• Calling All System i5 Innovators

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have used an AS/400, iSeries, or System i5 server in an innovative way, whether you are an individual working in your garage office or a techie working at a company large or small, COMMON, the i5/OS and OS/400 user group, and IBM want to know what you have done. The deadline for the 2007 System i Innovation Awards is fast approaching, so if you want to embarrass your colleagues by making them give a speech or try to get a trip for yourself to Anaheim, California, to get your award at the annual COMMOM user group meeting

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• System i5 GM Shearer Chats with iSociety Members

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The iSociety user group devoted to the System i platform is beginning to come out of its shell, and hosted its first “fireside chat” with Mark Shearer, the general manager of the System i5 division, on February 1. If you missed the chat–which I did because iSociety did not notify me of it even though I am a member, unless of course my passport has been revoked–you can read the chat at this link on the iSociety. My thanks to the iSociety for posting a script of the chat for myself and for readers of The Four Hundred who

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• Faster i5 595 Rumored to Be Imminent

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that within the next month or so, IBM will roll out a faster high-end System i5 box, one that matches the basic feeds and speeds of the most powerful System p5 servers that Big Blue sells. It is not clear if this supposed upgrade to the System i5 595 machine will be done as a formal launch or as a special request box that only the largest i5/OS shops are even aware of. The latter kind of machine is available as an RPQ, which is short for “request for price quotation” in IBMspeak. Historically,

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• Avnet’s Second Fiscal Quarter Propped Up By EMEA Sales

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s System i5 server business might have been down 10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006, and System p5 Unix sales might have been soft with only a 4 percent decline, but master reseller Avnet, made the best of it and still managed to grow its overall electronics and technology distribution businesses in its second quarter of fiscal 2007 ended December 30. Avnet posted overall sales of $3.89 billion in the quarter, up 3.5 percent compared to the same quarter in fiscal 2006 (and which corresponded to the calendar fourth quarter of 2005). Avnet brought $99.1 million

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• IBM Moves OS/400 V5R3 Towards the Door, Rejiggers i5 Prices

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its launch of upgraded disk controllers and disk enclosures for the System i5 line last week, IBM also made a bunch of little changes to prices on selected features. The company also withdrew from its product catalog a number of peripherals and features, and also said that it would withdraw OS/400 V5R3 and an associated bevy of related systems programs from marketing on January 8, 2008. The withdrawal of OS/400 V5R3 in under 11 months is probably going to have a more profound effect on the i5/OS and OS/400 community than some price changes on features. For

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• Sales Up 16 Percent in Q1 as Kronos Launches Wares for Manufacturers

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Workforce management software maker Kronos keeps humming along, growing organically after making a number of key acquisitions in years past. With the company having come to dominate its niche software market, the only question now is why Oracle, Infor, or SAP have not acquired it yet. In its fiscal 2007 first quarter ended December 30, 2006, Kronos reported sales of $148.7 million, up 16 percent. While product sales were only up 9 percent to $52.2 million, Kronos had $10.6 million in subscription revenue, a new category of sales for the company. Maintenance fees rose by 13 percent in

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• Zend Upgrades Commercial Add-Ons for Its PHP Engine

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  PHP creator and commercializer Zend Technologies will today announce the third release of its Zend Platform PHP engine for enterprise-grade PHP applications. The Zend Platform software takes the open source PHP engine, which is distributed with open source Linux operating systems under a GPL license, and adds features to it for content caching, load balancing, high availability clustering, and monitoring and management. The basic PHP engine is free, but Zend Platform costs money, and the price varies depending on the features companies want to use. Zend has a somewhat confusing way of naming its products, which bears some explanation before

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• SafeData, Strategic Systems Form Partnership

  February 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  SafeData, a provider of hot site data centers based on iSeries and System i5 servers for small and medium businesses based in Warwick, Rhode Island, said last week that it has signed a partnership with Strategic Systems, a systems integrator based in Holly Springs, North Carolina, to expand its presence in the southeast region of the United States. “Strategic Systems has a strong base of IBM midrange clients in the southeastern United States,” explained Peter Briggs, SafeData’s president in making the announcement. “We have been focusing on the northeastern United States over the past few years. Through Strategic

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• As I See It: The Elusive Leader

  February 12, 2007 Victor Rozek

  You have to have a degree in forbearance to read the Harvard Business Review. As you might expect, any publication boasting the Harvard imprimatur is not only likely to be pricey (which at $16.95 per issue it most assuredly is), but its pages are guaranteed to be brimming with Ivy League importance. Granted, the magazine publishes the results of scholarship and research, but it’s all so weighty and earnest that even the self-evident becomes profound by virtue of inclusion. Take these startling revelations from a two-article expose on leadership in the February 2007 issue: “No one can be authentic

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• IBM X-Force Says For-Profit Cyber Attacks to Increase in 2007

  February 12, 2007 Alex Woodie

  2006 was a record year for security vulnerabilities, with an average of 20 new flaws discovered every day. But brace yourself for 2007, as cyber criminals grow more sophisticated, requiring more vigilance by companies, according to a recent report issued by IBM‘s Internet Security Systems (ISS) X-Force research and development team. There is a caveat to the vulnerability figures listed in the paragraph above. While the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities jumped 40 percent in 2006 compared to 2005-that’s 7,247 vulnerabilities compared to 5,176–the rate of “high impact” vulnerabilities decreased somewhat, from accounting for 28 percent of all vulnerabilities

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