Volume 15, Number 45 - November 13, 2006 Archives

IBM Lowers Interest Rates on Low Rate Financing Deal

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue is jerking around the interest rates on its Low Rate Financing deal again, and this time, it is lowering the rates it is charging to finance IT hardware, software, and services so it can boost sales in the fourth quarter.

On September 19, IBM raised the financing rates on the Low Rate Financing deal for the second time in 2006, and now the rate has gone down. Interest rates have, by the way, been more or less stable during this time, so IBM is clearly using its ability to borrow money very cheaply to help customers finance gear,

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Arrow and Agilysys Cite Weakness in Proprietary Server Sales

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Two of the biggest master distributors of IBM‘s servers, Arrow Electronics and Agilysys, have turned in their financial report cards for the three months ended September 30, and as you might expect, both companies cited weakness in the sale of proprietary servers–meaning mostly System i5 products and some mainframes.

Arrow, of course, has a vast distribution business, including electronic components as well as IT gear (much like rival Avnet, the other “A” of the three A-named companies who are master resellers of the System i platforms. During the third quarter, Arrow had revenues of $3.45 billion, up

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Sirius Gets Equity Investment from Thoma Cressey

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, when Thoma Cressey Equity Partners takes an interest in something, the private equity firm doesn’t waste much time moving. After having acquired two high availability software makers in the System i market within the past several weeks, last Friday the company announced that it would be making an equity investment in another prominent System i vendor: Sirius Computer Solutions. To many, this will be seen as another shot in the arm–or perhaps more precisely, into the balance sheet–for the System i market.

Sirius was founded in 1980 in San Antonio, Texas, and quickly grew to become one of

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Power.org Organization Announces Merged Power Instruction Set Architecture

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As promised, the Power.org organization that IBM created to promote and standardize the Power processor architecture and build of the ecosystem of hardware and software based on the Power chips has rolled out a new instruction set architecture, or ISA, for the Power platform.

Power ISA Version 2.03 and the related Power Architecture Platform Requirements (PAPR) specification were both announced last week, and Power.org also unveiled a roadmap for the Power architecture and the processors that use it.

The new ISA merges the architectural elements of IBM’s Power and PowerPC processors with the vector processing extensions created by Motorola before

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Power6 Ups the Ante for Virtualization, Power Management

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last month, IBM told the world about some of the features that it had built into its future Power6 RISC processors, which are expected to appear in IBM’s System p machines around mid-2007 and maybe in its System i machines around that time, or maybe in late 2007 and perhaps early 2008. Big Blue is being a little vague about exactly when Power6 will come out for reasons it has not specified. But the company is being clear that when it does come out, Power6 will be jammed full of improvements.

As previously reported in this newsletter, the Power6 chip

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Online Backups Business Treating EVault Well

November 13, 2006 Alex Woodie

Things seem to be going well for EVault, the provider of online backup and recovery solutions for the iSeries and other platforms. According to the company, which is privately held and therefore not required to disclose financial data, fiscal year 2006 saw revenues increased by 44 percent while the number of customers increased by more than a third. What’s more, EVault says the momentum continued into the first part of fiscal year 2007.

EVault, which was founded in 1997, was one of the first companies to commercialize online back ups and recoveries. In 2004, the company introduced support for

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Interest in WDSc Indicates Small but Steady Change in App Dev

November 13, 2006 Dan Burger

One of the reasons applications, such as those developed in RPG and COBOL, are branded as legacy is because most are constructed with non graphical server-side tools that are clunky and slow compared to modern, client-side tools with graphical interfaces and major productivity and functionality advantages. Alternatives to the trustworthy SEU/PDU tools exist. IBM and a long list of its business partners offer these alternatives. And I think it is fair to say momentum is building when it comes to developing modern applications, but it would be an exaggeration to call it anything approaching a groundswell.

Ask anyone in the

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Sirius Gets Equity Investment from Thoma Cressey

November 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sirius was founded in 1980 in San Antonio, Texas, and quickly grew to become one of

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As I See It: The Workplace Politician

November 13, 2006 Victor Rozek

Politics is a great tree burdened with rotting fruit, and there’s nothing like a recent election to remind us of why it can be so distasteful. If political ads are any measure of gravitas, politics is full of brash sound and feigned fury signifying rudeness. Although politics is associated primarily with governance, the term is also used in the workplace, where it describes the backroom and boardroom decisions that impact employees–often adversely–but have little or nothing to do with the actual running of the business.

To be sure, the term “politics” is also used more loosely to describe a range

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