• IBM to Spend $100 Million in 2006 to Drive Express Offerings at SMB Shops

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM said last week that it was going to spend $100 million to reach out to thousands of IT resellers around the globe who peddle hardware, software, and services into the small and medium business end of the IT market. The effort, dubbed Express Track, aims to significantly increase the number of partners and resellers that IBM has in the SMB space. The SMB part of the IT market is growing roughly twice as fast as the enterprise segment, so IBM has been revamping and repricing its servers and software to get more traction in the SMB space, where price

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• Vanguard Systems, Document Imaging Solutions Merge

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Vanguard Systems, a supplier of document management, workflow, and related storage applications for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, has merged with Document Imaging Solutions, a provider of document processing and content and records management software for the Windows platform. DIS has created a set of records management tools called e-DMS/Workflow, which runs on Windows boxes. Like other enterprise content management (ECM) players–notably FileNet, which was acquired by IBM two weeks ago for $1.6 billion–DIS has created a set of customized records management extensions to the e-DMS/Workflow product that are tailored for specific industries. Specifically, e-DMS/Workflow has been

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• Bang for the Buck: Midrange i5 Servers Versus the Competition

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the prior two installments in this Bang for the Buck series of articles, I looked at how various i5 520 machines stacked up against similarly powered and configured Windows, Linux, and Unix servers. The first article looked at the i5 520 Value and Express Editions and their competition, and the second article did comparisons to the i5 520 Standard and Enterprise Editions. This week, I examine the relative performance and value that the i5 550 delivers compared to rival boxes. As was the case with the entry i5 520 machines, the advent of dual-core X64 processors and aggressive, core-neutral

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• Brocade to Buy McDATA for $713 Million

  August 21, 2006 Alex Woodie

  Brocade Communications Systems, a manufacturer of switches used in storage area networks (SANs), plans to buy rival McDATA in an all-stock transaction valued at $713 million. Michael Klayko, CEO for San Jose, California-based Brocade, said the acquisition of McDATA will build on Brocade’s vision for the next-generation data center. “This combination will accelerate the pace of innovation, enable us to build stronger relationships with our customers and partners, and provide greater scale and efficiencies to accelerate our growth,” Klayko says. John Kelley, chairman, president, and CEO of Broomfield, Colorado-based McDATA, says the deal benefits customers and investors. “For our

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• Does the Size of Your IT Supplier Really Matter?

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Numbers matter to people. There are symbolic floors and ceilings, expressed as numbers, that delineate what most of us consider the proper bounds to reality or significant milestones. Think of Dow 10,000, or the turn of the millennium, or a 25th wedding anniversary, or breaking the 10-second barrier for the 100-meter dash, or pushing through the sound barrier. Moreover, disasters magnify with increasing numbers by more than you might think possible–if you weren’t human, that is. We rank the events and the things in our lives by numbers, and in many cases, the changing numbers change our behavior. Even if

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• WebSphere Wears Enterprise Portal Software Crown Again

  August 21, 2006 Dan Burger

  Five years ago, the portal business was just a glint in IBM‘s eye. Last week, IDC released a report that placed the WebSphere Portal portfolio in the number one slot for the fourth consecutive year. IBM secured its position as the established leader in the enterprise portal software (EPS) market with a year-over-year revenue gain of 12 percent, according to Ken Bisconti, vice president of workplace, portal, and collaboration products at Big Blue. IDC bases its rankings on software license and maintenance revenue. The abstract to the IDC report noted that IBM’s leading position in the EPS market can

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• ERP Software: Its Effect on Performance and Productivity, Part 2

  August 21, 2006 Jerome Peloquin

  This is the second of three-part article series on the use of technology to improve and enhance human performance in the workplace. These articles specifically address computer software as typified by the large scale ERP applications of the last thirty years, and chronicles the development of technology in support of performance and productivity. This installment covers first generation of ERP systems and their underlying technologies. I recommend reading the first article in the series, of course. Although helpful, reading it is not absolutely necessary to understand this article. A Tiny Review–The Beginning The functional purpose of technology in the

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• AMR Research Says HCM and CRM Markets Are Growing Faster than ERP

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since the turn of the century, sales of ERP systems have been plodding steadily along, but other software segments, which are not nearly as large, have experienced faster growth. So it is for human capital management (HCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) software, which are adjuncts to ERP systems. According to a recent report from AMR Research, the CRM software market is expected to grow at 10 percent in 2006. The HCM software segment is also expected to grow at 10 percent this year by AMR’s reckoning, and these two segments will be tied as the fastest growing segments

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• The X Factor: Database Appliances Come Around Again

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great thing about a general purpose operating system like a variant of Unix, Windows, or Linux is that it is designed to support a lot of different applications and many different means to access those applications. The original computers from decades ago were primitive and also relatively secure and easy to manage by modern standards. The price/performance improvements in increasingly complex operating systems have not come even close to offsetting the annoyance and cost of patching and securing them. Even a free operating system carries a very large people cost. Which is why makers of software that resides on

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• SaaS Is Real: Salesforce.com Boasts of 500,000 Subscribers

  August 21, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While most companies want to run their own applications, there is increasing traction for the idea of selling software as a service, or under a SaaS model, if you want to use the IT lingo. The poster child for SaaS is Salesforce.com, which was founded on the idea of selling a hosted version of its customer relationship management software seven years ago. Last week, Salesforce.com–which may be in use at your company–announced that it has managed to grow its end user subscriber base to 500,000 seats, despite a number of embarrassing system outages earlier this year. Those seats are

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