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  • As I See It: Babes in Broadband

    July 28, 2008 Victor Rozek

    A couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done–preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department.

    Now, marketing is not a reality-based profession. It is most assuredly faith-based, complete with promises of eternal satisfaction. Just sign here and accept Qwest as your provider, and you will be granted eternal access at heavenly speeds. Well, as

    …

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  • SAP Shuts Down TomorrowNow Support Biz

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    After a protracted, painful, and ultimately successful bid to acquire rival PeopleSoft by Oracle that resulted in the contentious deal being done in January 2005, Oracle’s key enterprise application software rival, SAP, made a wiseguy move–and what looked like a clever move– only a few weeks later in acquiring TomorrowNow, a company that provided support to the application suites under control of the greatly expanded Oracle. But the grins at SAP all turned to chagrins in March 2007 when TomorrowNow and SAP were slapped with lawsuits for illegally downloading Oracle’s support materials.

    Last summer, SAP’s chief executive officer,

    …

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  • Reader Feedback on What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    My dicing and slicing of the demographics of the midrange server market last week elicited an interesting response from a reader, suggesting a much cleaner way of thinking about how to separate small, medium, and large enterprises and their IT departments from each other. Check it out.

    Hey, TPM:

    Here’s an even simpler distinction, call it B and C. There are companies where the decision to buy a server or an application is made by a hired manager and those where the decision is made by the owners.

    • To the former, the money comes from their Budget.
    • To the latter,
    …

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  • Gartner Predicts Half of Users Dissatisfied with IT Pace by 2013

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    OK, so I laughed out loud when I saw this recent report from Gartner. Not because the idea is wrong, but because I thought that all end users were pretty much unhappy with their IT departments.

    The report, which will be presented in the coming months at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit and its Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit, had this very simple premise: More than 50 percent of end users will be dissatisfied with the slow rate of IT change in their enterprises by 2013. That projection is weighed against the current dissatisfaction with the gung-ho rate of IT

    …

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  • IBM Ultrium Media Pricing: Told You This Story Wasn’t Done

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    My journalistic spidey sense is still pretty good, it looks like. Two weeks ago, I told you that IBM lowered prices on Ultrium tape cartridges by a pretty big percentage and then raised them right back up again a week later. I also said that I couldn’t wait to see what IBM did on July 15 or July 22, because this story wasn’t over.

    Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t over. Let’s recap, just so we don’t cause as much confusion on this as IBM has. Here are the price changes on Ultrium media announced on July 1, in

    …

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  • Middleware Makers Are Sued Over Server Patents

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    As we are all well aware, patent laws can be as much of a problem for innovation as they can be a boon for it. A patent is only as good as the clerk’s understanding of the technology field they are issuing patents for, and unfortunately, not everyone can be as smart as Albert Einstein, perhaps the smartest patent clerk in the world.

    This is how we get into the situation that we see from time to time in the information technology racket: a small and obscure company holds patents that seem to apply to a broad line of technologies,

    …

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  • Mike Borman Lands the CEO Job at Avocent

    July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Here’s a name that you will recognize: Mike Borman. No, he’s not the Apollo astronaut and former chief executive officer at Eastern Air Lines, but rather the former general manager of the iSeries division at IBM and now the new chief executive officer at systems management product maker Avocent.

    Borman was named general manager of the iSeries division in July 2004, and took a bunch of heat at the COMMON midrange user group meeting that fall and made a series of commitments to listen to iSeries shops, improve the product line, and do a better job selling the box.

    …

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  • What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?

    July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd.

    The midrange systems and now, server, market and its customer base has always been important. The midrange products from IBM

    …

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  • More Power7 Details Emerge, Thanks to Blue Waters Super

    July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers.

    And so it is with IBM‘s future Power7

    …

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  • IBM Drives Home a Strong Second Quarter Across the Board

    July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done.

    Mark Loughridge,

    …

    Read more

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