latest IT Jungle reporting

IT Jungle continues its great reporting on the computer industry.

in the feedback section a reader writes that his company has given up on the i5:

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh102306-story05.html

"...I found your article on quad processors quite interesting. We have
two applications: JDE OneWorld and Datatex J2EE ERP system running on
the i5. ..."

"...We have been disappointed in the performance of our two i5 520s.
It is clear to me that the amount of memory you need to run WebSphere
is so high--we estimate you need 40 GB of main memory for a few
hundred users--and the cost of the hardware so expensive that we are
no longer investing in this platform. Our future direction is Intel.
..."

Timothy Prickett states how he thinks the i5 should be marketed:

"... IBM has launched the i5 520 Solution Edition boxes with 20-user
and 40-user caps. These machines have full cache and run at the full
1.9 GHz clock speed, ..."

"...It seems to me that what we need to do is convince IBM to work its
pricing backwards, all the way to zero users. ..."

"... I would have priced up the hardware in such a way that the i5 520
would have a base price exactly equal to a discounted System p5 520
Express server with the same 1.9 GHz Power5+ chip. Call it $6,000 for
the 4 GB of memory and four 35 GB disks on the larger box. ..."

In a 2nd report, there are actual numbers on IBM 3rd quarter sales:

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh102306-story06.html

"...The System i5 line brought in, according to Farmer's estimates,
about $301 million in sales in the quarter, down 22 percent compared
to the $388 million in sales from the third quarter of 2005. While
this number was pretty low, it was not as bad as in the first quarter,
when IBM sold only $236 million in i5 iron. ..."

"...For the third quarter, Farmer and his team were expecting IBM to
book around $353 million in i5 sales, ..."

"... And System p5 Unix server sales beat its estimates by 5 percent,
too, hitting $930 million in the quarter. ..."

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the x, z and p are each selling around a $billion a quarter. The i5
looks to be averaging $300 million.  That means the i5 is 10% of IBM
hardware sales. oh, boy. Will we be sold, shut down or will mgmt
finally unlock the governor and sell the system at p5 prices?

-Steve