• Have IT Vendors Been Hit Harder Than IT Departments?

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know about you, but I keep wondering where the disconnect is between the U.S. unemployment rate and IT departments. And if there is a disconnect, as there seems to be from looking at the data, I am grateful on both your behalf and my own. The rest of the IT Jungle team is grateful, too. None of us–you, me, and them–wants to become a statistic. Here’s what I am talking about. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did its monthly report on employment (or lack thereof) in America, and the news was not good.

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• CFMUG Downshifts from Monthly to Two Yearly Meetings

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Central Florida Midrange Users Group (CFMUG) has announced that it is downshifting from monthly meetings of its users to meetings twice a year. User groups, while still valuable and perhaps even preferable as a means to network among peers, are under pressure as IT professionals have less time to attend meetings and rely, as you might expect, on the Internet to keep in contact with their peers and vendors. CFMUG is no more immune to this as is LinuxWorld (downsized as well), Novell’s BrainShare (canceled), and COMMON, which has shifted to one big meeting a year instead of

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• IBM to Bid for Satyam? Rumors All Over the Place

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Scandal-ridden Indian IT services company Satyam Computer Services may, or may not, have a Big Blue potential buyer sniffing around now that the Indian Securities and Exchange Commission has given its approval for Satyam to sell a 51 percent controlling stake in itself to a suitor. Two months ago, Satyam founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted that the company had forged documents and pumped up the company’s assets by $1 billion. The high-flying application and IT services giant had a market capitalization of over $7 billion a year ago, and now is trading at something around $500 million after the

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• MKS Weathers the Economic Storm in Fiscal Q3

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application lifecycle management software maker MKS polished off its third quarter of fiscal 2009 on January 31, and the strengthening of the U.S. greenback against the Canadian looney, as well as plain old-fashioned growth, helped the company turn in a pretty good quarter, considering how tough the economy is. MKS, which is a public company whose shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, reported $13.2 million in sales in the quarter (that’s in U.S. dollars using U.S. accountancy rules), up 3.2 percent. The company’s license sales in the quarter dropped by 10.1 percent to $3.7 million, but a 6

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• Overworked, Underpaid, and No Free Donuts and Coffee

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic meltdown has caused quite a few business practices to change in fairly short order, and office perks and various benefits that were affordable during good times are downright impossible to justify in the current economic climate. To get a sense of what is going on out there in cubicle land, CareerBuilder.com commissioned a poll of 3,259 human resources managers (working at companies in the United States), which was performed by Harris Interactive in late November and early December last year, just as the economic crisis was ramping up to a scary pitch. Some 38 percent of managers said

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• IBM Adds i Shops to Expanded p Shop Trade-In Deal

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM added the i side of the Power Systems house to a long-running trade-in deal it was giving to shops using alternative Unix and proprietary platforms from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu if they acquired a System p 550. In addition, the company tweaked the deal to offer incentives for shops buying Power 520, 550, or 560 servers and also announced discounts on i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 user licensing fees. The original System p trade-in deal was launched in February 2008, just as IBM was putting the dual-core Power6 processors into its System p lineup

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• IBM and Resellers Do the iLoyalty Blitz

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I report in the lead story in this issue, IBM is giving customers using old AS/400 and iSeries machinery trade-in credits on new Power Systems gear and is also cutting the cost of per-user software licensing fees on i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 until the end of June. These two deals are, in fact, part of something IBM and its master resellers have cooked up called the iLoyalty Blitz. The basic idea, according to the internal documents that I have been able to get my hands on concerning the iLoyalty Blitz, is to get customers interested in new Power

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• Server Sales Slumped As 2008 Stumbled to the Holidays

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Unfortunately for server makers, the box counters at IDC had a bit less work to do in the fourth quarter of 2008 as the server market took a big dip. The company said last week that it believes that server sales worldwide fell by 14 percent in the final quarter of the year to $13.5 billion. Shipments declined by 12 percent, which means average selling prices were on the decline as companies moved to lighter configurations and vendors cut prices to try to move product. Thanks to the global economic crisis–and yes, I am getting tired of saying that phrase

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• Mad Dog 21/21: That’ll Teach ‘Em

  March 2, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  It’s difficult to sell an IBM i server to a prospect who worries that the talent required to use the machine will be in short supply, and even more so to sell an AS/400 or System i shop a new Power System that requires fresh skills. Students have X64 machines and so, usually, do their schools. Power? What’s that? IBM is trying to educate the educators by making access to Power technology cheaper for schools and by supporting faculty members, researchers, and students. And it has a big educational shindig coming up in September. As part of its effort to

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• Healthcare and Utilities Lead Vertical Markets in IT Spending

  March 2, 2009 Dan Burger

  In a year when IT spending is being nipped, trimmed, and sometimes lopped, it’s refreshing to hear about additional funds finding their way into corporate planning. For a peek at that silver lining, we are thankful to the forecasters at Gartner, who last week released a report detailing IT spending by vertical markets. Two industries claimed a place in the sun: healthcare and utilities. Not that it’s all that sunny in the forecast, but Gartner’s prediction is that IT expenditures in healthcare will grow 2.2 percent and utilities will invest at a slightly higher rate, which is pegged at

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