disney discounts

Middleware software maker Seagull Software announced last week that it has received a slightly lower offer to be acquired by Rocket Software.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 scheme.

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.

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.

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.