• IBM Tweaks Financing Deals to Push Servers, Storage

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re coming up on the end of another fiscal year, and as is traditional, IBM aims to use financing deals as a means of trying to push products in the fourth quarter. IBM last week announced a new financing deal for its hardware that will be familiar to its customers, since it is a variant of a deal that IBM has brought out of its bag of marketing tricks from time to time over the past several years. IBM also tweaked the financing rates on an existing deal. Under a deal called the Financing Advantage Why Wait deferral, IBM is

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• IBM Won’t Open Up XSM-Replicated Data in i5/OS V5R5

  September 25, 2006 Alex Woodie

  Flexibility has been a drawback of IBM‘s advanced Cross Site Mirroring (XSM) high availability technology. According to IBM officials at the COMMON conference last week, XSM will continue to be limited in its usefulness with the next release of the operating system, which will be called i5/OS V5R5. XSM, which IBM introduced with OS/400 V5R3 and enhanced with i5/OS V5R4, is a form of clustering used to mirror data and objects from one iSeries or i5 system to another. The technology, which leverages independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs), has been heralded by OS/400 high availability experts for its capability

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• Expect i5/OS V5R5 in 2007, Power6 for System i Maybe in 2007

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan and Dan Burger

  Whenever IBM‘s top brass in the System i division attends a major trade show event like COMMON, the IBMer in charge of development of the System i platform is always on hand to give a sneak preview of the technologies that Big Blue is putting together for the next release of hardware and software. The COMMON event in Miami Beach was no exception, and Jim Herring, director of System i product management and business operations, was on hand to answer questions. Because I have been fortunate enough to be called to serve for four weeks in New York

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• COMMON Rejiggers Itself for the 21st Century

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  COMMON, the largest user group dedicated to the System i platform, announced some big changes at its event in Miami Beach last week. Many of these changes were rumored and anticipated by the OS/400 and i5/OS community. The first big change is that the semi-annual big COMMON shindig, complete with a Town Hall meeting and a big vendor expo is history. In fact, the Fall COMMON event in Miami was, for all intents and purposes, the last such Fall COMMON we will see–at least like the past events. Next fall COMMON will, however, host a smaller event in Columbus,

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• Venture Capitalist Thoma Cressey Acquires Vision Solutions

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a story that the i5/OS and OS/400 community didn’t hear in two decades of history, but which in the past year has happened more than a few times. Another prominent player in the community has been acquired by a prominent venture capitalist. In this case, late last week, Vision Solutions, which is owned by a holding company from South Africa called Idion Technology Holdings, said that it was going to be acquired by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners. The deal, which has been approved by the Idion board of directors and which will presumably be approved by

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• EMC Buys Virtual Tape Library Specialist Neartek

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Although EMC has made no formal announcement of the deal, virtual tape library software maker Neartek has quietly said that EMC has bought the assets of the company and that it has ceased operations as of September 1. Like IBM and Sun Microsystems, EMC uses VTL software created by FalconStor in its own VTL product, the Clariion DL. So exactly what EMC has planned for Neartek’s Virtual Storage Engine, which runs on Windows, is unclear. The most obvious explanation for the acquisition is that Neartek was on the financial ropes and was approached by EMC, which did not want

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• The iSociety: System i Users React

  September 25, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Newcomers to the iSociety community that was announced last week at COMMON are invited to register to be part of that community. The registration process begins with the iSociety Creed, which states: “I believe in one system that fully integrates all things visible and invisible, and provides abundance to business everywhere. I believe that this only system was created to enlighten business people, and to free them from the tyranny of the technologists. And I believe that, one day, there will be just one system, and that all others will be pale imitations of it.” The visitor then has

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• Rimini Street Offers JDE Support Services

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Rimini Street, a Las Vegas-based provider of maintenance and technical support services for Siebel Systems CRM and PeopleSoft ERP suites–both now owned by Oracle–said last week that it would go for the trifecta and by the end of the year offer support on JDE’s World and EnterpriseOne ERP suites, too. The company, which was founded after Oracle bought Siebel Systems, added technical and maintenance support for PeopleSoft’s ERP software earlier this year. The support offering that Rimini Street is providing for the JDE suites is identical to its offerings on the PeopleSoft and Siebel stacks. Rimini Street says

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• As I See It: Pretexting

  September 25, 2006 Victor Rozek

  “Pretexting” is defined as: A) Invading a country under false pretenses; B) Telling your spouse you’re going to the store for a quart of milk and stopping for a quick beer on the way home; or C) Hiring a lot of lawyers to give the appearance of ethics and objectivity. (For the purpose of this pop quiz ignore the fact that attorneys are paid not to be objective and that lawyers are to ethics what politicians are to truth.) The answer could probably be any of the above, but if you picked “C” you’re a winner, or in Hewlett-Packard‘s

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• The Web, the Workplace, and IBM’s Updated Content Management Software

  September 25, 2006 Dan Burger

  Without mentioning specific numbers, IBM is pleased to report that its Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) software revenue grew 68 percent in 2005, and that during the first six months of 2006, revenue jumped another 52 percent. Those are excellent figures, no question about it. But a small group of users can make otherwise meager revenue gains look spectacular in terms of percentages. We can’t say for sure, but let’s call it a hunch that most of you have not had your hands on Web content management software, whether it was delivered from IBM or some other vendor. Web content

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