Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Acquisition Spurs Arrow’s Systems Biz In Q4
February 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Enterprise Computing Solutions group at Arrow Electronics turned in its financial report card for the fourth quarter ended in December, with very good revenue growth, and the company’s components business also did pretty well, too, on that sales front. But costs were on the rise and the company also booked some restructuring charges that took a bite out of profits.
In the quarter, Arrow had $6.15 billion in sales, up 13.9 percent, and net income, after an $18.2 million restructuring charge, fell 22.8 percent to $134.9 million. This once again demonstrates how tough it is to make a nickel
-
U.S. Job Growth Sputters In January, And So Does IT Employment
February 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDecember was cold, and so was January. And the economy in the United States is feeling the chill if the job market is any indicator. For the second month in a row, American employers in the private sector added fewer jobs than expected and the masters of the public sector across local, state, and Federal agencies took out the pink slips and handed them around.
The Department of Labor issues its monthly jobs report, which you can see here, on the first Friday of every month and the global economy reacts instantly to what numbers come out. As I
-
Blue Chip Builds Out 1.5 Million CPW IBM i Cloud
February 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBlue Chip got its start in the garage of founder and current managing director Brian Meredith back in 1987, even before there was an AS/400. The company was originally created to provide third-party maintenance on System/36 and System/38 gear, and over the years it expanded into the AS/400 and successor markets. About a decade ago, Blue Chip got into direct product sales, including IBM’s Power-based systems as well as X86 iron, and also into managed services. Now, it is investing heavily in the cloud, and for IBM i workloads in particular.
Blue Chip has around 200 employees in operations in
-
Power Systems At The Center Of Texas A&M Research
February 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePower Systems At The Center Of Texas A&M Research
This is the kind of deal we expect to see more of now that IBM has made it clear to the world that it wants to focus more on its own Power platforms and less on the X86 platforms based on processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. That said, the deal also shows how hard it is to just peddle Power-based machines.
Under a broad arrangement with Texas A&M, the ag school that is also the largest research institution in the state, IBM is installing lots of Power-based gear
-
Why Is [Insert IT Vendor Of Choice] So . . . .
February 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet’s have some fun. I was feeling goofy the other day and as we all often do when we are feeling goofy, I asked Google a direct question. In this case, I didn’t finish the sentence, because I wanted to see what the zeitgeist out there was asking. You can do this by letting Google do the autofill.
At some point in the near future, we will just have a Watson interface for this and all the fun will be gone. But by that time, I will be living a self-sustaining life on a small farm in the mountains somewhere,
-
Reader Feedback On RPG OA: Open Opportunity And IBM’s Q4
February 3, 2014 Hey, IBM
… Read moreSorry, you are stuck in a green screen world because you let yourselves be duped that the PC and Unix way were the wave of the future. Green screen created by DDS was quite innovative in its day and it made interactive programming simple for IBM shops–20 or 30 years ago–with RPG when other companies struggled and could not create anything close to this one-time elegant and always simple user interface provided by the notion of a display file.
IBM had a winner and chose to hang its hat on Java and PHP and tools for application development, and so
-
PureSystems Base Busts Through 10,000 Installations
February 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere may have been some uncertainty about the future of IBM‘s X86-based server business throughout 2013, but customers wanting converged systems, which bring servers, storage, networking, and a unified management framework all together, took it in stride. The PureSystems installations have continued a-pace, says Big Blue.
To be specific, the installed base of PureSystems iron numbered more than 10,000 units as 2013 came to a close, which is up from the more than 8,000 units that IBM had at the end of the third quarter of last year. I also got some much-needed clarification on what, precisely, IBM is
-
Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 3
January 29, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreThe last two issues, I’ve discussed different ways to move an IBM i partition from one location to another. I talked about using traditional backup and restore techniques, as well as using logical replication High Availability (HA) software for partition migration. This week, let’s finish the series by looking at using externally connected storage including SANs, PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM, and Live Partition Mobility for moving partitions.
The Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition
To recap, there are four basic ways to move an IBM i partition.
- Restore the partition in place or to a new location using
-
The Case Of The Late Night FSM Explorer
January 29, 2014 Jeff Waldbillig
… Read moreIt was a quiet night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. I was working the graveyard shift at the help desk, and this night I was still waiting for my first call. Marge Stetson, my supervisor, walked by and after seeing the glazed look in my eyes, told me she’d cover the phones for a few hours if I wanted to do some technical education.
Marge knew that a product called the IBM Flex Systems Manager (FSM) was being deployed in our network, and she expected us to field some questions in the next few weeks
-
CIOs To Feel The Pinch Again In 2014
January 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf a new poll done by Gartner is any measure, it looks like chief information officers and their IT departments are going to feel the pressure to do more with less or the same in 2014.
Gartner had just finished up a survey of 2,339 CIOs from all around the globe as 2013 was coming to a close, and the results of the survey are problem familiar to all of you living in the IT trenches. The aggregate budget of the CIOs, who came from 77 different countries, represented more than $300 billion in IT spending, which is about a