The consolidation of the midrange continued last month when The PowerTech Group, a leading developer of i OS security software, was acquired by Help/Systems and Audax Group, the private equity group backing the i OS utility developer. Few details of the deal are being released, as the companies are privately held and therefore under no obligation to spill the nitty gritty. What is known is that PowerTech will continue to function as a completely independent entity.

By all indications, PowerTech has become a powerhouse of i OS security software this decade. Whereas many of its competitors had been

If there is any rule in the latter stages of development in any market, it is that the big get bigger. So it has been in the market for application software for businesses of all sizes, and last week JDA Software continued to exert its gravity in the software space by acquiring sometime-rival supply chain software specialist i2 Technologies for a net cost of about $346 million. The move not only makes JDA that much more of a player in supply chain software–and for many companies, positions JDA up above SAP and Oracle–but also puts to rest years of

This bit of news will come as no surprise to any IT Jungle readers who have run their own businesses or who work for small companies where money is a lot tighter than at larger enterprises, which always seem to have a lot more dough to spare for IT projects that may or may not pan out. According to research performed recently by IDC, SMB shops, which have IT budgets that are growing at least twice as fast as spending among larger companies, are more worried about the state of the economy than all the latest gadgetry or hot

Richard Stengel describes him as “the closest thing the world has to a secular saint.” And Stengel is in a good position to know. For two years, the managing editor of Time collaborated with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. How better to describe a man who endured 27 years of hellish captivity, emerged unembittered, and rejected vengeance in favor of creating a more perfect union.

Stengel recently wrote an article in which he shares his reflections on Mandela’s leadership qualities honed over nine decades of tumultuous and heroic living. Not all are equally relevant to

The product might still be bearing the cryptic XIV name its founder, Moshe Yanai, gave the storage company he founded after leaving EMC, but now the XIV Storage System also has the IBM 2810 Model A14 designation, and this new type of clustered storage system is available in the Big Blue catalog.

IBM acquired XIV, which is based in Israel and which was still operating in stealth mode as it was preparing to launch its products, on January 2 of this year. Yanai, who is the engineering genius behind EMC’s wildly successful Symmetrix line of disk arrays, left EMC

I seem to have missed something on the DDS versus DDL topic, which Dan Burger wrote about in Database Modernization Still Unknown Territory. Explain why and how DDL is faster if they both run on the same box. The speed of the disk drives is the same. If there is some “super algorithm” for DDL, why can’t it be applied to DDS? Is there some design feature of DDS that just makes it slow compared to DDL, or is DDL really just something new just because IBM thought it was time for a change, kinda like the i versus

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A guy walks into a bar wearing a Microsoft .NET T-shirt and challenges any Java-loving pansy to fight. The place gets deathly quiet, and one guy in the back of the room slides his chair back from a table, stands up, and glares at the intruder.

These kinds of encounters happen all the time, but by and large the combatants remain anonymous and the outcomes are quickly turned into folklore, with each side retelling the stories with their favorite programming environment superhero wailing the opponent into a bloody pulp. Well, get ready

With so much dicey news out there in the economy, you have to look high and low for a little good news. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel have been doing pretty well for themselves in recent quarters, but in a market where Microsoft is under pressure and Sun Microsystems can’t seem to right itself as Dell is making progress. And, as it turns out, so are the largest IT and electronics distributors in the world, Arrow Electronics and Avnet.

Both companies, who are the two major master distributors for servers in the world, reported their financial results for

Application tool and integration software provider Magic Software Enterprises continued to make progress on riding up the wave of legacy application modernization out there in the world, and reported record sales and profits in its second quarter ended June 30.

Magic Software is based in Or Yehuda, Israel, but does a lot of its business in North America and Europe–particularly in OS/400, i5/OS, and i shops. So its own rise and fall is something of a barometer, loosely speaking, of what is going on out there in AS/400 land. Being a public company, as Magic Software is, allows us to

The one thing that happens when a company goes from being publicly held to private is that it has at least four fewer reasons to talk to the world about itself since the company doesn’t have to do the quarterly dance with Wall Street and the financial and trade press. But old habits die hard, and human resource and talent management software maker Kronos reported financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter, just because it can if it wants to and just to make a little noise for itself.

There aren’t a lot of details, of course, because Kronos