The Sageza Group: Snapshots

As past IT investments reach the end of their design life, the need to refresh them becomes inevitable. The decision to update the computing environment provides organizations an opportunity to bolster their competitive advantage through state-of-the-art IT technologies. Simply updating or refurbishing what is in place locks in past limitations and forgoes the opportunity to leapfrog the competition. Rather than embracing the status quo, an organization would be well advised to assess the efficacy of its IT strategy, even if it entails migrating to a different platform.

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January 2008

IBM and Mayo Clinic Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center

By Clay Ryder

The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is a collaborative research facility created by IBM Corporation and Mayo Clinic, and focuses on building awareness and interest in the field of medical imaging informatics. The Center highlights state-of-the-art imaging solutions and seeks to drive innovation in the field not only through its sponsors, but by third parties as well. The Center’s research and development combines both parties’ extensive experience in imaging and informatics, with the mission of bringing new benefits to patients, doctors, and administrators, while improving efficiency and lowering the cost of delivering medical care.

February 2007

System i ISVs Demonstrate Business Innovation that Matters: Agilysys, Bally Technologies, InfoGenesis, and Infor Team with IBM

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

For as long as there have been applications and platforms there have been independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors have had ISV programs. The challenge for hardware makers is to get good applications running on their platform and to make ISVs want to recommend that platform for their applications. For ISVs the platform needs to provide a good return on investment. Each additional platform that they support requires commitment of developers and resources as well as time. Traditionally, a platform must provide either a significant installed base opportunity, a superior technology capability, or some total cost-of-ownership benefit that makes the application- plus-platform solution truly palatable to potential users. As customer innovation becomes a more mainstream use for technology, potential buyers are also looking not just for technology innovation, but also for business innovation: new processes, or new ways of doing business, reaching customers, or creating new customers that allow them to expand their businesses and not just to support them.

July 2006

IBM System i and Lawson Software

By Clay Ryder

The IBM System i is a platform with a partner base as varied as its customers are loyal. Revitalized by a complete hardware refresh in early 2006, the System i continues to build on a heritage of integration, simplicity, and manageability. Lawson Software is one of the 1,700+ ISVs that have made a strategic commitment to the platform, which offers ISVs the ability to create offerings with demonstrable business value, simplified IT infrastructure, and reduced operating cost. The continued growth of the System i ecosystem as well as the long-term support of partners such as Lawson Software illustrate the forward-looking nature of the IBM System i.

January 2006

Taking the Risk Out of Migration

By Clay Ryder

One issue that any organization will eventually face is the need for refresh of aging technology. While a system may have represented the state of the art when it was installed, over time any solution begin to lose its cost-effectiveness. Although many believe refreshing technology is as simple as calling the vendor who provided the solution, a company should consider whether the original supplier necessarily has the best solution today. Whether the purchase is for a refresh of an out-of-date system with high maintenance costs or for upgrade to address operational limitations, customers should carefully weigh the risk in staying with a given vendor or migrating to another. In many cases, a refresh is an opportune time at which to consider the value proposition of a platform migration and to evaluate which vendor could best meet the customer’s current needs.

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November 2005

Versatility for Verticals and Horizontal Value for All: The iSeries and ISVs

By Clay Ryder

The IBM eServer iSeries is a platform with a partner base as varied as its customers are loyal. Building on a heritage of integration, simplicity, and manageability, the iSeries remains a remarkably versatile platform offering ISVs the ability to create vertical-specific offerings that provide companies demonstrable business or horizontally focused solutions while delivering a simplified IT infrastructure with reduced operating cost and creating competitive advantage. The iSeries simultaneously supports multiple operating systems including i5/OS, Linux, AIX 5L, and Windows, as well as Java and other state-of-the-art environments. Built-in security features can help businesses meet regulatory requirements and safeguard data across all of these environments. The iSeries Initiative for Innovation, introduced at PartnerWorld earlier this year, has renewed interest among thousands of ISVs and delivered over 450 applications and over 200 tools to the market. It has fostered the growth of new, innovative solutions for iSeries customers and enabled ISVs to reach new markets.

August 2005

Mid Market Scale: EMC Centera Four-Node Configuration

By Clay Ryder

Recent changes in the business and technology environment have made it clear that there is a compelling need for a strategic alignment of backup and archival processes within organizations. It is no longer sufficient to perform complete backups of production data without consideration for cost and operational efficiency. Regulatory, competitive, and physical limitations have narrowed backup/recovery windows, while government compliance and corporate governance have placed new demands on archiving. Although backup, extraction, and archiving remain discrete business processes and technological solutions, there are competitive advantages to be gained by aligning these processes with the value of the business data being stored. Failure to bring an organization's storage policies into alignment with business value will result in the continuing unchecked and costly growth of the production, backup, and archive data environments. While such solutions have been available to larger enterprises, mid-sized organizations found these solutions priced out of reach until now. The new EMC Centera Four-Node Configuration, with 2.2TB of usable storage, delivers the same advanced content and self-management features available in all Centera configurations, but is scaled to fit the needs and pocketbook of mid-sized and smaller organizations.

August 2005

X Marks the Spot for IBM

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Consolidation for industry standard servers has been more of a desire than reality as the concept was well ahead of the technology. However, Microsoft’s Virtual Server and EMC’s VMWare products for the Windows environment, and XenSource’s products for Linux in conjunction with forthcoming virtualisation support capabilities from the chip vendors, mean the technology is finally here. The introduction of the new IBM x3 architecture and the new eServer models x366 and x460 mark a sea change for the x86-based server market. These servers are two members of a family that permit scaling for x86 architectures that allows IT managers to undertake server consolidation and virtualisation as never before. IT managers no longer need to think one application for one server; they can consolidate workloads on a platform that has significant price/performance improvements and the ability to scale with the attendant reliability features. IT managers can now treat their x86-based server buying decisions on strategic directions and not just on more immediate tactical needs. The end result could see the x86 market sweet spot moving from the dual-processor to the four-way system as price/performance metrics are altered.

June 2005

The Bazaar Invades the Cathedral: Power.org Comes to Mare Nostrum in Barcelona

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Power.org is the first organization to experiment with the idea that an open hardware architecture can drive standards and a platform for innovation spanning the gamut from embedded devices to supercomputers. The desire to drive innovation around its Power Architecture caused IBM to launch Power.org in December of 2004, creating a standards organization for developing, enabling, and promoting the Power Architecture technology and specifications. Barcelona in June was the scene of the latest summit for the group to announce recent progress in membership, activities, and products as well as to discuss future directions and promote awareness and interest in the community.

May 2005

IBM Aids Storage Woes with Virtualisation-based Solutions

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

While an IT manager’s most immediate storage needs are often more disk, more space, this is frequently only a symptom of one or more serious problems. Ultimately, adding storage that isn’t part of a well thought out plan can exacerbate the problem rather than ameliorate it. Often the best place to start is for vendors, business partners, and customers to have a serious conversation that explores beyond surface symptoms. The results should lead to solutions that add business value rather than increase management hassles.

April 2005

IBM zSeries Takes Corporate Data to the Highest Level

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Development of backup and recovery capabilities have mostly focused on the backup portion of the equation, with recovery limited largely to recouping individual files. However, the science of computing is such that some companies have significant portions of revenue dependent on the ongoing availability of core applications. Without those applications, there is essentially little or no business. The recovery of mission-critical applications and data is an integral component of business continuity requiring organisations to rethink their strategy for preventing damaging or potentially fatal downtime. These IT managers need systems capable of restoring data in seconds rather than in minutes or hours. The IBM eServer zSeries has GDPS technology that provides critical levels of availability, including recovery and swap capabilities that hedge against an organisation’s risk exposure.

April 2005

IBM Extend zSeries Security Fabric across the IT Infrastructure

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Long considered the epitome of reliability, manageability, and availability for IT data centres, the mainframe has provided a secure environment for countless mission-critical systems. As the head of the eServer family, the eServer zSeries has led the way in high-end innovation for IBM. IBM are now extending these capabilities beyond the mainframe to other parts of the IT infrastructure, allowing IT managers to construct “secure vaults” for enterprise data.

April 2005

Food for Thought: The iSeries and ISVs Recreating the Food Distribution Industry

By Jim Balderston

The IBM eServer iSeries, together with ISVs and business partners specializing in food distribution, offers these distributors the ability to scale their operations cost-effectively to take advantage of new revenue opportunities. By building on a heritage of integration, simplicity, and manageability, the eServer iSeries can help companies simplify their IT infrastructures and reduce operating costs while creating competitive advantage. The iSeries simultaneously supports multiple operating systems including i5/OS, Linux, AIX 5L, and Windows (through the IXA or IXS) as well as Java, WebSphere, and Lotus Domino environments. Built-in security features can help businesses meet regulatory requirements and safeguard data across all of these environments.

March 2005

When All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks like a Nail: Microsoft’s Midrange Alliance Program Ventures into iSeries Land

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

The IBM eServer iSeries has been around for many years reliably meeting mid-market customer needs; a platform that provided business applications to companies without IT complexity. As technology has evolved, the iSeries has evolved with it, continuing to provide hallmark capabilities but also allowing software developers to take advantage of the latest application development tools and middleware. Microsoft’s Midrange Alliance Program offers customers an alternative for maintaining older applications but lacks the capabilities inherent in the platform that makes the iSeries so valuable to customers.

February 2005

EMC Energizes iSCSI Deployment for Windows Servers

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Broad support of iSCSI by a major storage vendor means that it should no longer be viewed as a niche technology for specialized use. By offering support for iSCSI across its storage product families EMC is making iSCSI a real option for IT managers. In this paper we look at how iSCSI offerings from EMC provide customers with opportunities to move more of their Windows storage to a networked environment in a cost-effective manner.

January 2005

IBM eServer OpenPower 710: Entry-Level Price, Exceptional Flexibility

By Rob Kidd

The IBM eServer OpenPower 710 is the newest OpenPower family system, offering attractive performance and price/performance for the entry-level strategic Linux server market. The OpenPower 710 provides a range of hardware and software options for deployment flexibility. The OpenPower 710 is a strategic option for IT shops with entry-level requirements as well as enterprise-class expectations.

An enterprise-specific evaluation of a particular technology, a company’s strategy, market dynamics, and current industry developments for business executives and IT professionals. Primary research combined with forward-looking insights lets readers get up to speed quickly on changes in the IT and ecommerce market.

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