TFH Volume: 17 Archives - Page 8 of 47

Some Servers Take a Dive in IBM’s Third Quarter

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM preannounced its revenues and earnings as the market was swooning two weeks ago in an effort to calm a staggering and falling Wall Street, the company’s overall numbers gave the impression that Big Blue was nonetheless weathering the financial storm. While this may be true in the aggregate, to IBM’s credit (don’t say credit) as an IT supplier, certain portions of its business–particularly certain server lines–didn’t do so well. Decide for yourself if this is some kind of leading indicator for the rest of 2008 and maybe 2009.

IBM’s sales for the third quarter came to $25.3 billion,

…

Infor CEO Preaches Business Darwinism, Prepares for Hyper Business Future

October 20, 2008 Dan Burger

Taking a page from Eric Marks’ book, Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, Infor chairman and chief executive officer, Jim Schaper, gave the attendees at his company’s Inforum user conference last week his preview of business in the year 2015. Infor, the ERP super group that has assembled a collection of major and midrange ERP software firms that specialize in the manufacturing and distribution businesses, is in the early stages of shifting its application development to a service oriented architecture.

The move to what Infor calls its “Open SOA,” a technology framework with middleware built in, has the aim of

…

Ask TPM: Isn’t It Time for the i OS to Catch Mono?

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Timothy,

I read in a recent eWeek article that the Mono 2.0 release, which implements the features of .NET 2.0, was announced on October 6. Is there any news regarding whether IBM will ever support Mono in IBM i? (I would assume not.) We have a mixed shop here: Power Systems for our main business application and Windows/Sharepoint/.NET for our Website and intranet. I am doing both RPG and C# development.

It would be great if we could one day run C# apps and Web services on the IBM i to potentially update our RPG program front-ends and interface with

…

IT Shops Are Getting Wise to the Unified Communications Hype

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the underlying technologies that allow us to reach out and touch someone through the telephone networks have changed dramatically and continuously over the past 50 years, the convergence of computer and telephone networks and new software to merge business applications seamlessly with telephone networks has led to much enthusiasm about so-called unified communications. And companies are getting wise to the hype.

IT analyst firm IDC has done its fifth annual Voice over IP with InfoWorld magazine (which is owned by the same company as IDC and a slew of other IT trade rags, including ComputerWorld), and has used

…

IBM Helps Partners Learn New Data Center Skills

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For as long as I have been watching the IBM midrange, the company has been trying to push more and more gear through its reseller channel and put the burden of training for sales, configuration, and support onto the partner channel. Business partners grouse about ever-lowering margins, and the pressure that comes from Moore’s Law, which makes all aspects of computing that have to do with electronics cheaper as people costs go up every year.

The spread between the two is where the growth in the IT market has come from.

But, if you are a business partner or an

…

The Tech Sector Stops Adding Jobs–Cuts Soon?

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Even before Wall Street and the other stock markets of the world started melting down with such intensity in late September and early October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit in the U.S. Department of Labor, was showing that computer hardware and software tech companies have stopped hiring in the States and telecommunications companies have started making cuts.

The U.S. economy has been losing jobs all year, and in the September statistics, which you can read in detail here, the bureau calculates that 159,000 people lost their jobs. (This is the non-farm labor pool, by the way.) Jobs

…

Oracle and SAP Still Haven’t Settled the TomorrowNow Suit

October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This week, application software powerhouses SAP and Oracle will be back on the phone trying to get their ongoing, and for SAP, embarrassing, lawsuit concerning the now defunct TomorrowNow third-party support business going again.

According to a report on the Dow Jones newswires, Oracle and SAP had a conference call to try to sell the suit, and are going to take another crack at it. The report in the Dow Jones wire had an SAP spokesperson confirming that the talks were ongoing with the judge in the case and that the next conference would be on October 20.

The lawsuit

…

IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

October 13, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, the rumor going around that IBM is doubling up the processor core counts on its Power Systems servers, which are based on the company’s dual-core Power6 processors, turns out to be true. Last Tuesday, IBM announced that it has doubled up the cores in the Power 570 to a maximum of 32, and now is also offering a 16-core box called the Power 560 that slides in underneath it in the product line. As expected, IBM also doubled the core count on entry Power 520 and midrange Power 550 machines when running the i 6.1 (formerly OS/400 and i5/OS)

…

Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

October 13, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week’s announcements for the Power Systems product line did not just have to do with the doubling up of core counts on Power 520, 550, and 570 servers plus the debut of the new Power 560 box. (See IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems also in this issue for more on that.) There were a bunch of other hardware and software announcements that are interesting to i shops.

First, there is a new processor option for the Power 550, which has been using 4.2 GHz Power6 cores until now for i Editions and AIX and Linux Editions.

…

SMB Manufacturers Testing PLM Integration Possibilities

October 13, 2008 Dan Burger

Breaking down boundaries is maybe the most worthwhile goal an IT department can under take. The IT industry that helped build all the walls–we like to call them silos these days–is helping to eliminate those obstacles, and this is to the credit of those companies that are wholeheartedly participating. Also deserving of some credit are the companies that have gotten past platform bigotry to pursue business interests. They all deserve a pat on the back, if you can find any of them.

OK, that may be an undeserved slight. In actuality, there are many examples of increased efforts toward interoperability,

…

Previous Articles Next Articles

Search for: