• Micro Focus Joins with Partners to Modernize Legacy Apps

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Micro Focus, the British provider of software development tools that is probably best known for its COBOL compilers, last week announced that it has formed a consortium of tool providers who want to help migrate and transform legacy applications running on minicomputers and mainframes. Dubbed the Migration and Transformation Consortium, this organization is an amalgam of providers of various programming languages and database management systems running on legacy systems and companies who provide transformation tools to get these applications to the Web. Specifically, it includes 50 companies with expertise in: Legacy mainframe and midrange systems, including ancient gear such

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• Midrange Shops Ponder Using Outsourcing Services More

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The data might be a little thin, but this could be the beginning of a trend. According to Susquehanna Financial Group, a stock brokerage house that tracks the IT outsourcing market, midrange shops are more willing to consider outsourcing than they might have been in the past. Susquehanna Financial did detailed interviews with 25 IT organizations that have at least 1,000 employees and that represented healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, financial services, and telecommunications firms. (Yes, 1,000 or more employees is the high-end of the midrange market, not the core midrange, and yes, this is pretty skinny data.) In any event,

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• Next Up on the System i5: Native GNU g++ and IBM XL C/C++

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the Java and C# programming languages and their respective Java Virtual Machine and Common Language Runtime environments for executing Java and C# programs get a lot of the glory these days, and there’s plenty of excitement around PHP (also an interpreted language) as it moves into the commercial world from the Web, the simple fact remains that an awful lot of very good systems and application programs are still written in the C or C++ language. And that is why I think that IBM should offer support for a native, open source GNU g++ compiler on the System i.

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• IBM Details Superfast Optical Chipset

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The future of computing is, for many reasons, probably going to be optical because of the blazing speed and high bandwidth of optical circuits compared to electronic components. The U.S. Defense Department, which helped fund some advanced research by IBM certainly believes so, and both are pleased about a prototype optical chipset that Big Blue detailed at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim, California, last week. Getting electronic signals off of chips and into networks requires a lot of energy, and it takes considerably more energy to move electrons, the basic unit of electricity, than it does to move

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• WDSc V7.0: Componentization of Advanced Edition Is Not Enough

  April 2, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

  Over the past few weeks, there has been much discussion in this newsletter and elsewhere regarding IBM‘s announcement of the latest release of WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc), version 7.0. Most notable has been the ruckus caused by the deprecation of the CODE/400 toolset and the limiting availability of Screen Designer and Application Diagram to the costly Advanced Edition. The deprecation of CODE was not a surprise. In fact, it was expected that when comparable tools were added to WDSc there would no longer be a need for CODE. What has shocked most developers is the timing. CODE will

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• Manhattan Associates, IBM Ink Deal to Expand Partnership

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Supply chain software maker Manhattan Associates and IBM have been partners in one form or another for the past 15 years, and last week the two re-upped their partnership and got a little closer together. Under the deal that was announced last week, Manhattan Associates will code its Integrated Planning Solutions and Integrated Logistics Solutions to run atop various operating systems supported by Big Blue and will deploy that software on IBM’s WebSphere middleware stack and using its DB2 databases and other information management software, such as Transformation Extender and Message Broker. These latter two items are data integration tools

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• Gartner Says It Was “All Over” the Virtualization Effect

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, IDC announced that it has revised its server sales forecasts to take into account the future effect that server virtualization (carving up a physical machine into multiple virtual ones) and multicore processors (putting two, four, or eight cores in a single CPU socket) will have on shipments in the market. The server box counters at Gartner took exception to our contention that IDC was the first to make such changes to server revenue and shipment models. While Gartner did not, like IDC, issue a press release to discuss its thinking on the virtualization effect on the server

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• IBM Takes Over IT Operations as Circuit City Cuts Costs

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Circuit City, the second largest distributor of electronics in the United States, has announced a cost-cutting plan that will see the company fire some 3,400 employees–about 8 percent of its workforce–and outsource its IT operations to IBM. This story doesn’t have a huge OS/400 and i5/OS angle to it, unless you consider that Circuit City is very large user of AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 servers. Like other large enterprises, Circuit City keeps the exact nature of its systems a secret. But we know from past stories that we did here at IT Jungle that as of the summer

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• Kronos To Be Taken Private Through a $1.8 Billion Buyout

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Several weeks ago, when this newsletter reported on the very good financial results that workforce management software maker Kronos posted in its fiscal first quarter, I quipped that Kronos has come to dominate its niche software market and the only question about its future was why Oracle, Infor, or SAP had not acquired it yet. Last week, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners (H&F) shelled out $1.8 billion to take Kronos private and to keep keeping time all to itself. Through several key acquisitions over the past decade as well as through organic growth, Kronos has

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• BOS Shows Improved Financials as 2006 Comes to a Close

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Better Online Solutions, the maker of midrange connectivity software and thin clients, is continuing to show improvement in its financial situation after a restructuring last year. BOS said that its sales for the three months ended December 31, 2006, rose by 9 percent to $6.1 million, and gross profits increased by 32 percent to $1.3 million. After divesting several units last year, the company has been able to cut costs, and brought $312,000 to the bottom line. For the full year, BOS posted revenues of $20.9 million, down 13 percent, and a net income of a mere $92,000. However,

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