• Ask TPM: IBM’s Dependence on Hardware for Software and Services

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

  …

  Read more

• COMMON Takes a Trip to DisneyWorld for 2010

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

  …

  Read more

• Arrow Lets Mid-Market Resellers Buy Sales Campaigns

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

  …

  Read more

• The Economy Squeezes Manhattan Associates in Q4

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

  …

  Read more

• Kronos Provides Some Financials for Fiscal Q1

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

  …

  Read more

• The AS/400 Made Off with the Money

  February 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The IBM AS/400 is good at a lot of things, including tracking inventory, processing claims, and tallying sales. And now you can add one more accomplishment to the legendary box’s resume: Running Ponzi schemes. In recent weeks, evidence points to the fact that Bernie Madoff used an AS/400 server to help perpetrate his alleged $50 billion fraud. Data contained on the server, recently confiscated by the Justice Department, will likely play a crucial role in helping to unravel the crime of the century. Fox Business broke the story about Madoff’s use of the AS/400 to run his alleged Ponzi scheme

  …

  Read more

• IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure Announcement Blitz

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a long time now, the major IT players in the world have been pitching the idea of convergence, by which they meant the coming together of computing and telecommunications technology. Now that the BlackBerry and the iPhone are here, this is pretty much a done deal. (I am joking, sort of.) But Big Blue, hot to chase some economic stimulus dollars from Uncle Sam and to get a piece of a different part of the capital budget at companies, has a new kind of convergence in mind. This time around, IBM’s top brass is pitching the idea of Dynamic

  …

  Read more

• Sugar in the YiPs Sandbox

  February 16, 2009 Dan Burger

  How do you get your hands on some open source customer relationship management software that’s ready to rock ‘n’ roll on the IBM i? Simple: Take a quick Web trip to the Young i Professionals home page, where you’ll find one of the more popular business-oriented, open source applications: SugarCRM. Visitors can log into the application–as a user or an administrator–and spend some hands-on time with an open source Web application running on the i platform. The SugarCRM package is part of a new class of open source enterprise applications written for the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and

  …

  Read more

• Mad Dog 21/21: Biting The Handout

  February 16, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  At 7:20 a.m. on February 2, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the Staten Island Zoo to meet Chuck the groundhog. Chuck, formally known as Charles E. Schumer Hogg, according to Bloomberg News, didn’t appreciate Hizonner’s “teasing him with corn-on-the-cob.” The critter bit the mayor’s gloved left index finger hard enough to draw blood. Mr. Bloomberg remained affable, as is his wont, setting an example of good manners for the Federal government, which is going to spend the next few years feeding potential nippers, among them IBM, Google, and Microsoft. Now, it could well turn

  …

  Read more

• Soltis Tapped for Vision Solutions Advisory Group and Road Shows

  February 16, 2009 Dan Burger

  Frank Soltis, recently retired from the iSeries chief scientist job at IBM and widely acknowledged as the father of the AS/400, isn’t the rocking chair type. Anyone who knows him would not have expected Soltis to stay on the porch in his post-IBM days. Last week, he popped up over at Vision Solutions. The high availability and disaster recovery powerhouse has tapped Soltis to become a member of its technology advisory board, a group of approximately 25 that includes industry experts, customers, business partners, and the Vision Solutions brain trust. The advisory group is hand-picked by Vision’s vice president

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles