Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The IBM Patent Machine Keeps A-Cranking In 2012
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been so long since IBM was not the company at the top of the list of firm issued utility patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that no one can remember who used to be at the top. With the rankings for 2012, Big Blue has been the undisputed leader since 1992, when it was in the middle of both a recession and an identity crisis and yet kept investing in research and development.
As we explain every year when this story rolls around in January, the USPTO stopped doing official counts and publicizing the number of
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North American IT Budgets Stalled By Economic Issues
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike the rest of us, the analysts at Computer Economics want to know what IT shops are planning to do in terms of capital and operational spending this year. And so the company did a survey in the fourth quarter to take the pulse at IT shops around the world, which in North America at least were jittery because of the elections and the looming Fiscal Cliff issues in the United States.
The survey is the basis of the company’s Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2013 report, which was just released. Computer Economics did in-depth surveys of
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IBM Splits Global Services Again As Mike Daniels Steps Down As GM
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA year ago, after taking the helm of IBM, Ginni Rometty reshuffled some executive assignments, and one of the things she did after moving up and out of the company’s Global Services and sales organizations to become the company’s CEO was to get executives in place for the eventual retirement of her former peer at Global Services, general manager Mike Daniels. As 2013 got started, Rometty let IBMers know in an internal memo that Global Services was being split into two bits again, that was because Daniels was retiring on March 31.
Several years ago, before it was clear
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Help/Systems Buys Dartware To Build Out Heterogeneous Monitoring
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSystems management, security, and analytics software maker Help/Systems continued on its acquisition tear as 2012 came to a close, and last week announced that it had bought Dartware, which peddles a popular system monitoring tool called InterMapper. The move will allow Help/Systems to better expand into the Windows, Linux, and Unix system management, monitoring, and job scheduling markets that are adjacent to the OS/400 and IBM i market that it grew out of.
Dartware comes out of the networking corridor that wraps around Boston and extends into New Hampshire. (There’s a reason Network World magazine was up there, after
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Admin Alert: Four Things To Do For Your IBM i In 2013
January 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreA new year always brings new challenges in administering your IBM i machines. Here are the top four things on my 2013 calendar that IBM i shops should look at in 2013, starting this month.
#1: Check Your Job Scheduling Date Objects In January
If you haven’t already done so, look at any date-dependent job processing objects on your system and change them to ensure that they will still work correctly in 2013. These objects might include:
- Any data areas that affect date processing.
- Files that need to go through yearly purge routines.
- Any RUN and OMIT date objects that
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Tracing Routines Explain Why The Computer Did What It Did
January 9, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Every week someone asks me why the computer did what it did. For instance, not long ago a buyer asked me why the computer did not send our requirements for a certain item to the vendor who supplies the item. I started digging through the program that generates the files we send to vendors. Then I realized there was a better way. Let me tell you about it.
In many shops, business rules are embedded in source code. Sometimes rules are hard-coded. I’ve seen code that directly referred
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Software-Defined Networking Is The Next Virtualization Bubble
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreServer virtualization is one of the big culprits behind the revenue decline in proprietary and Unix servers since the late 1990s and despite what many would have you believe, it has had a dramatic effect on X86-based server sales in recent years, too. Storage virtualization has been around nearly as long, and has driven up utilization and driven down sales of disk arrays in the past decade as well. And now it is time for the network to get the squeeze.
Specifically, a set of new capabilities called software-defined networking, or SDN for short, are being introduced into the physical
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Power7+ Machines Added To IBM i Capacity BackUp Deal
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are thinking about getting a Capacity BackUp (CBU) variant of the Power Systems-IBM i platform to use in a high availability cluster, you can now use a few of the new Power7+ machines as your secondary box.
The CBU machines first debuted way back in September 2003, when IBM wanted customers to embrace high availability clustering for OS/400 applications and when it realized it would have to cushion the blow to make secondary machines that were being replicated to less costly than production machines that were doing useful work. Prior to that, if you wanted to run HA
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IBM Tweaks Flex System And PowerLinux Prices
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is difficult to tell what any IT vendor is thinking as a year comes to an end, much less a year with the kind of economic uncertainties that we all were facing as 2012 came to a close. But after The Four Hundred went on hiatus and before the new year got rolling, IBM did a few nips and tucks and tweaks to pricing for its latest servers that indicates it is not happy with its competitive position. The changes were made to price lists in the United States and Canada, and the products not affected by changes are
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What The Future Holds For IBM i Platforms In 2013
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe future is never wide open, but rather is a sphere radiating out from this moment at precisely the speed of light. Everything that can and will happen will occur within that sphere, events moving out from the point where you sit and events moving in from outside, from all directions and as if they are pre-coordinated from the past outside of you to affect you precisely, right here, right now, from the edge of that sphere inwards. When you think about it that way, the orchestration of all of our presence is all the more remarkable. Outside of that