Welcome to 2009, everybody. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I actually took much of the vacation that was my due, and I spent lots of time with friends and family eating and drinking and horsing around. I feel human again, even if it is in relation to what still remains a troubling economy and a difficult world. Guild Companies, which publishes the Four Hundred stack of newsletters, made it through 2008, and provided there are a whole lot less shocks this year, it looks like we will be here to serve the AS/400 community in

There are worse careers to be in than information technology, apparently, even if the pressure is increasing to do more with less and there is always the threat of outsourcing or some other services-style IT looming just out beyond the next paycheck. According to the most recent job forecast put together by CareerBuilder.com, IT is among the few areas where managers expect to add employees in the coming year.

While the CareerBuilder.com survey does not focus exclusively on IT hiring, as do surveys from Robert Half Technology, the latest CareerBuilder.com survey does provide a comparison and contrast of

As odd as this may seem, a strengthening U.S. dollar hurt the financial results that software giant Oracle reported for its second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended November 30. Considering the self-inflicted wounds in 2008 that the U.S. economy is trying to heal from, you might think that a stronger dollar would be a good thing. But as Oracle’s most recent results show, a strong dollar is only good when U.S. companies are buying a lot more stuff than overseas customers.

But for U.S.-based multinational IT suppliers, a weak U.S. economy has been a bit of a boom as they

It’s a new year, with an about-to-be new president, but the same old questions are on the collective minds of Americans, and they’re about the economy. “How the hell did this happen?” It’s the question Robert B. Parker calls humanity’s cry, and given the state of things, it should probably replace “In God We Trust” on our shrinking currency.

The answer, as provided by George W. Bush, was “Wall Street got drunk,” and his solution was to throw more booze at it. We’ll have to wait for the new guy for a response that didn’t originate in a frat house.

If you don’t buy or sell a lot of computer and networking hardware, then you will probably be perplexed about this story. Judging from the context of a recent government hearing on the topic, counterfeit IT gear is apparently a much bigger problem than many of us might think. The U.S. federal government is so annoyed by the problem that it held a hearing about implementing acquisition rules that would severely curtail the use of secondhand equipment among major government agencies.

Back on November 18, the General Services Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration placed an announcement in

A computer architecture is only as good as the compilers that are created to take advantage of that, and the long and storied career of Dick Baines, one of the three key fathers of IBM‘s System/38 minicomputer, the great-great granddaddy of the modern Power Systems i platform, demonstrates this well. Just after The Four Hundred went off press in December for the holidays, Bains passed away after suffering a heart attack while visiting his son on December 13.

Bains, along with Frank Soltis, the just-retired System i architect and the face of the AS/400 for decades, and Roy Hoffman,

While the biggest financial services firms in America and sometimes Western Europe have been getting all of the headlines with their failures or acquisition by competitors in recent months, there is a far larger number of small banks and credit unions who are just as integral to the global economy and who are hurting as credit is tightening.

Not surprisingly to anyone who has been around the IBM midrange for a few decades, a lot of these smaller financial institutions have used proprietary minis or Unix boxes to run their back office systems for decades. Big banks, brokerages, insurance companies,

Consolidation is not just happening with IT in America, but in every country and market. Irish IT services company CDSoft has plunked down 1.5 million euros to buy its way into the IBM server maintenance business by acquiring fellow Irish company, ACT Group.

ACT Group has 25 people and revenues in the range of 3 million euros, according to CDSoft. The group had two units before CDSoft bought it. Blue Chip Ireland is, according to the company, the largest independent maintainer of IBM x64 and Power servers, and it actually does it the old-fashioned way by providing on-site maintenance. ACT

It used to be called application service providing, and the idea didn’t take off because telecom costs were too high, network bandwidth between PCs and remote Internet-connected services was too low, and there were cost and availability issues. Now, we are at the cusp between changing buzzwords. 2007’s software as a service, or SaaS, is starting to give way to 2008’s cloud services. Call it what you will, and despite some minor technical evolution, the story is nonetheless the same: using other people’s remote systems and software to give end users what feels like a local experience.

If you are

IT master reseller Avnet is, like every other company on the planet, looking for new places to do business in this tricky global economy. That is one reason why the company’s Avnet Technology Solutions, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT products made by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others, has ponied up some cash to take a barely majority stake in an IT distributor in Turkey.

Avnet has taken a 50.01 percent stake in Akora Technology and Industry Corporation, a reseller previously owned in full by Sanko Holding Group. Akora was founded in 2001, as the earlier IT recession