Jenny Thomas
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The Bad News Is Good For 2013 Worldwide IT Spending
July 8, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreSometimes the best way to deliver bad news is to try to say it so it seems like good news. That’s the approach the analysts at the information technology research and advisory company Gartner are taking with their latest projections on worldwide IT spending for 2013.
The Gartner analysts put on a brave face and released their latest estimate that worldwide IT spending will hit $3.7 trillion in 2013. Sounds great! And it is when you consider that this is a 2 percent gain over 2012, which Gartner also recently revised up from its original guesstimate to a final total
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Mobile, Modernization, And Cloud See The Money In 2013
June 24, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIT departments around the world can practically be heard crying out “show me the money” after years of tight budgets and sweeping cutbacks. And while the overall picture for IT spending still isn’t looking too rosy, there are a few areas that will get an infusion of cash this year, according to a recent survey of spending by government sector organizations on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications by Gartner.
The Gartner analysts are projecting that worldwide IT spending by government organizations will total $449.5 billion in 2013, which is a slight decrease of 0.1 percent from 2012. This
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IT Jobs Market Goes Flat
June 17, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreThere’s no sugar coating this one. The IT jobs market has hit the skids. At least that is what the latest report from Janco Associates, whose analysts keep an eye on IT market trends, is saying.
“Based on our interviews with over 90 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff,” said Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco. “In addition, a number of CIOs do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.”
This comes on the heels of the latest jobs report
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There’s No “i” In French Open Tennis
June 10, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIBM has been providing technology to the French Open since 1985. As you might imagine, a lot has changed in the last 28 years. At one time, back in the early 2000s, the AS/400 and then the iSeries played a role, but these days the tennis data is served on a private power cloud.
The French Open, which just wrapped up on Sunday, has been known to draw up to 100 times normal traffic to the tournament Web site at www.rolandgarros.com. With that kind of a visitor surge, it is easy to see why IBM’s SmartCloud services are
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IBM Advises Companies To Invest In Social Business
June 3, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreA decade ago, online commerce, more commonly known as ebusiness, was more than just a buzz word, it was a game changer. And the successful integration of ebusiness technology would be what determined which companies would survive, and which would get left behind.
Evidence of the pervasiveness of ebusiness is everywhere you look. Even the vendors at your local farmer’s market are armed with their Square, prepared to accept your major credit card to enable you to purchase that carton of fresh strawberries.
Today the game is changing again, and IBM is advising companies to invest in social business.
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Manta Announces New RDP Training Series
May 20, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIf you’re looking for some training for IBM‘s Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP), you know it can be hard to come by. But the fact of the matter is there are plenty of businesses that need people to maintain programs in RDP. The good folks at Manta Technologies have some good news if you’re in that category: A new Manta series covering the most popular IDE for IBM i application development.
“There has been a large demand from our customers for RDP, we have had courses on all the predecessors to it, so it was time,” said Bill
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IT Hiring Growth Slows For Third Month In A Row
May 13, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreWe are not even to summer yet and the hopeful prognostications of 2013 being the year of the rebound in the IT jobs market is melting away faster than the winter snow. The good folks at Janco Associates, who keep a close eye on IT industry trends, are reporting slow growth in IT hiring for the third month in a row.
It is human nature to start a new year with an optimistic outlook for the coming months, anticipating happy and prosperous times ahead. At the beginning of 2013 we were reporting on a IT job explosion in North
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IBM Announces More Share Buybacks, Higher Dividends
May 6, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIf you’re an IBM shareholder in need of some fast cash, we have some good news for you. IBM announced it has boosted its dividend 12 percent and approved $5 billion in stock buybacks at its annual meeting last week. The dividend of 95 cents a share will be payable on June 10 to shareholders of record on May 10. With the approval of the additional funds, IBM now has $11.2 billion in its repurchase program, which is enough to repurchase about 5.6 percent of its overall share count on Wall Street.
Whether or not this is good news for
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CIOs Move With Caution On New IT Hiring
April 15, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreUp, down, up, down. It’s not just the latest data on job numbers that might make you feel a little queasy, it’s also the way those numbers have fluctuated since the beginning of 2013. And it looks like we’re in for another gut-busting drop.
In February we reported on a job explosion in North America with news of a spike in the number of new jobs for IT professionals in the first month of 2013. By March, the outlook was decidedly less peppy when we told you about slower than anticipated growth of 5,700 new jobs in February from a
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The Spirit Of John Earl Lives On In Scholarship
April 8, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreEarlier this year, the IBM i community lost a valuable member when John Earl, an IBM i security expert, lost his battle with brain cancer. In a fitting tribute to a man who took joy in sharing his knowledge and was passionate in encouraging others to do the same, the COMMON Educational Foundation has teamed with Help/Systems to fund the John Earl Speaker Scholarship Award.
Help/Systems’ participation in funding the award is a nod to Earl’s history in the IBM i community. Earl was a co-founder of Lighthouse Security, which was acquired by PowerTech in 1998. Help/Systems acquired PowerTech