Dan Burger
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Manhattan Associates Posts Revenue Gains For Three Quarters
October 22, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreAn increase in licensing revenue is a pretty good indicator of how well a software company is performing. So when you see that Manhattan Associates has jumped that number from $37.7 million in the first nine months of 2011 to $47.1 million in the same period here in 2012, the supply chain management experts in Atlanta, Georgia, should be pretty happy with the veritable economic feast. A 20 percent bump is a worthy achievement, especially in an era where it is not uncommon to see software companies relying on services to be the sole bread winner.
In the third quarter
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SAP And JD Edwards Support Floats Spinnaker’s Boat
October 22, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe third-party maintenance business continues to be a rose garden for the likes of Spinnaker Support, where Oracle‘s JD Edwards software customers and SAP software customers are happy to have maintenance alternatives. Last week, Spinnaker indicated revenues at the company increased 80 percent and sales bookings were up 154 percent during the first three quarters of 2012.
Because Spinnaker is a private company, it releases financial reports as it wants rather than according to the financial reporting guidelines that public companies adhere to (more or less).
Two weeks ago, Rimini Street, another private company enjoying success primarily
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What Happens In Vegas . . . Comes Back To The Office
October 15, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreEncouraging employees to upgrade skills used to be emphasized a lot more than it is these days. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. It was more widely believed that learning to do more with the on-premise hardware and software was directly related to increases in productivity and a better return on the overall IT investment. There are still companies that believe investing in people is money well spent, but you could probably make a case for them becoming an endangered species.
One place you can glimpse these increasingly rare organizations is at the IBM Power Systems Technical University
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Vital To The i: The Thirst of Youth
October 15, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreThere’s some truth in the remark that as we get older we get more set in our ways. And along that same line of thinking is one of my favorite reflections that “wisdom arrives with old age . . . but sometimes old age arrives alone.” Things like this come to mind when I think about the age demographic of the IBM i community.
The other day I got an email from Laura Ubelhor, president of the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group and the assistant director of the COMMON Education Foundation (CEF) board of directors. Laura is full of energy,
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Take The Top Concerns Survey, Ask Others To Do The Same
October 8, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreYou work in the IBM i community. That gives you a perspective that is worth talking about. Some of that perspective is shared by others who work on the IBM midrange platform and the overall IT professional community. Some of your perspectives are unique to your own career, the company that employs you, and your geographic location. You’re integrated, but you are also a silo of proprietary information.
This is about sharing your information. It’s about becoming more integrated with the IBM i community and with IBM. I’m talking about feedback. I’m talking about your view of the IBM i
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The Search For IBM i Intelligent Life
October 8, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe pipeline of students graduating from college ready, willing, and able to step into an IT position at an IBM midrange shop isn’t what it once was, and those who claim the young talent pool has dried up like a west Texas watering hole aren’t far from the truth. But for companies with current and future jobs for recent grads who have IBM i experience, there’s good news.
Worldwide there are 96 schools with classes that include IBM i subject matter, and 44 of those are in the United States. Finding those schools, as companies previously searching for talent found
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ERP Gets Wrapped Up In New Technologies
October 8, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreIn the small to midsize business (SMB) arena, the IBM midrange shops have traditionally done well because of the excellent ERP applications available for a wide variety of vertical industries and the scalability that the system provides as businesses grow. However, markets change. Sometimes technologies follow and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes technologies change and cause markets to follow.
A recent report from the ERP observers at AberdeenGroup, based on a survey of 300 SMB companies (with no indication if any are running ERP on IBM i), put new technologies in the spotlight.
In the process of sorting out
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Remain Software Adds to Multi-Platform Choices
October 2, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreApplication lifecycle management vendor Remain Software has broadened the scope of its change management software known as TD/OMS. The software, which has been rewritten in Java, now supports Solaris and Mac OS application development environments along with the IBM i, Windows, Linux, and Unix environments supported by the previous release.
As before, it also supports popular fourth-generation languages (4GLs) for the IBM i platform, including LANSA‘s RDML, CA‘s 2E and Plex, AS/SET, and Magic Software‘s 4GL. And Remain Software provides support for automatic deployment to the Tomcat and Websphere application servers.
The latest piece for the TD/OMS
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Arming The IBM i Nation
October 1, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt could happen to you. Like a sucker punch from the president of your company, one day you get the word the IBM midrange system is being replaced. And before you can even ask–“How could this happen?”–you’re flat on your back seeing stars. You should have seen this coming. The murmurs about old technology unable to solve modern business problems, inaccessible silos of information, and the surge of the Window/Unix manifest destiny have been heard for years.
Just like ignorance of the law isn’t going to get you off the hook for a speeding ticket, claiming you didn’t notice other
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IBM Fishes For Managed Service Providers; Nice Bait
October 1, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreManaged service providers (MSPs) are lined up like suitcases at the baggage claim. Their destination is the small to midsize market. For years, IBM and the rest of the IT giants have searched for ways to crack that market, without a great deal of success. Managed services, via the cloud, are their best opportunity to date. Another indicator that managed service providers are gearing up for a coming change in IT buying behavior is IBM latest program designed for expanding its MSP network. Central to this program are two of Big Blue’s favorite topics: SmartCloud and PureSystems.
IBM claims there