• Vanguard Systems Buys Elite Document Solutions

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Vanguard Systems, a supplier of document management, workflow, and related storage applications for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, continues to grow through acquisitions, and last week it bought one of its partners, Elite Document Systems. Vanguard sells an electronic document management solution called IMS/21, which runs on i5/OS and OS/400. IMS/21 is commonly used in insurance, healthcare, financial services, and distribution companies that also rely heavily on documents to do their business. The IMS/21 software keeps electronic versions of all of the fax, invoice, statement, and other reports that i5/OS and OS/400 applications generate; it allows the scanning

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• Will 45 Nanometer Chips Make Two Warring Camps?

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Chip makers IBM and Intel have announced their research efforts to push the boundaries of chip making processes as they try to keep the Moore’s Law price/performance curve alive. IBM and Intel both divulged some of the techniques that they will employ in their 45 nanometer chip making processes, trying to steal headlines from the other. But that may not be the real story. It probably won’t be long before there are only two organizations in the world with the resources to extend chip technology and push Moore’s Law. One of these companies will be Intel, of course, and the

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• IBM Upgrades System i5 Disk Controllers, Adds Enclosures

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As this newsletter reported the company would do several weeks ago, IBM will this week launch a new disk controller for the System i5 line that has more performance and fatter read and write caches. IBM is also announcing a new means of providing much denser disk array packaging based on a method currently in use on the System p5 Power-based and System x X64-based server lines. The expected LTO tape library was not announced this week, but it is probably due any day now. There are several variants of the new disk controller card, which changes a little depending

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• Vision Solutions Boasts of Financial Results Post iTera Merger

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software vendor Vision Solutions says that the first 60 days of business since it completed its merger with former rival iTera have gone really well–and perhaps even better than anticipated. Vision Solutions used to be a public company, which meant that it published financial results for investors and the broader market to see. But Vision Solutions was taken private when it was acquired by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, a private equity firm that invests in a number of high-tech companies, in September 2005. iTera was a privately held upstart, taking on the Big Three in the HA

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• IBM and ISVs Launch VIP Program to Reinvigorate System i5 Sales

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As last year was coming to a close, executives at IBM said that in 2007 the company would be cooking up some sales and marketing schemes to bolster the System i5 channel and do a better job pushing the box and the solutions that run atop of it. Last Friday, IBM announced the Vertical Industry Program, or VIP, which is a fine-grained operation that will target very specific industries in various geographies to marry customers looking for applications to the independent software vendors who have the software they need. According to Kevin Patterson, director of worldwide System i sales at

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• Silly Rumor Says Oracle Wants to Buy SAP

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, the IT press reports rumors not because we think the rumor will pan out, but because reporting on the rumor is fun. And so it is with the most recent rumor that Oracle is considering a bid to acquire application software rival SAP for 38.5 euros per share. The rumor, which appears to have come out of the London stock market, was passed around the blogosphere last week and was reported in the London-based IT trade magazine, Computer Business Review. That rumored acquisition offer by Oracle works out to about $50 a share at the current exchange rates,

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• Sundry Other System i5 Announcements

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In anticipation of upcoming storage announcements for the System i5 product line, which I told you about a few weeks ago and which IBM will be making officially on February 6, the company last week made a bunch of relatively minor System i5 announcements. While not earth-shattering, these announcements are nonetheless important for OS/400 and i5/OS shops who are looking at their 2007 budget plans. IBM has announced two rebate deals relating to the System i5 and made modifications to a bunch of existing deals. The first new deal has to do with the System i5 Capacity BackUp (CBU) servers,

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• Manugistics Acquisition Powers Growth for JDA in the Fourth Quarter

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  JDA Software, which supplies software for retailers who run their applications on i5/OS or Windows platforms, announced its fourth quarter 2006 financial results, and thanks in part to the acquisition of supply chain specialist Manugistics, JDA was able to show pretty impressive growth. JDA said that for the fourth quarter ended December 31, it had total revenues of $88.6 million, up 61 percent from the $55.1 million in sales for software, services, and maintenance that the company posted in the fourth quarter of 2005. Sales of products and services from the Manugistics line, which became part of JDA when

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• The X Factor: One Socket to Rule Them All

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Vendors in the information technology business talk about standards more than just about anything else, something that the advent of the open systems business and Unix taught them to do two decades ago. But from their point of view, standards are a terrible thing–unless you happen to own one. We have standards for operating system features–POSIX and TCP/IP being two big ones–and standards for networking–Ethernet of ever-increasing speed–for storage–PCI, PCI-X and now PCI-Express peripheral slots and SCSI, SATA, and SAS disks–and for main memory–FB-DIMM and DDR2 modules. And now, perhaps, is the time for a standard CPU socket and interconnection

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• Rocket Software Lowers Bid for Seagull Software Slightly

  February 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Middleware software maker Seagull Software announced last week that it has received a slightly lower offer to be acquired by Rocket Software. Back in December, Rocket Software, which makes a bunch of mainframe tools and has extensions to Hewlett-Packard‘s OpenView tools that it licenses to HP, offered 4.68 euros per share to acquire the shares and outstanding stock options of Seagull Software. Just taking into account the shares listed publicly, that came out to about $55.7 million. According to a statement put out by Seagull Software, the revision came about due to “a combination of factors, including continued

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