• IBM i Chief Architect Tells Us Where We’re At

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are the IBM i chief architect, you are not just the top techie in charge of the platform, but you are also the unofficial and sometimes the official spokesperson for the platform to the outside world. That job was handled by Frank Soltis, the father of the System/38 and the grandfather of the AS/400, for more than three decades. And for the past couple of years, Steve Will has been chief architect and spokesperson, and has lately been making the rounds talking about where the IBM i platform is and where it is going. Will took the IBM

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• Is Constellation Software on the Block?

  May 23, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The first four months of 2011 has seen M&A return with a vengeance in the IT sector, and the IBM i software space has not disappointed, with deals announced for Lawson Software, Novell (by Attachmate), MKS, and Aldon, as well as rumors about a $1 billion-plus deal for Micro Focus. Now it appears that Constellation Software, which owns Friedman, Varsity Logistics, and other IBM i commercial assets, could be the next ISV to get sold. Constellation announced on April 4 that its board is undertaking “a review of strategic alternatives” to enhance

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• Still Wanted: A Cheap–or Free—IBM i Development Workstation

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I attended the Long Island System User Group‘s May Education Day last week along with my compatriot and editor of Four Hundred Guru, Ted Holt. While everybody was chewing on their dinner, I was asked to sing for my supper and talk about the IBM i platform along with Pete Massiello, president of both COMMON and iTech Solutions Group, and Al Grega, who was in charge of IBM’s worldwide Rational tools sales for the past three years and has now taken over WebSphere sales for Big Blue’s server platforms. The topics ranged far and wide, but this

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• As I See It: The Finer Points of Relating

  May 23, 2011 Victor Rozek

  “How you do anything is how you do everything.” This is one of those intriguing truisms that grew out of the personal growth movement. Although by no means absolute, there is enough verity in the observation to make it useful for identifying patterns of behavior. For example, it could explain the irritable workplace demeanor of a parent with a teenager at home. To understand why, you have to reference the work of John Gottman, a psychologist who has spent the better part of his career studying the nuances of relationships. He analyzes married couples the way an entomologist would consider

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• Enterprise Software Spending Grows Faster Than Expected

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The enterprise software market–everything from the hypervisor up through the operating system to databases, middleware, and applications–got back on something akin to an even keel as 2010 came to a close, according to the latest statistics from Gartner. That enterprise software stack also includes corporate purchases of Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems for PCs and laptops as well as applications for PCs, so the money does mount up. To $244.6 billion, in fact, which is 8.5 percent higher than spending on the same kinds of enterprise software in 2009, when the world was just starting to consider

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• Aberdeen Examines BI in the Supply Chain

  May 23, 2011 Dan Burger

  Business intelligence has to do with brains, but what about the bucks? If you ask supply chain executives about the value that business intelligence brings, it’s clear the two can’t be separated. But business value is not necessarily concordant with big software investments. And companies with an IBM i platform running their critical supply chain applications have the same issues related to organizational and process management, along with technology management, as any other organization. What’s hoped for in a business intelligence solution and what’s getting accomplished often isn’t within shouting distance of one another. And that’s why analyst firms such

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• Avnet Rides Server and Storage Waves in Fiscal Q3

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just like its rival Arrow Electronics, master IT distributor Avnet is riding an upgrade cycle for servers and storage. In the third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended April 2, Avnet posted $6.67 billion, up a very impressive 40.3 percent. Net income for the seller of IT gear and electronic components rose by 31.9 percent, to $151 million. Acquisitions are a big part of that growth story, of course, and on a pro forma basis excluding the effect of companies that have been brought into the Avnet fold, sold off, or unit movements within the company, overall revenues for Avnet

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• Blue Skies Are Gonna Cloud Up

  May 23, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  Not long ago, a prediction for cloudy skies was something we heard from our local weatherperson, and all it meant was you might want to keep an umbrella handy. But today’s cloudy forecast is courtesy of Big Blue, and, according to its new global study, those clouds are rolling in fast. In a recent IBM survey of CIOs, 60 percent of organizations said they are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing business and achieving competitive advantage. This figure nearly doubles the number of CIOs who said they would utilize cloud in

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• Red Hat, IBM, and Friends Gang Up On VMware, Ignore PowerVM

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IBM knows full well, when you are the 800-pound gorilla, the juggernaut, or the leviathan in any part of the IT industry–and you are making money–then everyone is gunning for you. And with the pole position in the X64 server virtualization racket, and a desire to extend that to virtualized PCs and tablets as well as to cloudy infrastructure, VMware has big red bull’s eyes plastered all over itself. Last week, server and desktop virtualization wannabe Red Hat teamed up with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, SUSE (now part of Attachmate), BMC Software, and Eucalyptus Systems

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• Attachmate Busts Apart SUSE from Novell, Puts Own People in Charge

  May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that Attachmate has finished up its acquisition of Novell, the private equity-backed conglomerate of midrange software companies has set about breaking the company into two different halves. For those of you who run SUSE Linux on your iSeries, System i, or Power Systems logical partitions, SUSE is now a separate division of Attachmate, much as Attachmate (with the Attachmate and WRQ products) was separate from the NetIQ security products. With the break, the SUSE Linux business and its related openSUSE development project are now separated from the burden of trying to save Novell and its NetWare and GroupWise

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