Timothy Prickett Morgan
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SAP Targets 1 Billion Users And €20 Billion In Sales By 2015
April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe top brass at German application software giant SAP are just as competitive in the sport of sailing with rival Oracle as they are in the application software business–and are picking up steam in the cloud and databases businesses, too.
SAP does not have as large a business on the IBM i platform as Oracle or Infor, but it does nonetheless have a few thousand key customers who are running its various ERP stacks on the progeny of the AS/400.
Last week, SAP reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012 ended in March, and overall sales
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IBM Boosts Share Buybacks And Dividend
April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis was about as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise. IBM‘s top brass are feeling so good about its financial prospects this year that it has once again raised its dividend and asked for and received approval from Big Blue’s board of directors to spend huge piles of cash buying back stock.
In a statement last week, new president and CEO, Ginni Rometty, said the board has approved another $7 billion to be spent on share buybacks, adding to an existing authorization from last year that still had $5.7 billion left in the kitty.
“We continue in our commitment to deliver
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Reader Feedback On Third Party’s A Charm For JDE Maintenance Contracts
April 30, 2012 Hey, Dan
… Read moreThere’s another issue with going to third-party maintenance for JDE World: operating system upgrades.
We looked at dropping World A7.3 maintenance a few years ago. We found out, however, that if we ever wanted to upgrade from i5/OS V5R4 to IBM i 6.1, we needed Oracle to provide us with the proper updated objects so we could run on the new OS. Oracle/JDE was only willing to do that if we stayed on maintenance. And oh, by the way, there is a significant penalty if you get off maintenance and get back on again.
So from my point of view,
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Power Iron Gets New Storage And Networking
April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreApril showers have tended to bring April AS/400 announcements of one sort or another, and here we are again in another April and indeed IBM is making enhancements to its midrange platform in the areas of networking and storage.
Some of the new features in announcement letter 112-069 will work in conjunction with the IBM i operating system, while some will not–even if you are using the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) as the driver stack between PowerVM logical partitions running IBM i and the new iron. I’ll walk you through all the new features so you know which ones to
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IBM Peddles Discounted, Linux-Only Power Iron
April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is getting nervous about the price disparity between Power and X86 servers again and wants to expand the total addressable market for its Power machinery. And to those ends, Big Blue has gussied up some Power machines in tuxedos to match their Penguin-powered operating system. These new PowerLinux machines have lower hardware prices than the same iron when configured to run either IBM i or AIX and, says IBM, can meet or beat two-socket X86 servers running Linux.
The one thing the two new PowerLinux machines cannot do–their firmware forbids it, according to Scott Handy, vice president of PowerLinux
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IBM i 7.1 Tech Refresh Sports Live Partition Mobility
April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs The Four Hundred told you months ago, IBM was indeed working on a Technology Refresh update for its IBM i operating system for the spring and this update does indeed include live partition mobility, bringing the IBM i platform up to the same level of logical partition live migration that AIX and Linux on Power have had for years. The Tech Refresh also includes a number of other enhancements to the integrated DB2 for i database, a repackaging of the DB2 Web Query tool, and a number of other tweaks and changes.
The Technology Refresh mechanism that Big
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Getting PC5250 F1-F24 Keys to Work Correctly on HP Laptops
April 25, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreToday’s tip comes from my own experience with a recent model HP Pavilion laptop that I use for my business. The problem occurred when I loaded up the PC5250 emulator software that comes with System i Access for Windows V6R1M0. I attached to and signed on to my production IBM i box with PC5250, executed a green-screen command, and hit the F3 key to exit the screen.
Nothing happened.
The F3 key didn’t work. Neither did F5, F10, F12, or any other F-key from F1 all the way up to F24. My PC5250 F-keys were dead.
Experimenting with different keystroke
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IBM Rochester Gets A Piece Of the PureSystems Action
April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe PureSystems converged system platform might be largely a product of IBM‘s System x division, which was officially renamed the Modular Systems division several years ago but no one uses the name. But the Power Systems division has a hand in the design and manufacturing of the machines, too, as it turns out.
Tim Alpers, a local product manager at IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, told the local Post-Bulletin newspaper that the PureSystems launch “was a big deal” for the facility, which had a hand in the research and design of the converged systems and will be taking part in
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IT Spending Projections Crimped For 2012
April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe strengthening U.S. dollar and slightly higher spending last year on hardware, software, and services as well as a reduction in projected spending by companies have combined to make Gartner revise its IT spending expectations for 2012 downward a bit.
Here’s the deal. Gartner reckons that IT spending was a little bit stronger in 2011 than its projections earlier this year pegged it, with sales of $3,661 billion worldwide across all categories of IT spending, including computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services, telecom hardware, and telecom services. In January, just after 2011 had ended but before many of the IT
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Summit Partners Acquires Control Of Help/Systems–Again
April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read more“In the private equity world, you rarely double in on a company,” explains Mark Ties, chief financial officer at Help/Systems, the maker of automation tools for IBM i, Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms. But doubling in, as Ties called it, is precisely what private equity giant Summit Partners did on April 17 when it bought the majority stake control of Help/Systems.
Summit Partners was founded in 1984 and has raised more than $14 billion in capital from investors in those ensuing 28 years, which has been invested in more than 340 companies in North America, Europe, and Asia. Of