Dan Burger
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SAP Stamps Its Mark On 2011
January 30, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen you’re the world’s largest business applications vendor, your financial report card stands as a bellwether for the IT industry. Of course, economic uncertainty adds to the drama and brings an even larger crowd to the stage. Last week, SAP delivered a powerful performance by announcing it beat all expectations for not only the final quarter of 2011, but for the entire year as well.
SAP may not be the largest IBM i software provider in terms of customer base or revenue stream, but there are several thousand customers, and some of the largest IBM i shops in the world,
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iSam Blue Adds Storage Director to its Lineup
January 24, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreiSam Blue, a data protection company specializing in the backup and recovery field, has added a virtual backup storage solution to its repertoire of products and services. The addition is a result of partnership with Tributary Systems makers of Storage Director, a virtual tape library software product that consolidates tape libraries and accelerates backups in multi-server, multi-platform environments.
Robert Seal, CEO at iSam Blue, says he first heard about Storage Director at the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition.
“I realized that this is a backup solution that many IBM i users need,” Seal said in a telephone interview
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Dawn of the Dead: Portals’ Revenge
January 23, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read morePortals are not dead. They’ve just been sleeping. Almost all highly hyped technology eventually moves into reality, where the effects of market consolidation and sometimes technology commoditization can dull a formerly bright star. But this could be a better time and place for portals thanks to social media and cloud computing. The big guys–IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and a few others are poised. While some smaller vendors are featuring lighter weight and lower cost products.
We’re still in the midst of a major hype storm that’s dumping huge amounts of propaganda concerning social media and
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IT Salaries, Staff Counts Reflect Weak Economy
January 23, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe eagle flies on Friday is an old-time euphemism for Friday is payday. For a lot of folks these days, the eagle doesn’t fly as high as it once did. And others aren’t so sure that eagle isn’t really a vulture circling overhead.
Whether you are an IT pro with a paycheck or a resume in your hand, IT salary reports like the one just released by Computer Economics makes for interesting reading. The same is true if you’re expanding an IT staff or looking for a baseline to compare your IT salary budget with the numbers Computer Economics is
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SaaS ERP Is Getting A Closer Look
January 16, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat do Dog the Bounty Hunter and Nick Castellina have in common? Both make their living by tracking. DBH, the star of a reality show, tracks the scum of the Earth, and Castellina, a lead analyst at Aberdeen Group, goes after IT trends. Specifically, he hunts software as a service, which gets the shortened handle of SaaS. It’s one of the big blips on the IT radar screen and enjoys Super Bowl quality hype.
Last month, Aberdeen released its latest SaaS ERP report based on survey results collected in the second half of 2011. Castellina is the lead analyst
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Subscription Revenue Decline Mars JDA Financial Report
January 16, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreJDA Software powered its way through 2011 to post decent financial numbers despite the legal battles it fought with Oracle over patent infringements and a lawsuit it inherited with the acquisition of i2 in August 2010. Revenue increased slightly in Q4, and overall 2011 was a good year for the retail and supply chain software pillar.
JDA has not finalized its financial results for Q4 2011, but because it had a downtick in software license sales, it decided to put out preliminary financial results to give Wall Street the head’s up. JDA estimates it will have approximately $173 million in
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On the Sunny Side of the Rimini Street
January 16, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen you’re hot, you’re hot. Rimini Street, the prominent third-party maintenance and support alternative for enterprise software from companies such as Oracle, SAP, and others, is once again showing that business is good for a company that provides reduced costs on services, which many software customers believe to be overpriced to the point of being gouged.
Last week, a Rimini press release announcing fourth quarter and fiscal year financial results brimming with fiscal accomplishments–its highest ever quarterly sales bookings, a 42 percent increase in bookings compared to the third quarter of 2011, and record revenue for the
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RPG & DB2 Summit: Skills Fitness for Modern IT
January 10, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreRPG & DB2 Summit: Skills Fitness for Modern IT
There is something new to learn every day. This idea pops up on people’s radar screens each year around this time in the form of New Years resolutions. It’s a great time for fitness centers to recruit. As a CEO, you might be thinking about the fitness of your business. As a CIO, the fitness of your staff might be a concern. As a staff member, you might be taking a look at the fitness of your skills.
If you want to be fit, you have to put in the training
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A Little .NET Can Go A Long Way
January 9, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreRichard Schoen has been doing presentations on using Microsoft .NET technology in conjunction with IBM i on Power Systems at COMMON for several years. At a recent Omni User meeting in Chicago, Schoen was speaking again on this subject and it certainly seemed to be a topic of interest as a larger than normal attendance was recorded.
This is not exactly a mainstream topic because Microsoft and IBM don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things . . . running Windows natively on Power Systems machines being a perfect example. This is a constantly festering wound that won’t
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inFORM Decisions and DSC Find Reasons To Partner
January 9, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreDocument management meets cloud computing in this partnership of IBM i vendors that came to light last week. The two participants are inFORM Decisions on the doc management and automation side, and Data Storage Corporation on the cloud storage, data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity side.
inFORM Decisions has been in the IBM midrange market since the days when the platform was known as the AS/400. DSC came into the IBM i market in 2010 when it acquired SafeData, a provider of hosted backup, recovery, and high availability solutions for the IBM i operating system. At that time, DSC