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Global Software Says Business Is Brisk

While many midrange application vendors are taking financial hits, because of a stingy IT market, Global Software says that business is brisk. According to the privately held company, which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and derives the lion's share of its sales from the OS/400 platform, sales in the first half of 2004 were $7.5 million, up 13 percent from the $6.5 million in sales the company had during the same period last year. The company noted that its data analytics products, including Spreadsheet Server and Executive DASH, grew 287 percent in the first six months of 2004. These products integrate with popular ERP suites on the OS/400 platform and allow data housed in general ledgers to be directly linked to Excel spreadsheets and other desktop applications, to allow real-time analysis of ERP data. Global Software says further that if conditions and sales persist, 2004 will be its best year ever.

Global Software also announced that it has signed up two business partners, focused on the PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne and World application suites, to resell its software. The new partners are GRT Business Solutions, based in Texas, and Ndevr, in Australia.

Agilisys Acquires Distribution ERP Specialist Aperum

Distribution and manufacturing ERP software specialist Agilisys announced last week that it has acquired rival Apernum, across town in Atlanta.

Like other software firms, Agilisys, has been on an acquisition binge as the IT market has tightened in the past two years. In December 2002, Agilisys acquired BRAIN, an automotive ERP supplier that went bankrupt. Then in June it bought Future 3, another automotive software developer, and in February 2004 it bought infor business solutions AG, a midmarket German ERP provider. In March 2004, Agilisys bought Daly.commerce, founded more than 25 years ago as Daly & Wolcott, which developed the first distribution package on the OS/400 platform when it was launched, in 1988. With the Apernum buy, Agilisys now owns DMAS, the distribution management software system that was originally created in IBM's Atlanta hotbed of midrange application software (alongside MAPICS and a number of others) back in the 1980s for the System/3X and then the AS/400 line of minicomputers. Apernum also sells two other distribution suites, called TakeStock and FACTS, and has nearly 2,700 customers worldwide.

IMON Technologies, Seagull Partner in China

Legacy software extension specialist Seagull Software announced that it has partnered with IMON Technology, an IT consultancy in Sydney, Australia, to push its products in Asia. The partnership calls for IMON to market, distribute, and support Seagull's products in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. IMON is an Intel partner and sells middleware from IONA Technologies and Sonic Software into the Chinese market.

Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance a 'Serious Issue' for SMBs, Says ITSPA

IBM to Hire 18,000 in 2004

IBM likes nothing better than to rub salt into the wounds of its rivals, so it was no surprise that Big Blue told the Wall Street Journal that it planned to hire 18,000 new employees in 2004 on the day that Hewlett-Packard told Wall Street that it was going to miss its numbers in the fiscal third quarter, which ended July 31, and fired its three top sales people.

Earlier this year, IBM said that it was going to hire about 15,000 people and offshore about 3,000 jobs from the United States, but now the company says that it will offshore only about 2,000 positions and will hire 18,000 people worldwide, with about 6,000 of them being hired in the States. IBM's employment worldwide peaked in 1991, when it had 344,000 personnel, and within three years it had slashed 125,000 workers as its core mainframe market imploded. (People who sell computers into glass houses should be careful about throwing stones, eh?) With the hires this year, IBM's headcount will be a little north of 330,000 employees.

Workers Glued to PC Screens, Says Microsoft Study

Microsoft has a pretty sizeable business selling mice, keyboards, and other hardware devices for PC shops as well as the monopoly on the desktop platform used throughout the business world. So it has a vested interest in understanding how business people use their computers.

So the company's hardware division commissioned a study from British market researcher Synovate, and discovered that about a third of office workers said that they spend between 4 and 6 hours a day sitting at their PCs, while half say that they spend eight or more hours behind their PCs. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of the workers polled by Synovate and Microsoft said that they associate the fatigue they feel at the end of the day to working at their PCs for extended periods of time. As you might expect, there was a subtext to this study: the two companies found that end users who work from an ergonomically designed PC can increase their performance (whether it is processing transactions or doing so-called knowledge work like writing or surfing) by as much as 25 percent, and half of the employees polled said that having a modern PC with the latest gadgetry made them feel better and work better.

AT&T Study Shows Businesses Still Vulnerable

Businesses in cities that have the highest risks for terrorist attacks, blackouts, and other disasters are least prepared to cope with such emergencies, according to a new study commissioned by telecommunications vendor AT&T and the Partnership for Public Warning, a nonprofit organization established in 2002 to promote the idea that there needs to be an organized means of communicating information to businesses and citizens in the event of disasters.

The two organizations surveyed 1,000 executives in 10 major metro areas--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Dallas--to assess what lessons have been learned from Sept. 11 and the blackout last summer, which affected most of the states in the Northeast as well as some in the Midwest. According to the study, New York and Washington are the least prepared for a grand-scaled emergency; only 25 percent of businesses polled in these metro areas have a disaster recovery plan. Perhaps because of the annual slamming by hurricanes, the Miami metro area does slightly better; only 15 percent do not have a plan.

While the report, "Disaster Planning in the Private Sector," was critical of the fact that the number was not 100 percent of businesses, 75 percent of businesses that do have a disaster recovery plan (or 56 percent of the total number of New York metro companies surveyed) said that they have not only developed a plan, but tested it as well. On a national level, the study finds that 25 percent of the companies polled have not updated their plans in the past year, and 40 percent have not tested the plans they have. About 20 percent of the companies surveyed said that their businesses had been hit by an outage that caused them to lose money.

Companies are doing something, however. Some 60 percent of the companies polled said that they have redundant servers or a backup site, and 25 percent have added backup power sources for their systems, and 15 percent have upgraded their telecommunications systems to make them more resilient. Of the companies that do have plans, 35 percent outsource their plan coverage from a specialist, and in the financial and government centers, where systems are critical, nearly half of the companies outsource plan coverage to service providers.