• A Little Application Humor, Thanks to Lawson Software

  September 24, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If Number Two always has to try harder, as car rental company Avis used to say in its commercials, then imagine how hard you have to try when you are number six behind SAP, Oracle, Infor, Sage Group, and Microsoft. Even if you don’t count Sage and Microsoft as providers of enterprise-class applications, Lawson Software is still up against some pretty tough competition. Which is why, perhaps, the company–or someone who has invested money in Lawson stock–has put out a stealth marketing video on YouTube, which you can see here, describing how three companies–Elcaro,

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• EGL: The Future of Programming for the System i?

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IT managers cut the checks in the data center world, but the programmers and system analysts do the work to make machinery turn into the software that controls how the business operates. The programmers are the ones who have the brains to actually make the complex code that allows businesses to be simplified and automated, and it is an unwise vendor that antagonizes the programmers on its systems and a wise one that tries to court as many programmers as possible to a platform. The IT managers may write the checks, but programmers have the most influence over what

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• Rumored Layoffs at IBM Rochester Not True

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past couple of weeks, people have been asking me if there have been layoffs inside of IBM‘s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, where the System i and System p Power-based servers are manufactured for the North American market. These rumors are not true, according to sources at the company. In the early part of the summer, I heard second-hand from an ex-IBMer who went on a tour of the facility while wheeling around the country on vacation, and what I was told is that there was not a lot of activity on the factory floor, which looked empty. At

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• HP Beats the System i on Integration for Midrange Shops

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As readers of the IT Jungle family of newsletters know full well, I am a hardware junkie and I am impressed when someone does something clever and useful with a piece of machinery. There are tens of thousands of hardware engineers worldwide designing and implementing sophisticated ideas, turning them into real objects, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for what they do. But I also find it equally mystifying why some ideas, which are obvious as far as I am concerned, take so blasted long to get implemented by server makers. Such is the case with blade servers

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• LANSA Packages Modernization; Leasing Covers it All

  September 17, 2007 Dan Burger

  All it takes is time and money. That’s an apt summation for just about any IT project, but is particularly true about application modernization, a project that is on the minds of many IT managers in iSeries shops. For most of them, it’s a determination of how much effort it requires, how that effort can be applied with existing staff, and how it fits into a workable budget. Alleviating those concerns is the benefit LANSA believes it has built into a new program it has introduced with the cooperation of Avnet and IBM. LANSA calls this program the Lease

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• Ask TPM: What About System/3X Compilers in i5/OS V6R1?

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our experts over at Four Hundred Guru get asked a lot of questions and they provide a lot of good answers. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature. So if you have a question you want to get my take on–or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on–then send me an email and I will see what I can do. Here’s a recent question I got about compilers. Hey, TPM: I note that you have written on the issue of

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• iSociety Chat: Preparing for the Move to i5/OS V6R1

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This Wednesday, the iSociety i5/OS and OS/400 community will host a chat that that your programmers and system administrators should probably listen in on if your company has any plans to move to i5/OS V6R1 when it becomes available next year. Paul Gotland, the software development engineer from the Rochester Lab who is intimately familiar with the inner workings of the microcode, technology independent machine interface, and compilers of the AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers, will be hosting a fireside chat on the things people have to do to prepare for the move to V6R1. We covered the program

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• Eclipse Foundation Delivers PHP Extensions to Open Source Toolset

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Eclipse Foundation that manages the open source community that is building out the Eclipse integrated development environment, will today announce that it has Release 1.0 of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project available. This is the first set of Eclipse tools that are aimed at the PHP developer community, which will marry the 2.3 million programmers who currently use Eclipse IDEs to create Java, C, C++, RPG, and other programs with the PHP community, which has an estimated 4 million developers according to estimated cited by the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse IDE was in used by an estimated

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• Reseller Channel Sales Growth Slows in Q2, Says IDC Survey

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IT analysts at IDC take the pulse of the reseller channel every quarter, and the even before all of the shenanigans with the subprime mortgage market surfaced in the third quarter, giving everyone the jitters, channel partners who push PCs, servers, storage, software, and other IT gear were saying that growth was starting to slow in Q2. According to the survey results, which are the result of questioning over 500 channel partners each quarter in North America, the number of IT resellers who reported that business was growing was down and the number of resellers who said that their

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• Gartner Projects Slowing Growth for CRM Software Sales

  September 17, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Software as a service, or SaaS, is having a major and transformative effect on the market for customer relationship management (CRM) software–perhaps as big of an effect as CRM had on the ERP software market a decade ago. The analysts at Gartner have put together their prognostications for the CRM market, where SaaS first took off in a big way thanks to Salesforce.com, and while the press releases are all about how this market will continue to grow, if you do the math on the numbers that Gartner presents, you will actually see that Gartner expects for growth to

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