System iNetwork

July 2009

July 27, 2009 10:11 AM

iManifest EMEA Still Looking for Heroes

Following in the footsteps of the iManifest effort in Japan, LANSA's Martin Fincham's efforts to get an iManifest EMEA off the ground have slowed. While there's been a lot of great response and interest, Fincham reports, the initiative needs some larger "Tier 1" IBM i-focused vendors to get on board. So far, aside from LANSA, only smaller vendors have been willing to shell out a bit of cash to make the iManifest EMEA take off.

On his My Midrange Meddle blog, Fincham writes:

I don't have a good handle on whether my call for participation in the iManifest EMEA initiative has reached the upper echelons of our community - those with the authority and financial wherewithal to say, like me, "that's a bloody good idea, we'll have a punt". I am grateful for all the media coverage and the declarations of support this publicity has generated. But now I'm asking you to go check with your boss if a) they are aware of the initiative and b) will they come out in support of iManifest EMEA?

Posted by cmaxcer on July 27, 2009 at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2009 11:49 AM

IBM Intros Easy POWER7 Upgrades for POWER6 Owners, Adds VM Software

If there's one thing that IBM does particularly well, it's to ensure that the solutions its customers purchased in the past will keep working far into the future, despite new software, operating systems, and microprocessors. Continuing in this tradition, IBM has introduced a new upgrade path to its next-generation of Power Systems based on the POWER7 microprocessor. Basically, if you're on a POWER6-based 570 or 595, you can upgrade your system to take advantage of POWER7--whenever it becomes available, that is.

IBM didn't say when it would introduce POWER7 microprocessors, but hey, you don't have to a be a kindergartner learning to count to know it's coming.

So How's This Work?

A Power 595 or 570 system upgrade can be accomplished during planned downtime by simply replacing the processors, memory, and system controllers with new POWER7 components within the existing system frame, IBM says. POWER7 processors will offer two to three times the performance of POWER6 using the same amount of energy, and they will be available in four, six and eight-core varieties.

To move your applications from POWER6 systems to the newly upgraded Power 595 or Power 570 servers, IBM's PowerVM Live Partition Mobility or AIX Live Application Mobility software will get the job done without impacting the availability of the applications, IBM says.

The new POWER7-based systems will include PowerVM virtualization enhancements, IBM notes, which will let you run up to a 1,000 virtual machines per system. POWER7 microprocessors, by the way, will use 45-nanometer technology and will feature coordinated upgrades across other technology components, including firmware and systems software.

IBM Announces New Virtualization Management Software, Too

So if you've got a 1,000 virtualized machines running on your Power System, you're going to need software to manage them, so that's where IBM's newly announced IBM Systems Director VMControl comes in.

The new tool lets you manage heterogeneous virtual servers, letting you discover, display, monitor, and locate virtual resources, as well as create and manage virtual servers, plus deploy and manage workloads--with a common interface--across Power Systems IBM i, AIX, Linux, in addition to IBM System z, System x x86-based servers, and BladeCenter solutions.

VMControl is part of the IBM Systems Director family of software.

Posted by cmaxcer on July 22, 2009 at 11:49 AM | Comments (11)

July 20, 2009 11:43 AM

IBM Beats Street, Talks Strategy, Downplays Hardware

In last week's conference call with Wall Street analysts and investors, Mark Loughridge, IBM senior vice president and chief financial officer, led with the prettiest numbers: In the second quarter of 2009, IBM delivered $2.32 of earnings per share, up 18 percent year to year. IBM generated more than $4 billion of cash from operations, ended the quarter with $12.5 billion in the bank, and returned $2.4 billion to shareholders, with $700 million in dividends and $1.7 billion of share repurchases. IBM now expects to generate at least $9.70 of earnings per share, which is up 50 cents from the company's previous estimates. "This is the result of the strategic transformation of our business," Loughridge said.

To nutshell IBM's major efforts, the company is working to provide high margin services and software through a nimble globalized workforce. "Margins are fueling our profit growth," Loughridge noted. "This quarter, our strategic outsourcing signings were up 38 percent at constant currency, and our key branded middleware revenue, now 58 percent of software, grew 5 percent at constant currency."

IBM's Transformation

Loughridge framed much of the conference call with explanations of IBM's transformation to a company with a high-value, high-margin focus.

"If you go back to the 90's, our gross margin was declining, with increasing pressure from commoditizing products. This was a massive headwind for us, which impacted our ability to reinvest in the business. Since then, we exited commoditizing businesses, including HDD’s in 2002, PCs in 2005, and printers in 2007--which represent nearly $15 billion of annual revenue. In that same time, we acquired over 100 companies for $20 billion. This has clearly accelerated our shift to higher value capabilities," he explained.

"We are investing in capabilities that will differentiate IBM in the future and accelerate the development of new market
opportunities. For example, in support of Smarter Planet solutions, 25 percent of our research projects are dedicated to these initiatives which take IT well beyond its traditional data center boundaries. This requires both unique technical capabilities and skills, in areas like healthcare, transportation, telecommunications and utility systems," Loughridge explained.

"From 2000 to 2008, the profit from software and services combined almost doubled," Loughridge noted. "In 2009, we’re continuing to drive solid profit growth in software and services. In fact, we expect both software and services PTI to grow double-digits this year."

Services and Software Segments

"Our combined services business did a tremendous job driving profitability and margin expansion this quarter. In what continues to be a challenging economic environment, total pre-tax profit was up 23 percent on revenue that was down 12 percent as reported and 4 percent at constant currency," Loughridge reported.

While IBM's software revenue was down 7 percent year to year on revenue of $5.3 billion for the quarter, the apparent dip was hardly bad. "We had terrific profit performance, with segment pre-tax income up 24 percent year to year, and pre-tax margin up 8 points to 32 percent," Loughridge said.

Meanwhile, Loughridge also reported that WebSphere products grew 8 percent; Business Process Management, Commerce, and Datapower product segments all grew double digits at constant currency; Information Management software declined 4 percent, but grew 4 percent at constant currency; Cognos, which was acquired in January of 2008, grew over 20 percent; IBM also had strong growth in its Information Integration and Master Data Management products. Lotus software declined 14 percent while Rational dipped 2 percent.

Tivoli's storage products grew 16 percent, or 25 percent at constant currency. "Driving this growth are the hot, higher value areas of virtualization, deduplication, and open disk storage, which together grew over 60 percent. We built the latter two capabilities through our Diligent and XIV acquisitions," Loughridge said.

Big Declines for Hardware

Systems & Technology revenue of $3.9 billion was down 26 percent year to year, which was 22 percent at constant currency. "We believe this performance is in line with the industry," Loughridge said, noting that IBM gained some market share over its competitors, particularly in the converged System p brand.

"We gained share in the UNIX market for the fifth consecutive quarter. Share gains have been the most pronounced in the midrange and high end of our product line, where our success in driving consolidation and virtualization has delivered proven results," Loughridge said. IBM said it displaced well over a 100 Unix competitors in the quarter and more than doubled the number of Sun takeouts from the first quarter.

Still, converged System p declined 13 percent year to year, but gross profit margin improved 2 points year to year "through solid cost management" Loughridge said.

System x revenue declined 22 percent and IBM's storage products declined 20 percent, but x gained a bit of market share and and storage held market share, respectively. System z revenue declined 39 percent year to year--but that's compared to stellar performance from 2008.

Blades were down 6 percent year to year.

Loughridge did say that IBM expects to improve revenue performance in the Systems & Technology Group starting in the third quarter--and deliver year to year profit growth in the fourth quarter.

Posted by cmaxcer on July 20, 2009 at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2009 9:54 AM

YouTube Video Profiles FIDM, BI, and Smart i

I'm working on a pair of articles about business intelligence for the September print issue, and there's an interesting end-to-end solution that ironically takes pieces and parts from multiple places to create the whole--I'm talking about the Smart i Appliance for IBM i. The word appliance implies this thing is something akin to a refrigerator that you just plug in, but really it's more like a gourmet oven/stove combination that requires special power and natural gas hookups, along with a bit of fit-and-finish work.

Still, in the land of BI, appliance is a reasonable descriptor for the SMB-targeted Smart i.

Smart i is put together using services and components from Key Information Systems (integrator), Systech Solutions (implementation), Talend (open source Extract, Transform, and Load software), and IBM (IBM i hardware plus IBM DB2 Web Query for i).

The whole package is designed to cost less than $50,000.

The point? I wanted to share a video that features Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, CIO at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM), who talks about Smart i on a YouTube video. Reynolds-Lair has been a long-time user and proponent of IBM i/System i/etc technologies. Here's that vid:

Posted by cmaxcer on July 15, 2009 at 9:54 AM | Comments (2)

July 13, 2009 9:53 AM

IBM i Manifest Spreads to EMEA

Seeking to build on the excellent and original i Manifest initiative launched by 70 IBM Business Partners and ISVs in Japan earlier this year, the business-focused grassroots effort to promote IBM i is traveling to Europe.

Amid clamoring interest and calls for action, Martin Fincham, LANSA's general manager for EMEA (and My Midrange Meddle blogger) is working to get a band of EMEA vendors to pony up the cash necessary to make a statement for IBM i. The Japanese group reportedly funded a full page ad in the Nikkei newspaper that would have cost somewhere in the $100,000 range to publish.

Fincham is looking to raise cash for a similar endeavor:

It was bold of our Japanese brothers-in-arms to announce their pledge in a national business newspaper. The cost of such a public declaration sends a clear message of intent to the market and makes this initiative standout from other ‘flash-in-the-pan’ endeavours. While Europe has several pre-eminent business newspapers from which to choose, I am inclined to believe that the Financial Times has the best pedigree and broadest reach in Europe. The rate card for a full-page advert with European distribution is £69,800 (€81,000). We need vendors from the IBM i community in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to come forward and agree to participate in funding and forming iManifest EMEA.

Fincham has put together a launch plan that requires 50 founding members for the EMEA region. In his plan, which is based on a metaphor of tiered seat pricing for airlines, nine members would pay a larger share of the manifest publication costs (business and premium economy fares), while most members would pay just 1 percent (economy fares). LANSA has already agreed to purchase one of the business-class seats to get the ball rolling.

What's Next?

Fincham writes:

The format of the advert will be similar to that used in Japan with the name of each Founding Member listed. I propose that the 9 largest contributors (those purchasing seats in Business and Premium Economy) form the Transition Board with me assuming the mantle of Chairman pro-tem. The Transition Board will meet in-person within 30 days of placing the advert and within 90 days of that meeting the Bylaws will be agreed and published. The Transition Board will be dissolved and members will then put themselves up for election for a 1-year term (1 member, 1 vote from the 50 founders). After that, who knows? Let’s channel our energy and enthusiasm into getting this bird off the ground, rather than drawing-up and filing a complex flight plan.

Interested in participating or learning more? Head over to My Midrange Meddle: http://midmed.blogspot.com/2009/07/imanifest-emea-call-for-participation.html.

Posted by cmaxcer on July 13, 2009 at 9:53 AM | Comments (18)

July 6, 2009 9:49 AM

IBM to Give No-Cost EGL Download

IBM has been cooking up a plan to offer a free version of its EGL application development toolset, with delivery planned later this summer. Unofficially called EGL Free, the tool promises to simplify the creation of rich Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) by hiding the complexities of JavaScript, HTML, and Java-based REST and SOAP services.

The initial code comes from IBM Rational Business Developer (RBD), which provides additional enterprise-level features that won't be included in EGL Free, such as support for WebSphere Application Server and other third-party vendor databases like Oracle. There's not a lot of information available yet, but IBM has a light FAQ about it on its EGL Café site.

Might EGL Free work well for IBM i/System i focused developers? What are some of the typical components a developer would need and what needs to be running on a System i or Power System box?

"Since IBM has been light on the details of what we can expect in EGL Free, it is hard to answer your question," notes Dan Darnell, an independent consultant who specializes in modernizing System i applications through the use of EGL.

"One would guess that they are not going to provide features in Free that would put revenues from mainframe/midrange customers of RBD and RDi SOA in jeopardy. It appears that the focus of EGL Free is on the EGL Rich UI technology--as opposed to the legacy app migration features of RBD or RDi SOA. There is nothing else out there to match EGL Rich UI for drop-dead easy development of awesome Web 2.0/RIA apps," he says.

So how might developers use EGL Free?

"What I expect, then, is that people will be able to use the terrific Rich UI technology to develop Web 2.0/RIA interfaces using EGL Free, and then they will develop their services layer in whatever language they think is best suited to the task: EGL, PHP, Java, a .NET language, or even RPG. I think, though, that IBM is hoping to attract an audience outside of the mainframe/midrange crowd so there may not be all of the tools available in EGL Free that one might use to gain the best leverage of a large legacy application base--for that, again, you would look to the full RBD or RDi SOA products," Darnell explains.

"From the looks of it a developer will need to have a Windows-based PC to run EGL Free. IBM says that the initial deployment target environment for EGL Free is Tomcat 6.0. I run EGL Rich UI apps in this environment today on IBM i so I can attest that it works well," he notes.

Posted by cmaxcer on July 6, 2009 at 9:49 AM | Comments (10)

July 1, 2009 10:23 AM

Bartell Trains, Hopes to Shave Eyebrows

I try to ignore fundraising events when it comes to publishing--I tend to shy away from abusing my position as an editor by promoting miscellaneous causes and sorting out which are "worthy" of publication--but there's a youngster in our IBM i community who gives a lot back to the IBM i world (like code, educational sessions, his blog, etc) so I'm bending my own rules: Aaron Bartell of Mow Your Lawn fame might shave his eyebrows.

Bartell is running the Rock 'n' Roll Chicago marathon, and he's trying to do some good for the world at the same time. On his blog, he writes:

"I am running to feed kids that are literally starving to death. I have four of my own kids with the 5th on the way. If I really stop and think about the reality of my kids dieing for lack of food it shakes the very foundation of my heart - I have to do something. That's where World Vision comes in…

World Vision works to tackle the root causes of poverty by working with children, families, and their communities to provide things like clean water, health care, nutritious food, education, and economic opportunities."

You can support Bartell's efforts through Team World Vision by making a one-time tax-deductible donation--there's a link from the post on Bartell's blog about it.

To make the whole process more entertaining and eventful, Bartell is going to incrementally shave a portion of his body when different fund raising levels are met, with a goal of $10,000.

At a $1,000, he's going to shave his legs. At $2,000, he's going to shave his armpits, and at $4,000 he'll hot wax the hair on the middle of his chest. At $7,000, off with the eyebrows, and at $10,000, his 4-year-old gets to take a shaver to his head.

Instead of doing this in the privacy of his own home, he's going to broadcast the events on YouTube. (Right, you know what I'm thinking, too, but here's an important point: if you donate, it doesn't mean you have to watch him shave his pits.)

OK, so back to the good cause . . . as you bite into your sandwich for lunch today in your air-conditioned office, take two seconds to imagine children scrambling around looking for food.

Here's that link again: http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/?p=169

Posted by cmaxcer on July 1, 2009 at 10:23 AM | Comments (13)