• Power Systems Down A Bit in IBM’s First Quarter

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Power Systems division, which sells what were formerly known as System i and System p servers and which are simply called Power Systems these days, was a relative bright spot among its various server lines in the company’s financial report for the first quarter of 2009. But even the popularity of IBM’s high-end Power boxes could not defy the same pressures that all of IBM’s other groups are feeling thanks to the economic meltdown. For the first quarter, IBM’s revenues fell across all of its major product groups–some more than others–and profits took a slight haircut, too. But,

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• COMMON Europe Opens Up Global i Top Concerns Survey

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 community has always been an international one, and in fact, for most of the 30 years that IBM has been selling midrange systems, the company did a lot more box shipments in Europe than it did in the United States. This made sense, given that Europe was not yet economically united and each country had its own businesses. Mergers around the world have given rise to a lot of consolidation of companies and their platforms, which has diluted the multinational feel of the i platform a bit. But just a bit. To get a feel for what i

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• Jilted Sun Snapped Up by Oracle for Application Systems

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, the drama between IBM and systems rival Sun Microsystems is over, now that database and application software giant Oracle is ponying up $5.6 billion in cash and debt to acquire Sun. Or, perhaps, it is just beginning, and perhaps Oracle has seen the light and will be creating a little something midrange folk know as the Application System, 400 Not Included, slash reserved for competitive battles in the marketplace. Sun’s private equity backers and frustrated Wall Street investors ran out of patience with Sun’s promises of eventual revenue growth and a return to profitability about the same time that

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• JDA Sales Hampered and Profits Slammed by Downturn in Q1

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Retail and supply chain management application software maker JDA Software reported its financial results for the first quarter, and like just about every other IT vendor on the planet, JDA was hit by the economic downturn, which hurt sales a little and profits a lot. For the quarter ended in March, JDA says that it had revenues of $83.3 million, down 11.2 percent, more or less matching the revenue decline that IBM itself saw in the first quarter of this year. JDA’s software licenses in the quarter fell by a much more dramatic 23.5 percent to $15.3 million, but maintenance

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• NSPI Taps Halcyon to Manage i Hosting Customers

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Network Services Plus, a long-time peddler of AS/400 and successor products and services, has tapped Halcyon Software to provide system monitoring and automation capabilities to customers who use NSPI’s i-related hosting services. NSPI, which is located in the Roswell suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, has been around the IBM midrange for the past 22 years and, among other things, does consulting for JD Edwards suites as well as application hosting and business continuity services. Three weeks ago, NSPI announced a partnership with high availability software maker Maximum Availability, which will see NSPI sell, implement, and support Maximum Availability’s

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• The State of PHP on the Power Systems i

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you follow the IT market for a living, sometimes you get lucky and spot a trend way out in the future and maybe you get to see it come true. Maybe you don’t. I have been, for instance, thinking that something akin to cloud computing (it was called utility computing back then) would be coming along since the dot-com boom started, just because of the economies of scope and scale aggregated computing farms offer and the high-touch, and therefore high-cost, nature of maintaining servers. We’ll see if this comes to pass. But back in early 2005, it didn’t take

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• IBM Tweaks Some i Deals, Nukes Some Old i Tools

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last Tuesday, on IBM announcement day, the sales and marketing people at Big Blue were out tweaking a few deals here and there that affect the Power Systems i platform, and the company also removed some i-related tools from the product catalog. Considering that we are in the second quarter and that the now annual COMMON midrange user group meeting is coming up, you’d expect more action out of the company on the announcement front. Perhaps the first quarter was a decent one for IBM, despite its need to cut untold thousands of jobs. Who can say for sure, except

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• Come On Out, Power6+, You Win

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes to the Power6+ processor, IBM has been as quiet as a child playing hide and seek that wants to win the game so badly that she ends up falling asleep in the hall closet where the sheets and towels are and can’t hear that everyone has given up the game. This is a great way to win the game–my wife actually did this as a child–but it also has the effect of scaring the living daylights out of the adults. The Power6+ chip is, of course, the presumed kicker to the dual-core Power6 chip that IBM launched

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• As I See It: Berry Berry Annoying

  April 20, 2009 Victor Rozek

  A story, perhaps apocryphal, made the rounds a while back about a newly hired manager. The day he was scheduled to attend his first meeting, he was running late. As he hurriedly entered the conference room, he was surprised to notice that the people around the table were all sitting in silence, with their heads bowed and their hands clasped in their laps. Not knowing what to make of this, it occurred to him that perhaps in this corporate culture meetings started with an invocation or a moment of silence. Then he noticed what was actually going on: they were

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• First Quarter Sees Largest Tech Job Losses Since 2002

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were getting the impression that the IT job market in the United States hasn’t been this tough since the dot-com bust, your worries have just been confirmed by outplacement expert Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. According to the company’s estimates, the job losses in the technology sector in the U.S. have not been this steep since the end of 2002. Specifically, Challenger says that some 84,217 IT-related jobs were cut in the first quarter of 2009, which was a 27 percent rise over the 66,312 jobs that were cut in the fourth quarter of 2008, when the economic

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