• Readers Pipe Up on Service with a Smile Strategy

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  TFH Every now and then, an idea pops into my head and I mentally run at it hard and fast, trying to knock it down. The ideas behind Service with a Smile–and a Wink and a Nod, which was the lead essay in last week’s issue, have been on my mind for a few months, and I will be the first to admit that I wrote that late on a Friday after a long week with a bit too much coffee running in my veins. No doubt about it. But, nonetheless, the ideas seemed to resonate with readers of

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• IBM Revives Low Rate Financing Deal for the System i5

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s on-again, off-again Low Rate Financing offering for its various server products expired on December 31, but is was revived two weeks ago on the System i5 product line. The good news is that even though interest rates are trending upward, financing rates are down below the rates IBM was charging in May 2004. If the gap between actual interest rates on the street and what IBM is charging to finance OS/400 server deals is any indication of Big Blue’s eagerness to do deals, then it is probably safe to say IBM is pretty eager. The U.S. Federal Funds

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• OS/400 Servers Over Time: iSeries to i5 to System i

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that the System i5 machines are just getting into the hands of resellers and then customers, it is an appropriate time to take a hard look at the value that the new machines offer to OS/400 shops. In prior issues of this newsletter and its siblings in the Four Hundred family of publications, we have gone over the feeds and speeds of the new hardware and the features and functions of the new software. Now it is time to assess what kind of deal these new machines offer in a series of articles that will compare the System i5s

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• Monster ACM Report Says Offshoring Ain’t So Bad

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past several years, globalization, as expressed through H-1B visas and offshoring, has been the bugaboo of some regional and national IT communities and the savior for others. The race to the bottom and the ever-present need to slash costs while increasing the number of business functions that get automated and boosting the connectivity and collaboration between employees, partners, and suppliers, has put tremendous pressure on companies to get the cheapest IT labor and support they can. Much has been written about offshoring, but now the Association for Computing Machinery has weighed in with a big study that was

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• OS/400 Shops Increase Spending on Services

  February 27, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Last June, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels called services spending “the hidden giant of IT spending,” noting that the total dollars spent on services are “mostly hidden because it is fragmented into a dozen sub sectors. . . .” He notes that Forrester estimates that professional services represented 22 percent of all U.S. IT spending in 2004 and 2005, and he highlights the optimism that firms offering services feel that the services business will continue to grow. Of course, Bartels is talking about the IT industry as a whole here, not just the SMB market where the OS/400 platform is well

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• IBM Research Pushes Chip Tech Down Below 30 Nanometers

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and development partner JSR Micro, a Sunnyvale, California, maker of the components that go into chips, announced last week that they have pushed the photolithography methods used to make chips beyond the 32-nanometer limit that the chip industry has expected photolithography to peter out at. SPIE Microlithography 2006 conference being held in San Jose, IBM and JSR showed off some circuits they had created using a technique called immersion photolithography that could draw circuits with line widths at 29.9 nanometers, one-third the size of the current 90 nanometer circuits commonly

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• The Server Market Begins to Cool in Q4

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The latest server market statistics from IDC and Gartner came out last week. IDC gave out stats for the fourth quarter of 2005 and all of last year, while Gartner just talked about 2005. The two companies more or less agree on the shape of the server market, but it was IDC that came out and declared that revenues had actually declined in the fourth quarter, and shipments had begun to slow. Gartner was mum on the subject of the fourth quarter. IDC believes that the server market cooled in the fourth quarter of 2005, declining 0.2 percent to $14.5

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• SSA Global Warns of Shortfall, Reduces Projections for Fiscal 2006

  February 27, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like other vendors of IT products that are based in the United States but which do a big portion of their business in the global market, ERP software powerhouse SSA Global is being hit by the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies. Last week, SSA said that its projected revenues for all of fiscal 2006 would take a $14 million hit because of currency exchange rate changes. But other factors in the market caused SSA to lower its projections for the fiscal year ended July 31 from between $780 million to $800 million down to $755 million to

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• As I See It: Future Schlock

  February 27, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Raymond Kurzweil and Bill Joy are the Yin and Yang of technological consequence prediction. Kurzweil, the optimist, is part inventor, part futurist, and part philosopher. He is a best-selling author, recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Technology, and member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, so he knows whereof he speaks. Joy, the pessimist, is the quintessential nerd, turned computer architect, turned dark futurist. He is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and until 2003, he served as its chief scientist. He was also co-chair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research. So he, too, knows

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• TomorrowNow Upset at Quest User Group

  February 27, 2006 Alex Woodie

  TomorrowNow, the SAP subsidiary that provides third-party maintenance services for the J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft ERP systems, will be in Nashville in April for Quest International‘s annual conference. However, it won’t be at the Gaylord Opryland Resort, where conference sessions and the vendor expo will take place. Instead, TomorrowNow will be holding court “across the street,” because Quest has revoked the company’s membership due to its ownership by SAP. Andrew Nelson, founder, president, and CEO of TomorrowNow, sounded a bit annoyed in discussing recent events between his company and the Nashville-based user group. “They came and talked to

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