• IBM Offers Low Financing Rates for System i5 Upgrade Leases

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IBM has been gradually ratcheting up interest rates on its Low Rate Financing deals offered through Big Blue’s Global Financing unit for the past year, in concert with the interest rate rises put in place by the Federal Reserve and the commercial banks that lend to companies and consumers, the System i5 business is under a little pressure to perform. Cheaper financing is one of the ways that midrange shops can be enticed to buy servers when they might otherwise choose to hold off. And that is why the Global Financing unit is now offering relatively low financing rates

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• Server Virtualization Is Mainstream, Says Yankee Group

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT consultancy Yankee Group has just completed its 2006 global server virtualization survey, and based on the results of that survey, has declared that server virtualization is now a mainstream technology. Yankee has put together a two-part report based on the survey results from 1,700 MIS managers around the world, in various industries, and across a spectrum of company sizes. According to that survey, only 14 percent of the companies polled have not yet chosen a server virtualization vendor for at least one of their platforms (presumably, many companies have more than one virtualization approach, since no virtualization hypervisor yet

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• Sundry Summer Announcements for the System i5

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If I had to guess, I would say that IBM was originally planning on making announcements for its Power5+ server lines, the System i and the System p, on July 11. But then Sun Microsystems jumped in with its “Galaxy” Opteron server announcements, and Big Blue apparently thought it would be better to push its System p5 announcements out two weeks. However, some brief System i5 announcements still were made on July 11. These included, of course, the new System i5 Solution Edition for JDE EnterpriseOne, a lower-cost version of the i5 520 with full-on performance and designed to compete

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• Midrange IT Professionals Working Overtime, Bigtime

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you sell appliances that help automate system and security administration and help desk operations, as Kace does with its Kbox appliances, then you have to bring on home the effect of such appliances on the everyday life of system administrators and help desk operators if you want to make a sale. And to that end, Kace has commissioned a study to see how much overtime IT employees are being asked to do on a regular basis. The basic idea, of course, is that because you don’t use the Kbox appliances, you have to work late, and that if you

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• A Closer Look at the Economics of the Solution Edition for JDE

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Devil is always in the details in the computer business, and it is funny how the Devil is always looking out for the vendors and not the customers. I have been watching the computer business for decades now, and I am never surprised that things are not usually what the marketeers claim them to be, especially when I do the math. So it is with the i5 520 Solution Edition for JDE EnterpriseOne that IBM announced last week. The deal is a good deal, but it is not as good as IBM would have had us believe from its

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• Attachmate Completes NetIQ Acquisition, Previews Vista Support

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Attachmate, formerly known as AttachmateWRQ after these two companies were acquired by venture capitalists and merged last year, has completed its $495 million acquisition of systems management and security software vendor NetIQ. In the wake of the acquisition, the company simplified its name back to Attachmate. Attachmate is headquartered in Seattle, and the NetIQ operations remain located in Houston. Logan Wray, senior vice president of acquisitions for the company, has been named general manager of the NetIQ unit, while Marc Andrews, a senior vice president at Attachmate, has been named chief operating officer of NetIQ. With the combination of

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• Time Sharing: An Old Concept That’s Still With Us

  July 17, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Time sharing is certainly not new. The term has actually been around since the 1950s, when it designated the idea (unrealized at that time) that a computer could simultaneously be shared by more than one user. Of course, we have long since achieved that goal, and these days, with the exception of most personal computers (and even these can be set up to be shared if you are clever), just about all computers are time sharing in that context. When computers capable of sharing their processing cycles–and therefore running multiple jobs for multiple people simultaneously–became the norm in the late

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• JDA Completes Manugistics Deal, Warns of Weaker Second Quarter Results

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange retail software specialist JDA Software has completed its acquisition of supply chain software provider, and former darling of Wall Street and the dot-com boom, Manugistics. At the same time, JDA pre-announced its financial results for the second quarter to give Wall Street a warning that the numbers would be below estimates. JDA said that it ended up paying $213 million in cash for Manugistics, a few million bucks more than it had planned for because of the fluctuations in the company’s stock price. In this contentious application software market, where size appears to be everything, it is somewhat surprising

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• As I See It: The Donking Life

  July 17, 2006 Victor Rozek

  It’s summertime and the song tells me the living should be easy. And I want to believe it. But it’s Monday morning again and the fish aren’t jumping and the cotton is only high because my shorts are riding up. It’s going to be a long day and I’m already thinking about next weekend, feeling distracted, restless, and bored with my job; wanting to avoid doing it for as long as possible. When that wave of restlessness engulfs me, obligations seem nearly intolerable and sameness becomes the enemy of sanity. I mean, how many times can I do the same

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• Freescale Claims Breakthrough in MRAM Memory

  July 17, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Freescale Semiconductor, the chip manufacturing company that was spun out of Motorola, announced last week that it has commercialized a new memory technology called Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, or MRAM, that looks as if it will shake up the computer business. Magnetoresistive, or MR, technologies were first commercialized in the disk heads of IBM disk drives created by the Rochester, Minnesota, laboratories–back when Big Blue used to create its own memory and disk storage technologies. Motorola is the first company to commercialize the use of MR technologies in memory chips. MRAM is a non volatile memory technology, like

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