• Reader Feedback on Power vs. Nehalem: Scalability Is So 1995, Cash is So 2009

  April 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  TPM, Why do you have to be so right and why does IBM have to generally ignore your insightful, thoughtful advice on how to compete? ARGH! Thank you for the wonderful writing you and your team produce. My simple words cannot show my appreciation enough. Sincerely, Ethan Hi Ethan, Thanks so much for your kind words about my team and what we do here at IT Jungle. And simple words do show appreciation. Some days, appreciation is the only force that keeps us going, since money surely is not enough. So don’t think I don’t appreciate your appreciation. (OK, this

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• Managers Lament Lack of Attention to Legacy Apps

  April 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Stick to your knitting. Keep your eye on the ball. These are phrases we use to remind us to not forget why we are in business in the first place, but they apply equally well to IT departments. It is easy to get distracted and seduced by new technologies; remember that whole dot-com thing and all the disruption it caused a decade ago? But it is important to not lose skills relating to the core IT systems at your company, which are often encapsulated in legacy applications and databases on IBM mainframe and midrange gear. While COBOL application specialist Micro

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• How Do SMBs Decide On What IT To Buy?

  April 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic crunch is turning small and medium businesses into more savvy shoppers, as you might expect. So how are SMBs making their IT buying decisions these days? According to research done by IDC, there is a good, old-fashioned way that is still popular: talking to people they trust about the technology they use in their organizations. Yup, despite all the good information that is available on the Internet–information that was largely unavailable 15 years ago, when the IT market was less complex–word of mouth is still a key part of the IT buying process for SMBs. But before

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• ACOM Taps Standard Data to Peddle Document Management App

  April 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ACOM Solutions, which sells a content management program called EZContentManager for i platforms, has announced a value added reseller agreement with Standard Data Corporation, an IT company with a long history that makes the entire midrange look like a bunch of whippersnappers. ACOM is, of course, familiar to the IBM midrange. The company’s flagship EZContentManager program may run on Windows, but it is aimed squarely at the i platform and the unique kinds of spool files and documents that the box creates, as well as the kinds of documents that end users generate on their PCs and often

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• Vision Solutions Starts Independent User Group in Russia

  April 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400, with a little help from a company once known as JD Edwards, got a pretty early and strong toehold in the oil and gas industry, and thanks to IBM, Jack Henry, and a number of other application providers, established a pretty strong showing in international and regional banking. And with the economies of Eastern Europe, Russia, and other parts of the former Soviet Union growing at a pretty healthy clip for the past decade, it comes as no surprise that i platform sales have shown growth in this region of the globe. And it is therefore no surprise

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• Power vs. Nehalem: Scalability Is So 1995, Cash is So 2009

  April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The entry and midrange server racket has a new processor in town, and its name is Nehalem, and it comes from Intel. And despite the poor global economy and despite the nay-sayers who think that people don’t think about processors and their features any more, the Nehalem chip is going to get traction this year and it is most certainly going to shake up the entry and midrange spaces where the Power Systems i platform plays. Let’s play some Intel code-name bingo first, just because it is fun. Technically, the chip that Intel announced last week has Nehalem as

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• IBM Poised to Buy Sun, Rumors Say

  April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, Big Blue and Big Mouth seem to be getting closer to closing a deal that will see IBM acquire its archrival in servers and systems software and its partner in Java, Sun Microsystems. Perhaps more than any other acquisition in the history of the computer business, this one, should the talks stop and the deal unravel, marks a dramatic change in the IT landscape. And I don’t necessarily mean a good one. Late last week, I heard a rumor from people a lot closer to the situation than myself that a deal could be announced as early as

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• IT Spending Forecasts Slashed by Gartner, Forrester

  April 6, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IT analyst groups Gartner and Forrester Research last week released pessimistic reports predicting a decline of 3 to 4 percent in IT spending, both here and abroad, for 2009. Spending on servers and other pieces of hardware will be clobbered with a 15 percent decline, according to Gartner, which says the spending slowdown is exceeding the IT spending repercussions of dot-com bubble burst back in 2001. According to Gartner’s forecast, global IT spending will total $3.2 trillion this year, a 3.8 percent decline from 2008, when IT spending reached $3.4 trillion. Hardware sales will plummet to just $324 billion this

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• As I See It: Built-In Disasters

  April 6, 2009 Victor Rozek

  A $200 million Airbus A340-600 commercial jet sits on the tarmac at the airport in Toulouse, France. The jet is new and has yet to ferry a single passenger. It has been towed to what is called the “run-up area,” where its Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies crew is performing an engine test. Having set the air brakes, the pilot instructs the flight computer to slowly increase power to all four engines. With the engines fully engaged and screaming under full lift-off power, a cockpit horn begins blaring, warning of impending takeoff. Annoyed, one of the crew pulls the circuit breaker

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• Head in the Clouds or Head in the Sand? SaaS Faces the Facts

  April 6, 2009 Dan Burger

  Companies need to pay attention to the software as a service (SaaS) option. For a lot of companies, it’s being dismissed as too early in the game, but you can’t ignore the young companies and the start-ups–possibly your future competitors–that are choosing SaaS and cloud computing for their IT strategy. Meanwhile the heavyweights of the IT business are attempting to devise some standards that make interoperability a priority while accusations fly about who is still carrying proprietary baggage and who has vendor lock-in as an ulterior motive. Conversations leading up to the difficult decisions between SaaS and traditional off-the-shelf software

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