• Forrester Predicts IT Spending Slowdown in 2007

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again. One IT budget cycle is ending, and another one is beginning, and everyone is trying to figure out if the market for information technology will grow again in the coming year. Growth in IT spending is a leading indicator for all of the vendors, companies, and IT personnel who participate in the commercial computing realm, so there is a lot riding on how IT spending goes up or down in any given year. The analysts at Forrester Research are the early birds for IT spending forecasts for 2007, but that forecast was embedded

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• Evans Data Cases Programming Language Popularity

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two recent reports from Evans Data have provided some insight into what is going on in the programming profession these days. One report, released in late November, is based on a poll of programmers in North America and gets a sense of the programming languages they use to create applications. But the other report, from October, is perhaps more stunning. It shows that by 2009–if Evans Data’s projections are right–there will be a lot more programmers in the world from places other than North America, and what they do might matter a whole lot more. According to the latest North

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• Lotus SameTime Connects With Major IM Communities

  December 11, 2006 Dan Burger

  When IBM‘s Lotus division announced on December 6 that its SameTime instant messaging software is available with gateways to two immensely popular IM networks–AOL‘s AIM and Google‘s Google Talk–the boundaries of collaboration were seriously expanded. In a few weeks, a third major network, Yahoo! Messenger, will be added and another major step on the road to instant messaging integration will have been taken. According to IBM, this will put more than 157 million instant messaging users into one community. That’s not the same as saying “no boundaries,” but it’s a leap from multiple proprietary networks, which

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• Q4bis Teams Up with SM Consulting for Business Intelligence

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Business intelligence software provider Q4bis continues to push into the North American small and medium business market, and has inked a deal with SM Consulting to provide integration services for the Q4bis suite. The Q4bis is a suite of business intelligence tools run on Microsoft‘s Windows Server and a multidimensional database created using SQL Server, as well as a Windows front end, and various ETL and mobile tools that run in Windows. But Q4bis was intentionally extended, through a set of templates for major RPG-based ERP packages for OS/400 and i5/OS platforms to be able to interface with DB2/400

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• Phishing, Zero-Days Top Symantec’s Security List

  December 11, 2006 Alex Woodie

  Symantec last week issued an end-of-the-year report on the state of IT security, and the findings may surprise you–or they may not, depending on how closely you’ve followed the security goings-on during the last 12 months. In any case, if one had to pick the two most important security trends for 2006, it would be tough to beat the meteoric rise of phishing and zero-day exploits. Phishing, an activity engaged in by criminals to perpetrate identity theft and the financial misdeeds that inevitably follow, increased dramatically in the first half of 2006, when Symantec detected close to 900 unique phishing

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• The System iWant, 2007 Edition

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great thing about IBM‘s woes with the AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 products and its line of business within the Server Group, Systems Group, and now the Systems and Technology Group for the past dozen years is that there is always an opportunity to tell Big Blue how it might improve the OS/400 and i5/OS platform. It is always fun to try to figure out how IBM might do a better job of competing first against mainframes, then Unix, then Windows, and now Linux servers. The bad thing about this situation, of course, is that the OS/400 and

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• PwC Consultants Predict an IT Talent Shortage

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The data centers and departments of the world’s companies are not the only organizations that are constantly wrestling with developing technical talent and keeping their techies happy. The technology companies of the world–who supply us our hardware, software, telecommunications, and information services–have the same exact problem. And maybe they even have it worse, if a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers is a glimpse into the personnel management realities that technology companies are facing. PwC puts out an annual survey related to hiring and employee management practices at technology companies because it has a business practice consulting with these firms–many of them the

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• Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

  December 4, 2006 Brian Kelly

  In 2005, Windows servers eclipsed Unix servers for the first time in terms of revenue, by nearly $200 million. According to IDC, over $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers and $15.5 billion in Unix servers were sold worldwide in 2005. Additionally, Linux took third place at $5.3 billion and mainframes slipped to $4.8 billion. With sales of approximately $2 billion in 2005, IBM‘s System i fell short of making the report. How is it that the grandfather of what was once the darling small business system family in the world (the IBM System/3 and System/3X) could have slipped

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• The X Factor: You Can’t Steal What’s Free, But You Can Pay a Lot for Something That Isn’t Worth It

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early 1990s, when IBM was on the rocks after its mainframe business imploded and the world shifted to cheaper Unix servers and client/server development was just getting underway, the Wall Street Journal ran a multi-page story that I have never forgotten. The story was one of hubris, of Big Blue’s lack of understanding of how the market had changed so much around it that it took the company the better part of six years to find its feet again. Had it not been for the Y2K and dot-com bubbles, IBM might not have found its feet again.

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• Zend Puts Out Beta PHP Tools for OS/400 V5R3

  December 4, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As promised, Zend Technologies is diligently doing the job of back-porting its PHP language and related Zend for i5/OS tools to OS/400 V5R3. This year, as we all know, Zend delivered a freebie version of the PHP tools for i5/OS V5R4, but given that maybe only 15,000 or so people have V5R4, this limits the appeal of PHP on the System i5 platform and its predecessors. Which is why Zend and IBM are working together on a port to OS/400 V5R3, which probably has four or five times as many users. Last week, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at

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