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HA Vendor iTera Hires Exec to Head European Operations

High availability software vendor iTera has come out of nowhere (well, Utah, actually) in the past two years to rival the established players in the midrange high availability software market with its Echo2 software. Now that iTera has gained traction in the United States, thanks to sales in OS/400 shops and acceptance by IBM in its partner program, the company is expanding into the European market. To that end, it is putting feet on the street to install and support the Echo2 product and is hiring an executive to oversee the creation of the infrastructure necessary to support European operations.

Last week, iTera announced that it has hired Phil Davis as vice president of sales for the EMEA region. Before joining iTera, Davis worked at Lakeview Technology, in its European organization, and before that Davis spent many years working for a number of U.K. AS/400 resellers in sales and marketing positions. The company said that it chose Davis because he knows high availability and he knows Europe.

iSeries and eServer i5s in Ready, Steady Supply

According to a spot check of IBM's server scheduling systems, the new eServer i5 machines are in steady supply. IBM can ship Model 520 servers in about a week and Model 570 servers in about two weeks. (For some reason, Model 550 machines are not on the list.) Customers who want p5 520 and p5 550 servers can get them shipped within a week of ordering them, but p5 570 customers have to wait five weeks.

For customers looking for the prior generation of Model 8XX machines, Model 800, 810, and 825 servers ship within about a week of being ordered, while the bigger Model 870 and 890 servers take two weeks to ship. However, processor features for many of these Model 8XXs are supply-constrained, taking anywhere from four to six weeks to ship.

IBM Europe Pushes iSeries with "Why Wait?" Promotion

Having launched low-rate financing deals and deferrals on lease payments until 2005 for customers in the United States, IBM's European unit, headquartered in Paris, has announced the "Why Wait?" promotion, which offers similar benefits to Europeans who want to buy iSeries and i5 servers as well as other IBM hardware, software, and services. If you want to take part, the financing is available on 36-month leases on all iSeries iron and selected pSeries servers, but customers have to buy from IBM or its participating business partners before September 30. The financing deal was announced on September 8 and is available in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.

Key's ERP Webcast to Show ERP Is a Strategic Weapon

Key Information Systems will host a Webcast tomorrow that examines how ERP software can be a strategic weapon for small and midsized businesses. The event will bring together Dwight Klappich, a vice president at consultancy META Group, and Scott Lutz, director of product marketing at PeopleSoft. The Webcast will be held from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon Pacific Time, and you can register for it here.

Study Says American High Tech Has Lost 200,000 Jobs

The official economists for the U.S. government said that the recession ended in November 2001, but most of us think that this is a load of hogwash--at least in the IT sector, which has had perhaps more than its share of ups and downs in the past three years. According to a report from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Chicago, which examined government statistics in the past few years, the unemployment rate for computer programmers was 6.7 percent in 2003, two years after the recession ended. It is interesting to note that, at the height of this recession, the unemployment rate for programmers was 2.5 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2001, when the recession officially began, there were 2.146 million employees in the IT industry in the States, and by April 2004 that number dropped to 1.743 million. In the major metro areas associated with IT--Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle--IT employment was absolutely hammered, down 18 to 25 percent, compared with the national average of only a 10 percent decline in IT jobs. The only major metro area where IT employment held was Washington, D.C. Obviously, the unemployment rates in these areas have spiked over that time. The downturn in IT spending and the contraction of the economy are certainly part of the cause of the loss of those 200,000 jobs nationwide since the recession was declared over, but the report also suggests that offshoring is having an impact, too. While the evidence for this assertion is thin, many IT professionals probably agree with that sentiment.

NetManage Acquires Librados

NetManage, the Cupertino, California, software company that sells the OnWeb line of host integration middleware and RUMBA line of host access emulation programs, announced last week that it has acquired Librados, a Pleasanton, California, maker of enterprise application integration software that links popular applications to each other and to databases and middleware often used for custom applications. Librados has an intriguing royalty-free adapter model where ISVs pay an upfront, one-time licensing fee for the source code for the connectors; it also sells its integration server and adapters on a per-server basis for end users and for ISVs. The Librados products will be rolled into the NetManage Host Services Platform product line.