Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Eyebrows Go Up as HP Hands the Reins to Former SAP CEO
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe war between Oracle on one side and Hewlett-Packard and SAP on what increasingly is looking like the other side heated up bigtime last week as headless HP, which ousted top exec Mark Hurd on August 6, replaced him with former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker.
Rather than give all three jobs to one person, HP’s board of directors decided to split up the titles, making Apotheker, who spent 20 years at SAP and helped it build up the world’s largest application software empire but who was let go back in February after some missteps at the German giant, HP’s president
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IT Managers Tell Gartner Their Budgets Are Up 1.1 Percent in 2010
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe prognosticators at Gartner have lowered their IT spending projections for 2010 based on surveys of C-level executives at some 1,600 companies. But only a smidgen.
When the executives were polled back at the end of 2009, the weighted average rise expected in 2010 across all of the companies was an increase in IT spending of 1.3 percent. This came on the heels of an average 8.1 percent decline in spending in 2008 across these same companies. In a survey that ran from June through August, Gartner talked to the same execs and found that, on average, spending growth is
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Lawson Says S3 Selling Nicely, and M3 Is Recovering
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreUncle Sam helped out Lawson Software in its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended August 31 in a big way by charging the company less taxes than it did in the year ago quarter. So even though Lawson’s overall sales were up only 3 percent, to $174.7 million, in the quarter and operating expenses rose by 5 percent, the company was nonetheless able to boost net income by 61 percent, to $9.6 million.
In the quarter, Lawson’s software license fee revenues were $24.5 million, down 6 percent, but in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Harry Debes, president and
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IBM Updates IBM i 7.1 with PTFs for New Power7 Machines
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt was a busy month for IBM and its team of PTF programmers, according to Doug Bidwell, who puts together the System i PTF Guide for you to keep track of Big Blue’s PTF patches for i5/OS and IBM i operating systems.
In the latest PTF Guide, which you can see here, if you drill down into the Technology Refresh, you will see that Big Blue has delivered the patches to i 7.1 that allow the operating system and its database to run on the new Power7-based Power 710, 720, 730, 740, and 795 machines. The patches are also
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The CIO’s Conundrum
October 4, 2010 Ernest von Simson
… Read moreThe CIO’s job is not an easy one: One part salesman on IT innovation, one part global project manager, charged with knitting together the wares of multiple suppliers into a coherent, reliable and cost-effective application. And one part prognosticator on the success or failure of major vendors in an industry where repeated waves of change regularly swamp unwary incumbents. Just consider the fates of former leaders including Amdahl, Burroughs, Compaq, Cullinet, Data General, Digital Equipment, Exodus, and Wang, among others. Every decade or so, a new crowd of entrepreneurs overwhelm the incumbents, leaving the IT department to sweep up the
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IBM Buys Blade Network to Control Ethernet Switches
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe buying spree at IBM continued again last week, as the company spun the acquisition wheel of fortune and landed on blade and rack Ethernet switch maker Blade Network Technologies for what is rumored to be $400 million in cash. The deal marks the re-entry of Big Blue to the networking business–if you don’t count the OEM agreements with Blade Network, Juniper Networks, and Brocade Communications and the reseller agreement with Cisco Systems.
I don’t count these as being in the networking business, but before last year and the Dynamic Infrastructure blitz, IBM didn’t even try to look
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The Little Power7 Engines That Could–And Those That Won’t
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe System/38 languished as an exotic and expensive box through most of the 1980s and the System/36 entry systems sold like hot cakes a few years later, and that experience taught IBM two lessons that were embodied in the first AS/400s from 1988 and continue to be the hallmark of Big Blue’s midrange systems today, regardless of their processor architecture. The first is that it is necessary to have as broad a selection of systems as can be affordably designed and manufactured, and the second is that you can always charge a premium for more performance and greater scalability.
In
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Feeding the Auditor: Taking Care of Problem User Profiles
September 29, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreHelp. My iSeries shop is being audited. The auditors want a list of all users who have default passwords. They also want us to automatically disable any user profiles that haven’t been active for 60 days. I don’t want to automatically disable my inactive users because I have a lot of profiles that should never be disabled on our system. How do I handle this? I’m on i/OS V5R4M5.
–Brett
Finding your default password users is easy. Simply run the following Analyze Default Password (ANZDFTPWD) command and you’ll get a listing of all system users whose password is equal to
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RPG Sorting and Searching: A 7.1 Update
September 29, 2010 Susan Gantner
… Read moreBack in 2008, I wrote a tip about using SORTA and group fields in RPG to easily sort array data, such as subfile data. Array Data Structures existed back when I wrote the original tip, but SORTA was not supported at that time. So I was forced to use the less-than-obvious group fields technique described in that tip. With new support in RPG 7.1, things have changed, so I’m revisiting the example with an updated look.
The example program that I used before was very simple to retrofit to utilize an actual Array Data Structure. The definition of the array
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Enterprise Software Spending to Rise 4.5 Percent This Year
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe global enterprise software market is on the rebound this year after taking it on the chin thanks to the Great Recession last year. According to the analysts at Gartner, worldwide software sales across all categories will come to $232 billion in 2010, up 4.5 percent from last year’s spending levels.
Gartner is projecting that software spending will rise even faster in 2011, up 6.3 percent to $246.6 billion, and is projecting for sales to hit $297 billion by 2014. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent over the six years running from 2009 through 2014.