“All politics is local.” That was the lesson that Tip O’Neill, the legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives, learned when he lost his first political battle, which was to try to get onto the Cambridge, Massachusetts city council. It was the only election O’Neill ever lost, and he had pretty good job security in his district and in Washington until he retired in 1987. Like many of you in the IT sector, I am beginning to wish that all employment was local. And it just isn’t.

Get some coffee, put on your walking shoes, and take a walk with

PHP has had a place at the IBM System i table for the past three years and somewhere close to 12,000 System i application developers have sat down to taste the popular Web-enablement language. Some are eating it up. Last week, I spoke with Larry Nies, president of NSC, a company with a System i focus and a flair for PHP application development that depends on the Zend Framework.

Dan Burger: How did PHP come onto your radar?

Larry Nies: We were working on a customer site. We work with a number of foundries in the United States. In

Here’s a special deal for Power Systems i shops that you can only know about if you are talking to high-level IBMers from time to time, as I get to do in the course of my job. I haven’t seen an announcement letter on any of this out of IBM, but the deal I am about to tell you about went into effect on February 10 in conjunction with the Dynamic Infrastructure extravaganza that I told you about last week.

As I explained last April in the wake of the Power Systems launch and the convergence of the

As the Feds apply money like defibrillation paddles to the chest of the seizing economy, some still-healthy bystanders (think IT vendors) are openly wondering why they don’t just let the patients die. Of course, the onlookers wouldn’t phrase it so fatalistically, but they question the strategy of rewarding failed companies for their greed and stupidity.

As anyone who has ever played a team sport knows: When the game is on the line, you don’t call on your weakest player. And if you play with the big boys at the professional level, you understand that no one in their right mind

It looks like server virtualization really is heading to the mainstream on Power Systems machines, if some figures provided by the top brass at IBM are any indication. While logical partitioning has been available on OS/400-based servers since V4R4 was launched with the Northstar PowerPC servers back in 1999, it has been embraced mostly by big shops with big iron even as Linux and AIX partitions were added to the logical partitioning mix.

But not so any more, says Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM’s Power Systems division. Handy keeps track of the attachment rate of

The experts who put together Four Hundred Guru answer a lot of tech questions for the i community about programming and administering IBM midrange gear. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature, having to do with broader issues in the information technology space or with the i platform in particular. If you have a question you want to get my take on–or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on–then send me an email and I will see what I can

It’s a little too early to book your plane tickets, make your hotel accommodations, and dust off your mouse ears, but it is never too early to tell your kids or grandkids that the COMMON midrange expo and conference is going to be hosted in Orlando, Florida in 2010.

My daughter, Ellie, and my son, Hank, have fond memories of when COMMON was last in Orlando, back in 2005. They bug me every couple of months about when my next business trip will take us down south toward the House of Mouse, or any place interesting, for that matter. (When

The Enterprise Computing Solutions group of IT and electronics components distributor Arrow Electronics wants to make it a lot easier for its downstream resellers to put together marketing campaigns and scare up a little business out there in the midrange.

To that end, ECS has announced a new sales and marketing tool called MPower SmartCart, which is available to resellers that are members of its MPower Midmarket Partner program. The tool is really a Website that has a bunch of marketing materials for various servers and storage hardware and related operating system, systems, and application software. Partners log in and

Supply chain software maker Manhattan Associates, which has a sizable business related to the i platform, saw its sales decline in the fourth quarter of 2008, as most IT vendors did.

In the quarter ended in December, Manhattan Associates said that software license sales fell 25.5 percent to $13.8 million; services sales dropped 5.7 percent to $53.8 million while hardware and other sales fell by 14.6 percent to just a hair under $8 million. Revenues across all categories in Q4 came to $75.6 million, a decline of 11 percent compared to the year ago quarter. After a restructuring charge

As perhaps the key software vendor for workforce management products, privately held Kronos used to be a public company and is used to talking about how its business is doing. And so it has provided a few tidbits about how it did in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

For that quarter, which presumably ended in December, Kronos posted sales of $159.8 million, and earnings before taxes, interest, and amortization came in at $24.6 million. Those numbers just hang out there in space, because the company did not provide any comparisons with the prior fiscal year’s first quarter; not did