• IBM Cuts Price Tags on i5 550s and 570s, Tweaks Canadian Deal

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was bound to happen sooner or later. Last week, IBM cut prices on its midrange System i5 550 and sorta-midrange and more powerful System i5 570 machines that are based on the Power5+ processors that came out last year. The price changes were meant to stimulate sales of these platforms, which have plenty of oomph and which will be able to run the future V6R1, due in early 2008. While IBM has one Power6-based machine in the field–the 9406-MMA server that bears the System p and System i 570 brand–and will have a second–the JS22 blade server–to market in

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• Vision Solutions Says Business Is Better Than Expected

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With so much bad or shaky economic information sloshing around out there on the Internet and airwaves, it isn’t often that good news can be heard above the cacophony. This is especially true in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem, where the players tend to be smaller and any news–good or bad or otherwise–from IBM tends to dominate. Some of this is because so many companies in the System i market are privately held, of course. But sometimes, these companies talk. As did high availability software maker Vision Solutions last week. Since it was taken over by private equity firm Thoma

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• Power6 Blades Finally Come to Market from IBM

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After something close to six years of waiting, customers who are used to supporting applications on full-blown Power processors from IBM are finally getting an enterprise-grade blade server for Big Blue’s BladeCenter chassis. As previously divulged in this newsletter months ago, IBM last week has indeed launched the JS22 blade server, which crams two dual-core Power6 processors onto a single board and which supports AIX and Linux. The JS22 blade will support the i5/OS operating system early in 2008. IBM was rumored to be working on two Power6-based BladeCenter machines, one called the JS22 and the other called the JS12.

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• Eclipse IDE Study Shows that Standards and Community Work

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Eclipse Foundation, which was set up a number of years ago by IBM to create an alternative to Sun Microsystems‘ NetBeans project to create an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for programming tools, has just completed a survey in conjunction with IDC of its base to see who is deploying Eclipse, how they are using it, and how they participate in the community. Approximately 2.3 million programmers worldwide use a development tool that is based on the Eclipse framework, which allows elements of programming tools to be snapped into the IDE and therefore enables a certain

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• Power Systems Division: A New Unit, i5/OS and iCluster Included

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM broke the former System i division into two pieces in July, it did more than create two separate business units focused on different kinds of computing accounts. It also brought together a new stack of operating systems and related systems software that is the key to driving sales in both the Business Systems division–comprised of the entry System i 515, 520, 525, and 550 servers–and the Power Systems division–the result of the merger of the System p AIX server business and the high-end System i 570 and 595 machines. Historically in the systems and server racket, the coupling

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• ASNA Pushes More Than 1 Million DataGate Licenses

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application modernization tool vendor ASNA, which bridges the gap between IBM‘s i5/OS and OS/400 platform and its integrated database and Microsoft‘s Windows platform and its .NET architecture, said last week that it has hit a major milestone in the history of the company. Specifically, ASNA said that it had broken through the 1 million license mark for its DataGate software, which is a piece of middleware that ASNA has been selling for years to allow Windows applications–in recent years, those developed using the .NET framework from Microsoft–to access information stored in DB2/400 databases on i5/OS and OS/400

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• System i VIP Initiative Boosts Sales, Says IBM

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a statement released last week by IBM, the Vertical Industry Program (VIP) marketing effort, which Big Blue announced in late January to help target specific customers in specific markets that are well suited to buying System i servers and selected applications, is showing promising results in helping to boost sales of the venerable midrange platform. Exactly how much the VIP effort contributed to helping System i sales, IBM did not, as usual, say with any precision. IBM has been working on developing the VIP initiative since 2005, when the System i marketeers and sales executives wondered if

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• Aldon Extends Partnership with SOSY, Launches IT Action Hero Contest

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application lifecycle management software maker Aldon said last week that it has worked out a deal with a long-time partner in Europe that will see it expand its coverage. The company also announced a contest for its end-user customers called the Aldon IT Action Hero of the Year contest, and is soliciting stories from individuals, programming teams, or whole companies who have done outstanding work for their companies while using Aldon’s eponymous tools. First, the partnership extension. Back in July, as we previously reported, Aldon inked a distribution partnership agreement with SOSY, a distributor of i5/OS and OS/400

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• As I See It: The Paradox

  November 12, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Someone once said that wisdom comes from seeing the paradox–a contradiction that is nonetheless true. Work is a paradox: It can be life’s most pleasurable and fulfilling experience; or it can be filled with boredom and drudgery. For most of us, the truth lies somewhere between, and we navigate our careers longing for more fulfillment while searching for ways to minimize the drudgery–or at the very least, ways to anesthetize ourselves against it. In our culture, work has long been equated with punishment. Christian mythology describes Adam and Eve leading idyllic lives of leisure until an act of disobedience finds

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• Fujifilm Adds GPS Tracker to Tape Cartridges

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fujifilm USA, the Valhalla, New York, subsidiary of Japanese film and recording media giant Fujifilm, last week added a new twist to technology for adding more security to tape archives. The techies at Fujifilm, who crank out more patentable pieces of intellectual property than just about any other company in the world on behalf of the $23.6 billion Japanese conglomerate, have come up with a new product called Tape Tracker for data recording media. Fujifilm and its tape drive partners have already added encryption to LTO Generation 4 tape drives, but once a tape leaves the data center,

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