• IBM Delivers Entry Capacity BackUp Machines, As Promised

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a couple of months now, executives in IBM‘s System i division have been hinting that there were plans afoot for stretching the Capacity BackUp (CBU) variants of the i5 line down into the entry part of the product catalog. And last week, that is exactly what IBM did. The Capacity BackUp servers were originally announced as a hot-standby machine to support data and application replication workloads and do pretty much nothing else. Because they did nothing else, they cost a lot less than a regular Enterprise Edition iSeries or i5 box. But, customers wanted IBM to make some

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• AMR Research Says ERP Software Sales to Hit $29 Billion This Year

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Jim Shepherd, the senior vice president of research at AMR Research, released the firm’s latest analysis of the past ERP software market and its prognostications for the future of that market, and the good news is this: ERP software sales are still growing. In fact, according to AMR, companies consumed $25.4 billion worldwide on ERP software, support, and services in 2005, and if AMR’s projections are correct, then they will spend $29 billion in 2006. That’s an increase of 14 percent, which is a pretty healthy growth rate. Moreover, Sheppard is predicting that over the next five years, the

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• IBM Uncloaks Power6 Chip Details

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s the fall, so that means it is time for the major designers of processors and other related electronics to converge on Silicon Valley for the In-Stat Microprocessor Forum. IBM‘s Brad McCredie, who works for the Systems and Technology Group as the chief architect of the future Power6 processor, gave his presentation at the forum last week, and divulged a lot of the inner workings of the device. There’s a lot of stuff in this chip, which is what you would expect from a device with around 750 million transistors. First and foremost, McCredie said that the Power6 chip

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• IBM Enhances Web Enablement Bundle, But for V5R4 Only

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the server announcements last week, IBM also made some tweaks to its so-called Web Enablement bundle of tools that it has created to make i5/OS servers easier to configure and manage as they are set up to support Web-style applications. The Web Enablement software actually comes with its own licensed program product designation, 5722-WE2. The key new feature that IBM added this time around is called Express Runtime Web Environments for i5/OS, which is an installation program that IBM put on a CD or DVD drive to provide one-step installation of WebSphere Application Server-Express V6.0 and iSeries

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• User-Capped i5 520s, SAP Solution Edition 520s Launched

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When I wrote last week about upcoming System i5 servers that IBM was possibly going to announce in the future, I didn’t expect the announcements to come out that week. My sources were under the impression that it might happen before the end of the year, possibly with an announcement soon after that. Obviously, something has changed, and I think Big Blue has seen that moving to the Power5+ processors is not enough to make the i5 platform competitive with dual-core Wintel and Lintel platforms. Whatever the cause, the good news is that IBM is acting. Last Tuesday, IBM quietly

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• IBM Cuts Memory Prices on i5 570s, Gives Disk Controller Upgrade Conversions

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the System i5 announcements last week, IBM revealed a new reduced-price 16 GB memory card for the i5 570. The company also announced that it was now allowing customers to upgrade selected PCI-X RAID 5 disk controllers to more recent models through a feature conversion. When the revamped i5 570s were announced in January with the Power5+ processors, IBM offered two sets of memory cards. Most of the cards are based on 533 MHz DDR2 main memory, which allows the box to scale up to 256 GB of maximum main memory using 16 GB cards. To further

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• IBM Brings Blogging and RSS to Lotus Notes/Domino

  October 16, 2006 Dan Burger

  Maybe you are old enough to remember business without e-mail and the Internet. The point is not how old you are, but how quickly business has adopted these technologies to improve business processes in more ways than you can shake a memory stick at. What I like most about it is the capability to work from a virtual office. And the tools to do this just keep getting better and better. Take, for instance, the latest version of Lotus Notes and Domino. IBM is adding features that any out-of-office worker can put to use, because the key to working remotely

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• BOS to Offer $5.5 Million in Shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Better On-line Solutions, the Israeli maker of midrange connectivity products, said last week that it has filed a draft prospectus with the Israeli Securities Authority and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange to offer ordinary shares and warrants on that exchange valued at $5.5 million. BOS, which sells its products in the U.S. through BOSaNOVA, said two weeks ago that its president and chief executive officer, Adiv Baruch, has turned in his resignation and will leave the company at the end of the year. Baruch said that he came in to turn BOS around, and he divested unprofitable businesses

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Blowing Up Buddha

  October 16, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  Beginning in the third century, craftsmen in Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, carved and decorated two giant figures of Buddha. In March 2001, six months before Al Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center, the Taliban razed the statues. Two years later, the United States bombed Baghdad. And looters hit the National Museum . Their acts were so vile that even the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was moved. He said, “Stuff happens.” More recently, the board of the world’s second largest computer company was taken over by cannibals. They toppled two of the greatest images in high technology, those of

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• Rimini Street Hires SAP Execs as TomorrowNow Expands Operations

  October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since Oracle ate PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, a number of companies have been trying to make money by offering alternative technical and update support for the PeopleSoft and JDE ERP suites and the Siebel CRM suite. One of them was TomorrowNow, which was founded to offer alternative support for PeopleSoft applications and then expanded to offer JDE support; TomorrowNow was acquired by SAP in January 2005, and has been trying to give Oracle’s new customer base some grief. Another alternative support provider chasing Oracle customers is Rimini Street, which was founded to offer support to the Siebel

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