• IBM Job Cut Tactics in Rochester Questioned in Two Media Reports

  March 16, 2009 Dan Burger

  Job terminations at IBM‘s Rochester, Minnesota, facility are colder than a late winter north wind. Losing a job is one of the most stressful life changes anyone has to go through, but if there are degrees of stress that apply, being over 50 years old and getting the axe is especially hard because the rebound job is often at a considerably reduced salary and reduced benefits package. How did IBM handle its latest round of terminations in Rochester? Not very well, apparently. Local NBC affiliate KTTC took a closer look at the firings (to call them layoffs, as if

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• JDA to Buy Back Shares as Retailers Hope for an Uptick in 2009

  March 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  JDA Software Group, like most enterprise software vendors, is feeling the pain of the global economic recession. As corporate executives put the clamp down on big new software projects with multi-year time horizons, vendors like JDA have been forced to scramble to find ways to create shorter-term value for customers. One surefire way of giving value to shareholders is to buy back its stock, which JDA last week announced it will start doing. JDA has seen its share of bad news over the last year. For starters, its stock has been hit hard by the bear market, losing more

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• IBM Adds New SAS, SSD Disks to Servers

  March 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the main chasses in the Power Systems product lines have had slots for SAS drives since the System i and System p product convergence last April, it looks like the System x and BladeCenter lines are going to get the latest and greatest disk technology first this time around. Last week, IBM announced new small form factor SAS drives, those with 2.5-inch wide drive cases rather than the earlier 3.5-inch wide cases that were standard for SCSI drives since IBM shipped the first such 3.5-inch drives back when it was still called the AS/400 and when IBM Rochester had

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• Washington D.C. IT Kickback Scandal Sidelines New Federal CIO

  March 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, Vivek Kundra, the new Federal chief information officer for the Obama administration and the first executive to hold the newly created post, didn’t spend enough time in his new office to get his chair warm. According to a report in the Washington Post on Saturday, Kundra, who was hired on March 5 to the Fed CIO position after being CIO for the Washington, D.C. city government, has been placed on “administrative leave pending the outcome of the federal investigation” into a bribery scandal in the D.C. offices and implicating employees of the city’s tech agency, who worked for Kundra,

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• The COMMON Conference Agenda Is Coming Together

  March 16, 2009 Dan Burger

  Where are you on the Power Systems i learning curve? If you are in the low single digits on the time and effort side of the chart, it’s not likely that you’ve advanced on the measurable learning side. You probably don’t need to be reminded there’s a correlation between the two sides. Coming at the end of April is an opportunity to climb up the learning curve. The days, it’s called the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition. If you don’t already know, COMMON is the single largest community of IBM midrange users and its annual conference is largest gathering of

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• Getting Dizzy from Dynamic Infrastructure

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the economy went into recession in December 2007, and maybe even before, the top research and marketing minds at IBM were already hard at work on a new, big sales pitch that just so happens to coincide with the kinds of economic stimulus and long-term investments that the Obama Administration here in the United States and leaders in other governments want to make. What they want, of course, is a new and potentially much larger wave of automation, which has implications for our lives as well as our data centers. IBM’s top brass, starting with president, chief executive officer,

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• The Economy Gives the Server Biz a Flat Tire in Q4

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If IT departments are not being given the green light to attack the backlog of application development and infrastructure modernization projects they have on their to-do lists, the one thing they most definitely do not do is buy new server capacity. And that is why the fourth quarter, according to the analysts at Gartner, was not a particularly good one for server makers. Thankfully for them, though, a lot of projects are already funded and there is always basic capacity requirements driving some sales. Gartner figures that in the fourth quarter, server makers were able to push out 2.14

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• Infor Battles Customers in Court Over License Fees

  March 9, 2009 Alex Woodie

  ERP software giant Infor is taking legal action against customers as it seeks to recoup license fees it claims it is owed. The company reached an out-of-court settlement last week with a BPCS customer, Vaughan & Bushnell, regarding a dispute over an AS/400 upgrade performed in the 1990s. While the parties avoided a trial, Infor is still pursuing similar lawsuits against two other customers for license fees it claims the companies avoided paying following server upgrades. The terms of the settlement between Infor and Vaughan & Bushnell, a tool manufacturer based in Hebron, Illinois, that has used BPCS since 1987,

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• As I See It: Isolation

  March 9, 2009 Victor Rozek

  During the Great Depression, it was common that people greeted each other with a question. In shops, bars, and on the street, anxious men glanced self-consciously at one another and asked the only question that mattered: “Are you working?” Absent a social safety net, work was everything. It staved off hunger and the specter of bread lines and tent cites. It provided today’s security and tomorrow’s dignity; and made you the object of envy among the unemployed. For women, it was different, albeit no less painful. Some found jobs for starvation wages; many weren’t expected to work outside the home;

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• Global IT Spending Barely Ahead of 2008; Some Regions Showing Strength

  March 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  The supply of data keeps piling up. The demand for getting a better handle on that data keeps growing. But the money to convert those mountains of information into a better business strategy is being pulled back. Some organizations may be spending now to be in better shape when the economy starts to warm, but apparently many are keeping their hands in their pockets, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, spending only what they absolutely have to. IDC, in its most recent forecast, trimmed its worldwide IT spending estimate for 2009 to just 0.5 percent growth compared

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