But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• December 13
• December 6
• November 29
• November 22
• November 15

• If you have a vintage AS/400 running OS/400 V3 software, and are used to getting tech support from Support Line, IBM has a bunch of new services for you. These old machines are no longer supported through Support Line, so IBM has launched a new service, called Operational Support Services-Account Advocate, which used to be part of Support Line and is now available as a stand-alone service. The new service provides customers with remote telephone tech support for OS/400 and systems program installations and reinstallations, and helps with patching bugs that already have PTFs. Support is available Monday through Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., in the local time zone. Service can be upgraded to 24/7 coverage for an additional fee.
  
  
• Some 60 percent of the Fortune 1000 are not offshoring IT projects and are only now looking at technical and budgetary issues surrounding the practice, according to IT analysts at Forrester Research. Forrester says that another 25 to 30 percent of the Fortune 1000 are experimenting and have relationships with offshore IT providers for some small projects, but are not ready to commit more than 1 to 5 percent of their IT budget on these offshored projects. Another 5 to 10 percent of the Fortune 1000 are committed to offshoring for tweaking and developing their mission-critical applications, and they say they spend between 10 and 30 percent of their IT services budgets offshore. Fewer than 5 percent are "full exploiters" of offshoring, but they are spending between 40 and 50 percent of their budgets on these offshored projects. Forrester says there is a lot of hype surrounding the issue of offshoring, as indicated by the fact that only 5 percent of the Fortune 1000 is fully engaged in the practice. A wise person would say that this is probably just the beginning, and that as companies get better at it, they will exploit the low cost of high-tech labor in India, China, Singapore, and other areas. That is what relentless pursuit of profits means. Forrester reckons, based on the experience of the Fortune 1000, that it takes from 2 to 5 years to go from zero to half the IT budget at a large enterprise because of the management issues involved in moving projects from local in-house IT organizations to outsourced companies.
  
  
• Long-time midrange application developer CommercialWare, an expert on multi-channel retail software that develops applications that run on the IBM midrange platform and the Windows platform, last week acquired OrderMotion, an application service provider that specializes in the retail sector and is based in New York. The financial terms of the acquisition were not announced. OrderMotion will operate as the application service provider division of CommercialWare, based in Natick, Massachusetts. In January, CommercialWare acquired Capture.Net Technologies, a Toronto software company that develops a suite of integrated front- and back-office software for retailers. At the time of the Capture.Net acquisition, CommercialWare rebranded its product lines. In 2000, the company's core OS/400-based multi-channel transaction management system, called Mozart, was renamed retail.dot.commerce, and has since been renamed again, as CWDirect. CommercialWare's three Windows-based add-ons to retail.dot.commerce (integration.dot.commerce, analytics.dot.commerce, and collaborate.dot.commerce) were renamed CWIntegration, CWAnalytics, and CWCollaborate respectively. Capture.Net's software suite, Retail Management System, will be renamed CWStore.
  
  
• ERP software vendor SSA Global has picked Sirius Computer Solutions, one of IBM's biggest business partners and the largest reseller of midrange IBM servers in the world, to be its "go to" partner for the hardware its ERP customers need in order to run SSA Global software. SSA Global and Sirius will work together in the United States to simply acquiring platforms to run ERP software, which they believe will give them both a competitive advantage. Sirius has over 2,500 customers in the United States already, and clearly hopes to gain more, since SSA Global has some 16,000 customers worldwide using one of its many different ERP suites.
  
  
• Midrange storage maker eStorage announced last week that it has appointed Dave Contreras as its director of business continuity. Contreras will oversee the research, development, and marketing of eStorage's CopyFlash high availability software, a variant of Maximum Availability's noMax replication software for the AS/400 and iSeries platform. Contreras comes to eStorage after a stint at the Performance Consortium, specializing in server consolidation and capacity planning. He worked for high availability software makers DataMirror and Vision Solutions in technical and marketing roles before that.
  
  
• The IT business isn't the only one full of people who throw around jargon to impress or confuse their colleagues. According to a study by Abbey National Group, a holding company that owns one of the largest banks in the world, IT people are nonetheless almost as guilty of using jargon as lawyers. According to the study, 36 percent of people surveyed in the United Kingdom said lawyers and solicitors are abusers of industry jargon, while 34 percent of those surveyed accused computer and IT professionals of hiding behind jargon. Some 78 percent of the people surveyed by the bank said there is too much jargon used across all professions, and some 88 percent believe that if companies spoke plain English (or maybe even American English), the whole world would run a lot smoother. Of the Britons surveyed, 74 percent said that businesses use jargon to confuse and deceive customers, and 56 percent believe jargon is used by people who actually have no idea what they are talking about. If the listener doesn't understand and the speaker doesn't understand, this is not communication. The study was commissioned to support National Plain English Day, which was December 2 in Britain.
  
  

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