April 3, 2008 · IBM Announces New Power Systems

August 10, 2007 · RSA Acquisition of Tablus Logical Move for EMC

May 21, 2007 · IBM Announces POWER6 and Updated p 570

April 10, 2007 · IBM Announces System i Express Models 515 and 525

February 6, 2007 · Security in 2007

October 23, 2006 · EMC Announces Major Product Updates

July 5, 2006 · EMC to Acquire Security Specialist RSA

May 2, 2006 · z9 BC: A Mainframe for the Mid Tier

February 15, 2006 · IBM Announces New System p5 Servers

February 13, 2006 · Cisco Applies Unified Field Theory to Security Management

February 2, 2006 · IBM Gives i5 the High Five

July 26, 2005 · Big Blue's Big Strategy: Anything but Singing the Blues

May 17, 2005 · Do Blue Skies Mean Shorter and Shorter Days for Sun?

March 21, 2005 · Unified Content Management: EMC Introduces Next-Generation Content Platform, Documentum 5.3

Instant Insights 2001 - 2004

April 3, 2008         

IBM Announces New Power Systems

By Clay Ryder

IBM has introduced the IBM Power System, the first of a new generation of servers unifying the former System i and System p product lines, which features simplified pricing and increased application choice as well as reduced energy and administration expense. As part of the new launch, IBM’s integrated operating system formerly known as i5/OS will now be known as ‘i’.

August 10, 2007         

RSA Acquisition of Tablus Logical Move for EMC

By Lawrence R. Dietz

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, announced this week its intent to acquire Tablus Inc., a provider of data loss prevention solutions based in San Mateo, California. Tablus is privately-held; further details of the transaction are not being disclosed. The Tablus solution will add data discovery and classification, monitoring, and data loss prevention capabilities to RSA’s data security portfolio, helping enable the company to better meet the market’s need for information-centric security by finding and identifying sensitive data; preventing that data from leaking outside the organization; and simplifying the management of data security through policy-driven controls.

May 21, 2007         

IBM Announces POWER6 and Updated System p 570

By Clay Ryder

IBM today announced its latest Power architecture-based processor, the POWER6. At 4.7 GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of its predecessor, the POWER5, while using approximately the same amount of electricity. The chip will be first delivered in a new version of the IBM System p 570, that claims the leading position in four widely used performance benchmarks for UNIX servers: SPECint2006 (integer calculations), SPECfp2006 (floating point calculations), SPECjbb2005 (Java performance in business operations), and TPC-C (transaction processing), an industry first. Additionally, the new system holds twenty-five benchmark records across a broad portfolio of business and technical applications.

April 10, 2007         

IBM Announces System i Express Models 515 and 525

By Lawrence D. Dietz

IBM announced today new System i offerings targeted at small and midsized organizations including a System i Express solution targeting organizations with five to forty users as well as a second system optimized for the mid-market. As part of the announcement, a new scalable, per-user approach to software licensing was released. Under the new licensing scheme, one i5/OS license entitlement is required for each employee or internal system user, and a fixed price covers all external i5/OS access users. Access that does not directly touch i5/OS, such as through Web clients, requires no license, and there are no longer any CPW or 5250 licensing charges.

February 6, 2007         

Security in 2007

By Lawrence D. Dietz

The Annual RSA Conference has emerged as the focal point of the information security marketing year. Vendors large and small vie for the mindshare of prospects, analysts, and journalists. Rising from its humble origins as a gathering of cryptography nerds and those interested in bashing the U.S. National Security Agency over export restrictions, the Conference has blossomed to the largest U.S.-based information security event this year boasting almost 350 exhibitors. We can think of no more fitting time to offer our perspective on what we believe are five key trends.

October 23, 2006         

EMC Announces Major Product Updates

By Clay Ryder

The folks in Hopkinton clearly have been busy and today’s announcements reflect that. While there are many different aspects to the spate of announcements made, there are some common themes that shed light on EMC’s view of storage today, tomorrow, and in the future. There are plenty of incremental and not so incremental improvements in capacity, capability, and performance which could be viewed as simply maintaining a competitive position; however, we see more taking place than just that....

July 5, 2006         

EMC to Acquire Security Specialist RSA

By Tony Lock

Upon completion this could prove to be a very significant development. Today all organizations, irrespective of their size, are looking to address the complex, high-profile, potentially time consuming and costly issues surrounding the securing of information in the online Internet-connected world. EMC has stated that RSA’s encryption and key management technology will be central to its strategy to protect information, no matter where it resides inside or outside of an organization. RSA has assembled a range of solutions to help authenticate identities, authorize access to data and audit capabilities, as well as provide sophisticated data encryption and key management tools....

May 2, 2006         

z9 BC: A Mainframe for the Mid Tier

By Tony Lock

The System z9 BC is being firmly positioned as the entry point mainframe with extensive, and highly flexible, upgrade capabilities. z9 BC offers a new start point for organizations looking to consolidate diverse applications onto a secure, highly available, and flexible mainframe. The System z9 BC brings down the entry cost for mainframe computing and IBM is making available an extensive range of financing options available to further enhance the attractiveness of the platform...

February 15, 2006         

IBM Announces New System p5 Servers

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

To say that Big Blue released a couple of new servers would be a substantial understatement. There are many configurations represented here and several that have achieved some leapfrogging of performance metrics over the competition. As we have said before, the leapfrogging of benchmarks is a short-lived victory, so enjoy the moment, but be aware of competitors preparing to make the same jump. Nevertheless, we find much worthy in this announcement.

February 13, 2006         

Cisco Applies Unified Field Theory to Security Management

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

The trend of 2006—if it can be posited in February—is management. It is impossible to speak to a vendor or IT manager and not fall into a discussion of the importance not only of management, but of how to do it well. Just as the IT world built islands of automation, of applications, and of compute power, so too it has built islands of management. There is network management, systems management, storage management, change management, services management, and so forth. It wouldn’t be going too far out on a limb to suggest we need some management of all that management. Security hasn’t really been thought of as a management issue, it’s been thought of a security issue although that’s changing—Cisco envisions security as a fundamental part of the network—and many of its large enterprise customers would agree with them. In that light, Cisco’s approach to security has continued to evolve in lockstep with its vision of the network. This announcement is some of the first we’re seeing from Cisco’s more integrated approach to security, and it’s spot on.

February 2, 2006         

IBM Gives i5 the High Five

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

This announcement from IBM is crammed full of information and updates that improve the System i5 on several fronts and require multiple readings to properly get the full impact. On one level, it is typical of an IBM announcement for a major system. On another level, this launch is much more than a new product. It is an occasion for the iSeries/System i5 group publicly to look at where they’ve been in the last year, and to declare where they intend to go over the next year.

July 26, 2005         

Big Blue's Big Strategy: Anything but Singing the Blues

By Clay Ryder

Today’s announcement is prime example of what can happen when a vendor has money and decides to invest it in R&D. A billion dollars or so later and suddenly there is a computer that out-performs, 2 to 1, one of the biggest, baddest systems ever, the T-Rex. Geeks and propeller heads rejoice: there are over 18 billion transistors in a fully configured 54-way System z9 and the ability to scale to stratosphere and perhaps a bit farther into outer space. This is a serious, rubber-burning, ultimate-performance IT racing machine.

May 17, 2005         

Do Blue Skies Mean Shorter and Shorter Days for Sun?

By Jim Balderston

IBM noted that it is making this move now because a significant part of Sun’s installed base is getting older and will soon be in need of upgrades; a message Sun is apparently giving its own customers in an attempt to move them up to Solaris 10. That Sun’s installed base is getting threadbare is not really in dispute: the company’s largest single year of sales was in 2000, and it has continued to lose market share and sales engagements since that year. IBM is also well positioned to take advantage of this Winter Solstice, with greater Linux server share than HP or Dell, and with more than 360 middleware products running on Linux as well as 6,000 applications ported to the operating environment. The company has 12,000 Linux engagements around the world and has already completed more than 3,000 Solaris to Linux migrations to date.

March 21, 2005         

Unified Content Management: EMC Introduces Next-Generation Content Platform, Documentum 5.3

By Rob Kidd

In the past Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has had different meanings depending on the organization and context of ECM within it. ECM has also embodied a plethora of different vendor-point products such as digital asset management, web content management, or document management, in combination with inhouse IT implementations. Typically, this included offerings from multiple vendors, with little or no integration between the applications. Further BPM, collaboration tools, and repositories followed the same pattern, with integration of overall content minimal and process-specific. In short, enterprise content and process resided in isolated silos that came under pressure to be integrated due to regulatory, compliance, cost, and competitive issues.