• IBM’s System i and System x Technical Support Teams Win Accolades

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The support for IBM systems and servers is legendary. One of the reasons why Big Blue has been able to command a premium–particularly on its proprietary platforms–is the hand-holding that system engineers and back-end technical support operations give to customers to buy IBM’s boxes. And once again, the System i support operation has been selected by its peers in the support community to receive a Star Award; the System x division has received its first such award. The Star Awards are given by the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA). The first award was given in 1989, and it is

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• Survey Says: CEOs Trust Their Guts More than Data to Make Decisions

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is what it means to be human. After companies have spent untold trillions of dollars creating computer systems to process business transactions and give them the data that can help business leaders make better decisions, chief executive officers polled recently say that gut feelings are more influential than hard numbers about their own business or those of competitors. That conclusion is drawn from a poll of 252 CEOs of companies based in the United States performed by PRWeek, a magazine dedicated to PR professionals, Burson-Marsteller, one of the big public relations firms, and Millard Brown, a market research

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• The State of the System i: The Analysts Speak

  November 20, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Reporting on an otherwise stellar quarter, IBM noted in its recent quarterly earnings report that System i sales were down 22 percent, quarter-to-quarter, from 2005. To be fair, it was a tough comparison, since the System i, bolstered by pent-up demand brought on with delivery on several major announcements, hit pay dirt in the prior year, with sales up 25 percent over 2004. That said, the negative 22 percent number left a few of us feeling more than a little disappointment, especially in light of the fact that the System z line was up 25 percent, the System p was

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• Company Execs Are Concerned About Securing Data

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server maker Unisys has a mainframe heritage, and that means it has a deep understanding of the security issues that large companies and government organizations face. To get a better understanding of what business managers are thinking, Unisys has launched a new metric called the Trusted Enterprise Index, which the company hopes will give it some insight over time about the impact of the issues of trust, privacy, and security on business practices around the globe. To kick off the index, Unisys hired the Ponemon Institute, a private research firm, to conduct a survey of 1,700 senior-level corporate and technology

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• Sun Releases Java Under GPL Open Source License

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  About time. It only took two changes of the executive guard at Sun Microsystems and the better part of a decade, but last week Sun finally began the process of open sourcing all of its Java technology. And in something of a shocker that quite literally left the audience of techies and the press speechless, Sun chose the GNU General Public License v2 as the means of letting go of Java. When Sun finally let go, it did it with style and despite the contrarian views of many, Sun picked the best license to ensure the broadest amount of protection

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• IDC Ranks Data Warehousing and Business Analytics Tool Vendors

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at IDC who hand out grades for the data warehousing and business analytics software markets handed out report cards recently. The markets are continuing to grow at double-digit rates, even as technologies are maturing, because more and more businesses are seeing the value of doing intensive analysis on vast amounts of information in order to squeeze more revenue out of the markets they play in. The growth in these two markets is, however, slowing a bit. IDC reckons that a total of $7.7 billion in data warehousing tools were sold in 2003, and that the market grew by

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• Academic Initiative Attempts to Unite Business and Education

  November 20, 2006 Dan Burger

  Before you make the uninformed assumption that IBM Academic Initiative for System i has no bearing on you, your job, or the company you work for, consider for more than one minute what you can build out of a working relationship with a local technical school, community college, or four-year university. This is an opportunity to become involved in the educational process as it pertains to your profession and personally inject some real world experience that not only benefits students but you and your company as well. I think we can all agree that classrooms and learning from a book

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• Product Transitions Affect Financials at MKS During Fiscal Q2

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application lifecycle management software vendor MKS has announced preliminary financial results for its second fiscal quarter 2007 ended October 31, and the company warned investors on the Toronto Stock Exchange that sales would be down from the prior year. MKS, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, one of the hot-beds of OS/400 software development, said that sales of its Integrity ALM products will be in the range of $3.2 million to $3.5 million (Canadian) in the quarter, “significantly lower than expected,” but said that other components of ALM revenue–maintenance and services–grew at the expected rates. The decline means that ALM

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Stay the Recourse

  November 20, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  IBM is hooting about SOA, which stands for Services Oriented Architecture and which approximately means putting the changing needs of end users at the heart of computer systems development. We don’t know where end users were in the landscape before; we had, apparently in mistake, thought they were always the most prominent feature. In any event, this kind of SOA stuff, even if it makes some excellent points, is largely a red herring. It won’t reduce software or support costs. To do that, IBM resorts to another SOA, Substitute Offshore Artisans. Services Oriented Architecture is the latest in

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• Global Software Partners with Navigor in South Africa

  November 20, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Global Software continues to live up to its name, and last week the Raleigh, North Carolina, company announced that it has partnered to bring its Spreadsheet Server reporting and analysis tools for popular OS/400- and i5/OS-based ERP suites to South African companies. Specifically, Global Software has partnered with Navigor, a subsidiary of EOH, a public company that is traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. EOH is one of South Africa’s largest technology companies, and through its subsidiaries it is engaged in IT consulting, business process engineering, sales of ERP systems and their extensions (supply chain, customer relationship, and

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