between $27 million and $28 million. That figure will be roughly 19 percent better than the $23.4 million in sales that Seagull booked in fiscal 2005. Because Seagull kept something of a rein on costs, the company was able to bring about $100,000 to the bottom line (pro forma), compared to a loss of $908,000 in the prior year. However,

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• Survey Says Java Developers Like Open Source Databases

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  EnterpriseDB, which offers a commercialized version of the open source PostgreSQL relational database management system, recently polled the 12,000 readers of the Java Developer’s Journal to get a sense of their likelihood of deploying open source databases. If you think such databases are not going commercial, you are wrong. According to the survey, more than half of those polled said that their companies had already deployed an open source database or were more likely to deploy an open source database over other possible applications such as ERP, CRM, or office automation software. “Open source databases are leading the third

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• Infor Acquisition of SSA Global Sparks a Lawsuit

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just as everyone was preparing for the Memorial Day long weekend, lawyers for Steven Fisch, an investor in SSA Global, were putting the finishing touches on a class action lawsuit against SSA that seeks to halt the $1.36 billion acquisition of SSA by privately held Infor . The Infor acquisition was announced May 15, and has capped several years of massive consolidation in the application software industry. Fisch’s lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, specifically in its Chancery Division, and among other things, it alleges that the managers and venture capital owners of SSA

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• IBM Beefs Up Web Enablement for i5/OS Bundle

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you buy a new System i5 machine from IBM running i5/OS, you have access to a free stack of middleware that Big Blue calls Web Enablement for i5/OS. As part of its announcements a few weeks ago, IBM made some enhancements to this middleware stack. The Web Enablement for i5/OS goes by the IBM product number 5722-WE2, and it now includes the company’s WebSphere Application Server–Express V6.1 as its key foundation element. This iteration of WebSphere, of course, provides the Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 Java runtime environment (J2SE 5.0), which IBM has been promising as a more standard

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• The Cult of Numerology

  June 5, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  “. . . both ‘cult’ and ‘culture’ come from the same root. At [Arthur] Andersen, people didn’t seem as if they belonged to a cult in the sense of worshiping an out-of-the-mainstream charismatic leader. . . . But their behavior–their overarching commitment to the Firm and what it stood for–and the Firm’s efforts to shape that behavior were. . . cultlike. Slowly, a mighty culture was disintegrating into a soulless cult behind those doors. . .” –Barbara Ley Toffler, Final Accounting When the verdict was announced on May 25 of Enron demons Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling–Lay guilty on all

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• Merrill Lynch Cases IT Spending, Server Buying Patterns

  June 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at brokerage house Merrill Lynch have been taking the pulse of data center managers to get a sense of how things are going out there in IT Land. A couple times a year, Merrill Lynch polls 75 chief information officers in the United States and 25 in Europe to pick their brains on various issues. According to those polled, IT spending among these large enterprises is expected to rise by an average of 5.2 percent in 2006 and by an average of 4.8 in 2007. Last November, these same people were polled, and they expected spending to increase

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• Trucking Along with the OS/400 Platform

  June 5, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  “Modern technology is no longer optional in the trucking industry today,” according to Prime, an OS/400-based trucking company based in Springfield, Missouri. Anyone observing the high stakes and competitive nature of that industry would have to agree. A trucking company wouldn’t be successful for long without reliable, accurate, and real-time information communicated across a wide geographic area with moving targets (the trucks), and on-the-mark, 24×7 customer service. This takes a lot of information technology, obviously. Some people, especially those not in the know about the OS/400 platform, might be surprised to learn that the core systems that collect and

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