http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfhindex.html Description With a sharply declining server market this year and relative stagnation expected for the next four years, at least according to forecasts released by IDC and reported on in last week's issue of The Four Hundred, you can bet that midrange resellers are trying to get a bead on what things midrange shops want and, more importantly, need to spend money on. Which is the main reason why the Enterprise Computing Solutions division of master IT distributor Arrow Electronics has just done its second annual mid-market end user survey. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story01.html The AS/400 customer base needs to hear from IBM. They want to be reassured--not with words, but with deeds--that they are not being left behind. Loyal as they are, these devotees are not immune to feeling disregarded. Maybe not so much among large enterprises, where approximately 20 percent of the users provide IBM with 80 percent of its revenue, but in the SMB space where 80 percent of its customer base dwells, there is a feeling that IBM's investments in the platform are not sufficient. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story02.html There is a lot we can learn here in the States from Japan's IBM i partner community. A group of over 70 IBM partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) has joined forces there, the world's second largest information technology market, to launch the IBM i Manifest initiative for the Japanese market. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story03.html Remember those tests we took as kids that required us to pick the item that did not belong in a sequence: A) bicycle, B) wheel, C) chain, D) handlebars, E) botox. Well, here's one, courtesy of Time magazine. Going forward, the workplace will be: A) more flexible, B) more freelance, C) far less secure, D) run by a generation with new values, E) increasingly controlled by women. In fairness, I should have added F) all of the above, because Time believes all five conclusions to be true. But given these choices, one item on the list doesn't fit. At least I hope it doesn't. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story04.html Even with the need for storage capacity and the software to manage it quite high, no sub-sector of the IT market can fight off the economic downturn all by its lonesome. And in the first quarter, according to statistics coming out of Gartner and IDC, disk array and storage software sales saw even bigger declines than in the fourth quarter of last year. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story05.html I wasn't alone in my gratitude and slight melancholy as the summer solstice came around on the guitar again, reminding me of the AS/400's 21st birthday. A bunch of you had some thoughts about this and my suggestion that we need an official AS/400 Advocate to argue the case for the Power Systems i platform. I thought I would share some of the emails I got from readers. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story06.html It's back. . . . Well, I think it is, anyway. A long-running rebate deal that IBM has offered in one shape or form or another for the past zillion years, and which was withdrawn from the Power Systems catalog in May, is apparently being reintroduced. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story07.html As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story08.html The continuing lethargy in the global economy put pressure on revenues and profits at software giant and perhaps soon hardware vendor Oracle in its latest quarter, but the numbers are not as bad as some IT vendors have shown. That is for sure, and a testament to the mini-monopolies that Oracle has been able to build for itself over the years. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story09.html Do you think it's appropriate to use your Blackberry in a toilet stall? Or to send a tweet from your mobile phone while attending a funeral service? Your mother probably never taught you that these specific activities were naughty because they didn't even exist 10 years ago. Unfortunately, common sense apparently hasn't stopped Americans from practicing poor etiquette with their new-fangled smart devices. And according to a new Harris Interactive survey, most of us are tired of it already. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062909-story10.html