• IBM’s Transitive Buy Presents Interesting Server Options

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a story you’ve heard a bunch of times: IBM liked the software so much, it bought the company. And so the story ran again last week, when Big Blue bought software emulation specialist Transitive for an undisclosed sum of money. Transitive makes a bit of software called QuickTransit, which allows applications created for one chip to be encapsulated, and run on completely different architectures. Like so many of IBM’s moves, the acquisition of Transitive appears to be both an offensive and defensive move at the same time. More on that in a bit. But first, let’s review what QuickTransit

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• Midrange Shops Not As Protected from Disaster As They Think, Vision Finds

  November 24, 2008 Alex Woodie

  System i and System p shops have an irrational faith in the capabilities of their disaster recovery systems, and could be in for a harsh reality check if their servers go down unexpectedly. This is according to a report issued last week by high availability software provider Vision Solutions, which looks at the DR and HA technologies used by these organizations and the expectations placed upon them. For its new report, entitled The State of Resilience and Optimization on IBM Power Systems, Vision Solutions and its strategic partner, the Information Availability Institute, surveyed more than 2,000 IT

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• Public Safety Works on Information Sharing, May Go for SaaS

  November 24, 2008 Dan Burger

  Data integration problems plague a lot of organizations, but this curse may be best illustrated by examining the grief it brings to law enforcement agencies. It’s here that information sharing can come down to life and death situations without that claim setting off the hyperbole alarms. Improving data integration internally as well as among federal, state, county, and local agencies is a law enforcement priority and there are numerous initiatives and best practices paving the way. The IBM AS/400, iSeries, and System i are sometimes in the line of fire. Using law enforcement as an example of the challenges of

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• As I See It: Final Options

  November 24, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Let’s face it: if a couple trillion dollars in bailouts didn’t fix the economy, it’s probably in worse shape than even gloomy analysts want to admit. For one thing, if the economy wasn’t already on life support, we wouldn’t have found out about it until after the election. We all know the trends: a quarter million jobs lost in October alone, hundreds of businesses closing, and the Big Three auto makers trolling the halls of Congress with a sign reading “Will work for $25 billion.” It’s getting so bad Gladys Knight had to lay off one of her Pips. None

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• As Rumored, IBM Tweaks i Development Tool Bundle

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A little less than a month ago, I told you that IBM was rumored to be thinking about tweaking its Rational tool bundle for the System i and Power Systems i entry machines. And lo and behold, the very precise rumor that I told you about–which was conveyed to me from a business partner, who got the information from an IBMer in the know–has indeed come to pass. Specifically, IBM made yet another announcement of the rejiggering of the compiler and related toolset last week for its smaller i platforms. Because you don’t have the entire System i and Power

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• ChangeWave Plots a ‘Historic Collapse’ in IT Spending

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, here’s some more good news in the IT spending polling business and bad news for IT spending. ChangeWave, a market research collective founded during the dot-com bust to track tech trends and investing, has just finished up a survey of IT shops in the United States that shows companies were freaked out a few weeks ago enough to put a big damper on IT spending plans. How big? Bigger than the dot-com bust big. Take a look at the historical data that ChangeWave has gathered since 2001 in this article. ChangeWave polled some 1,926 IT organizations between

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• IBM Kills Off Power5+ System i Boxes

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As expected, IBM is taking the old model Power5+ System i machines that helped get the i platform back on track off the market, now that Power6-based machines give as good or better bang for the buck. Well, in most cases, and especially if you don’t think about any discounting going on out there in the reseller channel on Power5+ machines. Anyway, last week, IBM pulled the plug on the user-priced machines that finally came to market last year and gave the entry i platform a fighting chance against Windows-based machines among small and medium businesses. Specifically, the feature 8971

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• The Pressure Is On Server Resellers, Big Time

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While dominant IT suppliers IBM and Hewlett-Packard are still managing to hold their financials together despite the tense economic situation, they are doing this by and large because they have a vast channel of distributors and resellers into which they can pump their hardware and software. Server resellers have a lot of pressure on them to absorb gear, but vendors often help with financing to these resellers on the front end of a deal to get the equipment out of their factories and then help again on the other side of the reseller to finance equipment at the end user

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• Maintenance Expert ServIT Partners with Data Center Provider

  November 24, 2008 Dan Burger

  ServIT, a System i solution provider specializing in consulting, maintenance, and wholesale distribution, completed a partnership deal last week with Peak 10, a data center operator and managed services provider with a pocketful of high-profile clients across the United States. Peak 10 is particularly adept at managing regulatory compliance solutions for SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FDA, PCI, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLBA) requirements, according to the company. Tony Merendino, president of ServIT, described Peak 10 as “a valuable partner as well as a trusted IT advisor to the local business community.” In addition to the above-mentioned expertise, ServIT has more

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• WebSphere Marketeer Writes the Book on Marketing 2.0

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A familiar IBMer has just finished writing a book about the new style of marketing that is enabled by recent Internet technologies, and that author is someone who is familiar to AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops: Sandy Carter, currently vice president of SOA and WebSphere marketing, strategy, and channels at IBM. The book she has penned (well, people don’t really pen books any more, do they?) is called The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market, and ANGELS, being a phrase created by an IBMer, is an acronym.

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