• Oracle Pushes Sun Systems Biz Toward Profits, Fires More People

  June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are always a lot of ifs in life. Like, for instance, if the top brass of Sun Microsystems had made some of the changes that Oracle has done in the four months since acquiring Sun–but done them several years ago–then Sun would be positioned to ride up a recovery but would be still trying to figure out how to be a systems company. Oracle, as its most recent financial results show, may not succeed in the long run with its systems aspirations, but it has certainly made the most of Sun in a short time. In Oracle’s fourth quarter

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• The AS/400 at 22: Yesterday and Forever

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When people ask me how long I have been married, I give them two answers: yesterday and forever. I am not trying to be cute or funny–well, maybe a little–but I am actually trying to convey precisely how it feels to be married as long–or short–as I have been. I am also covering for the fact that I actually don’t know. I know my anniversary, which is October 4, as does my wife, but neither of us is very good at remembering the year. Neither one of us is very good at remembering what life was like without the

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• IBM Adds Power7 Boxes to Trade-In Deals

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it looks like IBM is having a little more trouble moving the Power7-based midrange servers it announced back in February than it anticipated. A long-running trade-in deal allows customers to get cashish as they dump older Power-based machines or competitive Unix and proprietary boxes. The deals are technically trade-in rebates, but the practice among Big Blue’s channel partners is to flip them around instantly so they work like discounts. The trade-in deals now include the new Power 750, 770, and 780 servers. The latest incarnation of the entry Power Systems trade-in deal from last week in announcement letter 310-205

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• As I See It: Against All Currents

  June 21, 2010 Victor Rozek

  You gotta love a guy who stands against the traffic on a one-way street and yells with full-throated conviction: “You’re going the wrong way.” But that’s Malcolm Gladwell. In his best-selling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers, he bitch-slaps prevailing wisdom, digging beneath the obvious to unearth surprising truths lurking below our awareness. Gladwell is a fuzzy-haired myth exploder, as annoying as he is enlightening because in his systematic, well-researched way, he delights in messing with our (small “r”) religion–our unquestioned beliefs about how life works. In his latest book, Gladwell challenges how we think

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• SaaS Surfs the Cash Conservation Wave

  June 21, 2010 Dan Burger

  Sure, the software as a service (SaaS) sales model makes a lot of sense if you’re talking about simple and quick to implement applications like Salesforce.com. But how does it look when it’s a complex set of ERP applications that a manufacturer might find useful? More often than not, a SaaS deal like this would be considered by an SMB with a sharp financial eye and an awareness of industry-specific apps running on an IBM Power System i. Smaller companies are always more creative when it comes to doing more with less, a lesson that was learned like never

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• JDA Software’s i2 Unit Smacked with $246 Million Judgment

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  JDA Software didn’t try to acquire supply chain software specialist i2 Technologies once, but twice–first in August 2008 for $346 million, an attempt that failed, and again in November 2009 for $396 million. Whoever did the due diligence as part of the merger and reckoned the effect of a lawsuit between the Dillard’s department store chain and i2 did not reckon on the jury in the District Court of the State of Texas for the County of Dallas, which came to the conclusion that i2 had not met its software license agreements and awarded $246 million in damages. Yeah, you

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• Another Indicator Says the IT Job Market Is Improving

  June 21, 2010 Dan Burger

  At IT Jungle, we like to pass along as much good news as possible when it comes to the job market. So here’s a little something that should make you happier than a tick on a fat dog. Geez, I hope that doesn’t turn out to be an overstatement, because I’m going to stick with it. If you have an issue with it, voice your complaints to the people at Monster Worldwide. You probably know them as monster.com. They’re the ones who came up with the data. I’m just the messenger. Technisource, a North American superpower in the

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• Disk Array Sales Are Spinning Up, Says IDC

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past few weeks, it has become apparent that hardware, not software or services, is going to lead the recovery in IT spending this year. After having already cased the server racket for the first quarter, IDC has dutifully dissected the disk array market, and spending is rebounding. On a global basis, spending on all kinds of disk arrays, be they tucked under the skins of a server or in a separate box linked to the server through Fibre Channel, iSCSI, converged Ethernet, InfiniBand, or other wires, rose by 18.8 percent, to $6.71 billion. If you carve out external

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• IBM Chops Maintenance on a Whole Bunch of Old Stuff

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At some point in every piece of hardware’s life, enough is enough. It long since might not have made any economic sense to keep a piece of gear in use, but it worked and a vendor was willing to support, so even if it probably was expensive to buy the support contract, the vendor made out like a bandit and customers could avoid change and risk, which has its own economic benefits. Eventually, even the vendor can’t make money offering support. There are just too few customers and it takes too much time to scrounge for parts and train someone

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• Newsflash: Developers Hate to Test Their Software

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are some things that transcend platform differences. All computers wait at the same speed. All projects come in over budget and beyond their projected windows. Sometimes people change things for the sake of change and for no damned good other reason. And, according to a recent survey, application software developers hate to test their code. So why not do what the computers do best and automate the testing? Well, because programmers are artists as much as they are techies, and they all have their own ways of writing code and therefore their own methods for testing code. What’s an

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