Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Northeast PA User Group Was Not Dead–Just Cocooning
December 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe members of the Northeast Pennsylvania Computer Users Group (NPCUG), which is located in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and which is a long-time user group devoted to the AS/400 and its successors, met in November and came this close to shutting down. But rather than do that, its 20 members have decided to transform the organization into a broader user group to server the IT community of that mountainous region of the Keystone State.
Jim Flannery, a senior systems analyst at Convergys, a customer relationship management software provider that does work with AT&T Mobility, is NPCUG’s most recent past president, and he
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Holiday Holidays–That’s a Bake and a Wrap
December 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe patent-pending fruitcakes are baked, soaked in cognac, wrapped in fondant, and in transit to family and friends, including the devoted employees of Guild Companies, the publisher of the Four Hundred group of newsletters here at IT Jungle. That is how I know it is almost time to stop typing for a while.
This company, like baking holiday fruitcakes, is a labor of love. Nothing good is ever easy, and a fruitcake is about as popular as an AS/400 out there in IT Land. But just like IBM Rochester makes a system that is different, yet good, I happen to
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A Second Opinion on Third Quarter Server Sales
December 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith server revenues being a kind of leading indicator for overall IT spending, the health and wealth of server vendors and various product lines within the systems racket are something that bears paying attention to each quarter. Which is why the market researchers at Gartner and IDC spend so much time trying to figure out what it going on with servers.
The Four Hundred walked you through Gartner’s analysis of third quarter server sales in last week’s issue, which looks at revenues and shipments for the overall market by vendor, as well as drilling down into RISC/Itanium boxes running
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Sirius to Top $1 Billion in Sales with MSI Systems Acquisition
December 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe availability of cheap money gathered up by private equity firms to make acquisitions has combined with an IT industry consolidating on so many fronts it can make you dizzy. And that is why it is really not much of a surprise that Sirius Computer Solutions acquired MSI Systems Integrators for an undisclosed sum. Both are among the largest players in the IBM Power Systems market, and have histories that stretch back to the AS/400 days.
Sirius is over 30 years old and is based in San Antonio, Texas. The company currently has 665 employees with a combined 3,800 different
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Admin Alert: The Nine Stages of a Power i Upgrade
December 8, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLike many other shops, you may soon be upgrading your existing iSeries, System i, or Power i hardware. To help with that process, this week I’m reviewing the nine general stages that occur during a Power i upgrade. While not all-inclusive, these stages create a general roadmap for what you need to consider during a Power i hardware purchase.
The Overview
Briefly, the nine stages of a Power i upgrade are:
- IBM hardware and software maintenance extension (if necessary)
- Operating system upgrade (optional)
- High availability preparation (optional)
- Sizing your machines
- Evaluating alternatives
- Final specifications, decision, financing, and ordering
- Third-party software
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The Top 10 IBM i Security Exposures, Part 2
December 8, 2010 Wayne O. Evans
… Read moreIn Part 1 of this article, I mentioned the importance of being aware of common security exposures. I described five of the 10 most common security exposures and provided suggestions for minimizing risk. This article covers the remaining five security exposures.
Exposure #6: Unrestricted use of IBM Navigator for i.
IBM provides IBM Navigator for i (formerly called iSeries Navigator and Operations Navigator) as the graphical user interface for OS/400 functions. This powerful interface can be used in place of a command line to manage the security of objects, display data file content, and even delete objects. IBM Navigator, like
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QlikTech Investors Go Back Down to Wall Street for More Money
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHaving done a very successful initial public offering back in July, the backers behind Qlik Technologies are going back in for a second offering to cash in their investment in the company.
Last Monday, QlikTech announced that its backers have a secondary offering of its shares on the NASDAQ market, with its owners offering 10 million shares of common stock and letting the underwriters of the stock push another 1.5 million shares if they were received with enthusiasm by investors. On Friday, the Radnor, Pennsylvania, company said it could do better than that and expected its venture capital backers to
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Survey Says Oracle Users Unhappy with Oracle Application Support
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the first round of the Oracle versus SAP and TomorrowNow lawsuit over and a jury awarding Oracle $1.3 billion in damages and all eyes turning to Rimini Street, which is suing and being sued by Oracle over its third-party support, it is an appropriate time, perhaps, to ask about how happy Oracle’s application software customers are with their vendor.
If a new survey by Computer Economics is any guide, the answer for some Oracle shops seems to be “not very much.”
The IT market researcher, which has just put together a report called Go-Forward Strategies for Oracle Application
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IBM Cuts Prices on Power 740 Storage and Smartie SSD and Servers
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like some customers are balking at the prices that IBM is trying to charge for storage chassis and a new solid state disk-PCI-Express RAID controller bundle that aims to boost the throughput of Power7-based machines.
Just before the Thanksgiving holiday and just after I had already went to press with the prior issue of The Four Hundred, IBM said in announcement letter 310-295 that it was cutting the price on the feature 1135 integrated storage controller by 13.3 percent. This device is not a storage controller, but rather a 2U chassis with two dozen 300 GB disks
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Server Sales Chug Along in the Third Quarter
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is still plenty of pent up demand out there in the data centers and data closets of the world for servers thanks to the dearth of server spending during the Great Recession. According to the box counters at Gartner, who released the market stats for the third quarter last week, companies shelled out some $12.3 billion acquiring 2.19 million servers in the 13-week period running from the beginning of June through the end of September.
Everyone wants to throw a party because that represented 15.3 percent revenue growth and 14.2 percent shipment growth compared to the third quarter