• BPs to Be Briefed on Upcoming iSeries Announcements on January 19

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to sources familiar with IBM‘s plans, Big Blue intends to brief its network of iSeries business partners about its impending i5/OS V5R4 announcements, as well as any other iSeries-related announcements, on January 19. Lots of us have been poking around to try to nail down when the i5/OS V5R4 announcements would happen, and the consensus a few weeks ago was that V5R4 would be announced at the end of February. But according to the business partners I spoke with, IBM’s letter to them indicated that it had moved the announcements forward into January. If history is any guide

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• IBM Cancels Systems & Technology Group University Event in Las Vegas

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Cancels Systems & Technology Group University Event in Las Vegas To the chagrin and surprise of many business partners and independent software developers, last week IBM abruptly canceled the Systems & Technology Group University, which was to be held in Las Vegas from January 23 through 26. IBM sent out notices to partners last Monday morning. This was a bit of a bummer for people who had already bought their airline tickets, of course. STGU is a forum hosted by the Systems & Technology Group sales teams from the Americas, European, and Asia/Pacific regions and the PartnerWorld organization to

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• Mainsoft, IBM to Convert .NET Code to Java on All eServers

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Turnabout is fair play, and it is refreshing to see that IBM is beginning to understand that it needs a strategy to try to bring the 100,000 partners who write code for Microsoft‘s Windows platform onto all of its eServer platforms–not just xSeries and BladeCenter servers that run Windows natively on Intel and AMD processors. For a decade, software vendors have been porting their OS/400, AIX, and MVS applications to Windows, or creating whole new application suites that compete against software developed for those platforms. Now, IBM wants to turn the tables on the Windows ecosystem, and it is

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• AMR Predicts SMB IT Spending Growth to Be a Paltry Few Percent in 2006

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IT departments at small and medium businesses don’t get a lot of respect from vendors, but the fact remains that the growth in the IT spending among this sector has been responsible for a lot of the recovery and then growth in IT spending in the past few years. (And, if you want to get real about it, the SMB market has been responsible for creating a lot of the new jobs the world’s economies have created, too.) But, according to a new report from AMR Research, the little engine that could might be running out of steam.

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• OpenSolaris Community Creates Kernel for Power Chips

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As soon as Sun Microsystems took its Solaris implementation of the Unix operating system open source last summer, the press, analyst, and user communities all started speculating where OpenSolaris might be ported to. By letting go of Solaris, Sun clearly enabled such rampant porting, and probably did so to encourage it, in fact. With the Xeon and Opteron ports already done and being largely supported by Sun’s engineers, the obvious next architecture was IBM‘s and Freescale‘s respective Power architectures. (Freescale is the PowerPC chip business that was spun out by Motorola last year.) On Sunday evening, January 8,

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• Lakeview Picks VP of Sales, Inks Reseller Deal with Kirchman

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  iSeries high availability software provider Lakeview Technology has appointed a new vice president of worldwide sales as it continues to build up its executive ranks. Lakeview said last week that it has promoted Robert Johnson from within its own ranks to the position. Johnson has spent 20 years in the high availability software business, with the past ten being at Lakeview. He was also previously the national sales manager for Stenograph Legal Systems–the company that makes those funky stenographer’s machines as well as computer-aided transcription software. Johnson’s appointment to the VP of sales position follows a month after Lakeview announced

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• IBM Tops U.S. Patent List for 13th Straight Year

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued its annual ranking of the top patent holders among the global companies that apply for and receive patent protection in the country. The USPTO is a branch within the U.S. Department of Commerce. As has been the case for the past 13 years, IBM got the largest number of patents in 2005, filing for and receiving 2,941 patents. However, IBM’s patent count fell by 9 percent from the 3,248 it received in 2004. While some IT professionals–particularly those in the open source development community and those in Europe who do not

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• LXI Appoints New Chairman, VP of Business Development

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange storage supplier LXI has hired a new chairman of the board and vice president of business development in the hopes that they can take LXI’s network storage business up to a new level. LXI has tapped Dan Latham, an executive with executive, sales, and marketing experience at a variety of information technology and telecommunications companies. Latham was named president of the Enterprise Division of a company called Seisint, a provider of background screening software and services that was sold to LexisNexis in Septmber 2004 for $775 million. Before joining Seisint, Latham was CEO of a company called ImageLinks, a

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• As I See It: Revenge of the Wise

  January 16, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Just two years from now, 40 percent of the American workforce will be 45 years of age or older. By 2012, one-fifth of American workers will be over 55. As Bob Dylan said, you don’t have to be a weather man to know which way the wind blows. The workforce is aging (or maturing as I prefer to characterize it, being a Boomer myself), and that may be the best news beleaguered IT professionals have heard in a long time–especially those who are 35 and older. The imminent retirement of the bountiful Boomers (all 78 million of them) will create

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• IBM Creates New TCP/IP and Ethernet PTF Group

  January 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have been suffering each time you tried to figure out how to patch the TCP/IP software on your AS/400, iSeries, or i5 server, IBM has listened to your complaints and has created a new TCP/IP and Ethernet PTF Group. For years, if you wanted to or suspected that you needed to patch the TCP/IP software built into OS/400 or maybe an Ethernet driver for a LAN card, you had to dig around in the PTFs released each week and try to sort it out. Other aspects of the system–database, Java, and so forth–have long since had their own

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