• Small Biz Owners Are Sticking It Out, Survey Says

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the small businesses in the Western economies accounting for a large number of jobs and the bulk of jobs growth, you can bet that the government and IT companies who are keen on selling their wares to SMB shops are very interested in knowing exactly what is on the minds of entrepreneurs right now as we all cope with the recession in various economies. To that end, software giant Microsoft‘s Office Live small business unit and a tech headhunter called Elance together commissioned a market researcher named Decision Analyst to survey small businesses owners about how they felt

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• IBM Cuts Back on Discounts on Power Systems i-DS8000 Deals

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September, IBM announced a special deal on its high-end DS8000 disk arrays for customers attaching those arrays to Power Systems servers sporting the i5/OS V5R4 or i 6.1 operating systems. This deal was tweaked in early December, and then again last week. The tweaks last week are important because they raised prices on the configurations for the DS800 arrays, which given the state of the economy and IT budgets at larger enterprises, seems a bit odd. The deal has four different Power System i and DS8000 disk array pairings. The first configuration is for a DS8100 with 9.3

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• Freeborders Expands its AS/400 Tech Center

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably knew that the AS/400 and its progeny were popular in India because of the first several waves of outsourcing and offshoring that hit the shores of America in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as companies tried to cut cost. But apparently there is some play now for the AS/400 in Chinese offshoring operations. A privately held company called Freeborders that is located in San Francisco and operates software development and data centers in China, announced last week that it has expanded a so-called “center of excellence” based on the AS/400. (The company said AS/400, not iSeries

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• IBM Talks Up Notes/Domino Numbers

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the annual Lotusphere trade show dedicated to the Notes/Domino and related software kicking off yesterday and running until the end of this week, you can expect IBM to be talking quite a bit about Lotus products this week. IBM already let the cat out of the bag about Notes/Domino 8.5, which was announced two weeks ago with very little fan-fare (that was being saved up for the Lotusphere show, presumably), including support for Apple‘s Mac OS X operating system for the client and server sides of the Notes/Domino combo. The Lotus support for the Mac operating system would

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• Server-Printer Combo Deal Results from IBM-Ricoh Alliance

  January 19, 2009 Dan Burger

  IBM Global Services and its WebSphere software division should be expecting a boost now that IBM and Ricoh have a new deal to share sales networks. The arrangement more closely ties IBM’s service oriented architecture efforts with Ricoh’s document solutions lineup. Two years ago, IBM and Ricoh created a joint printing business so that IBM could focus on its core server, storage, software, and services businesses. That high-volume printer business (IBM called it InfoPrint and it has retained that name), along with Ricoh’s document management software, was a good match for a great many IBM mainframe and midrange shops. And

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• There’s No i in Barack Obama, But There Is One in Bailout

  January 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If I don’t hear the word stimulus again this year, I will be just fine, thank you very much. The past year has been stimulating enough, and I would like for all of us to get back to business. Apparently, to get there is going to require some economic stimulus, rather than the kind you get from listening to the news for hours on end, as I do. Like the kind that President-elect Obama outlined last Thursday in a speech at George Mason University in Virginia. The numbers are absurd, beyond real human reckoning when an average salary is in

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• Layoff Rumors Panic IBM Workers; Nothing Confirmed

  January 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  For many IBM employees, last week was torture. Rumors have been swirling that jobs are on the chopping block and that close to 16,000 workers will become victims of a one-two combination punch from the economic downturn and IBM’s continual moves to lower its costs and extend its string of profitable quarterly reports. As is its standard practice, IBM has nothing to say on the topic of layoffs. That includes any denial that this move is about to be made. Information on the rumored job losses comes primarily from the Website of the IBM Employees Union, Alliance@IBM. (Yes, IBM

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• Application Modernization: Money in the Bank

  January 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  You might think that the combination of do-more-with-less business planning and the dire economic reports that dominate the daily news coverage would cause IT budgets to fizzle like last year’s uncorked bottle of champagne. That’s not exactly true, even though three out of four organizations are targeting IT spending as a good place to make cuts. You can’t forget about the one in four companies that are moving their business plans ahead by investing in IT. Investing in IT is something a lot of companies aren’t very good at, if you add the word “strategic” to describe the investing. At

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Shoes for Cheeses

  January 12, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  In 1967, a turbulent America gave birth to the Youth International Party and its pie assassin, Aron Kay. The following year, Yippies led the havoc at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention. They set a high (or low) watermark for protests of American policy that lasted 40 years. But in 2008, in Baghdad, a reporter named Muntazer al-Zaidi became the World’s Most Notorious Hurler of Insults when he lobbed a pair of shoes at President George W. Bush: soles of a new regime. How impolite! Still, the IT establishment might actually gain from some clever irreverence. Aron Kay’s pie throwing

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• IT Jobs 2009: The Dot-Com Bubble Burst Was ‘A Cake Walk’

  January 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to get a handle on how the IT job market is doing is not an easy task. If you look at data from the U.S. Department of Labor and peel out the sections of its monthly jobs reports to look at IT manufacturers and services companies, then the layoffs have not been so bad. But, of course, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not look at employment and unemployment by job type and title, but rather by industry, so you can’t get a real sense of what is happening in the jobs market from Uncle Sam. If I

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