• Asia/Pacific Region Bolsters Disk Array Sales in Q3

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The booming economies in the Asia/Pacific region are doing their part to help push up sales of external disk arrays, according to recent market statistics compiled by the analysts at Gartner, which just announced the stats for sales in the second quarter of 2007. On a worldwide basis, sales of external disk arrays in the third quarter rose by 3.4 percent to $3.86 billion, essentially mirroring the 3.3 percent growth, to $3.7 billion, that the industry attained during the second quarter of the year. In the third quarter, growth was largest in the Asia/Pacific region, up 22.7 percent compared

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• Database Tool Maker Joins the System i Market

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  They say you learn something new every day. But when you have been in the AS/400, iSeries, and System i market for 6,732 days, as I have been, you don’t necessarily learn big new things every day. But when a vendor called Resolution Software, which makes database design and maintenance tools for other platforms, said last week that it was coming to the System i space, the company’s tools made me aware of database issues I had not really known existed before. The brilliance of the design of the System/38 and its progeny–the AS/400, the iSeries, and now the

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• State of the System i: Other Software Makers Weigh In

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we wind down 2007 and get ready to take on 2008, now is a good time to take stock of the state of the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem. So for the past several months I have been talking to companies large and small in the ecosystem who peddle hardware, software, or a mix of the two to see how business has been in 2007, what they are hearing from i5/OS and OS/400 shops in terms of products and budgets, and what they expect their own businesses to do in 2008. The good news, at least as far as the

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• IDC Says Server Buyers Weigh Economy and Power in Q3

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Everybody, with the possible exception of the head bean counter at the company, likes shiny, new servers. New servers have more bandwidth to support larger workloads, which makes transaction volumes go up and response time go down; they also tend to be more energy efficient these days, which is a good thing. But whenever the economy is not roaring along, people get concerned and they do not want to shell out money for new iron. Right now, the economy is doing OK and the desire to have more powerful and efficient machines is offsetting the jitters among server buyers. Market

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• As I See It: What’s Past Is Prologue

  December 10, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Just beyond the holiday season lurks 2008, carrying the prospects of a fresh start and the baggage of past performance. New years are like that; full of hope and promise, but tempered by what went on the year before. For IT professionals, 2008 will be shaped by the confluence of powerful forces themselves molded by the recent past. The most critical of those forces, as always, is the economy, and how it will fare depends on who you believe. I’ve consulted the psychic hot line, and reshuffled the Tarot cards, but the future is still a bit murky. So to

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• Robert Half Says IT Hiring to Be Solid in Q1 2008

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are going to be looking for a new IT job in the new year, then your prospects would seem to be pretty good if the recent surveys by Robert Half Technology are any indication. As was the case in the fourth quarter of 2007, IT managers are still pretty optimistic about hiring in the early part of 2008. RHT is a subsidiary of Robert Half International, the $4 billion Menlo Park, California, staffing and consulting company that was founded in 1948, that is a publicly traded company, and that is the largest employee staffing and consulting company

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• VAI Partners with Mid-Range for Canadian Sales

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having just rolled out version 3.7.6 of its RPG-based S2K Enterprise ERP suite for manufacturers and distributors, Vormittag Associates is looking northward from its Ronkonkoma, New York, headquarters to the Great White North to try to stir up a little more business. And to that end, VAI has just announced a partnership with Mid-Range Computer Group, which has been the largest reseller of i5/OS and OS/400 platforms in Canada for the past decade. These days, Mid-Range Computer is more than a reseller of IBM‘s complete system and storage portfolio; it also operates two data centers of its own

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• Quest Software Buys PassGo for Access and Identity Management

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Quest Software, a maker of tools for managing Exchange and Active Directory implementations on Windows platforms, said last week that it has inked a deal to buy PassGo Technologies, a privately held British company that specializes access control and identity management products. PassGo was founded in 1983, and was eventually acquired by a company called Axent, which was in turn acquired by PC security juggernaut Symantec, which has recently became a big-time data center player through its acquisition of file system maker Veritas. Anyway, in August 2001, the people behind the original PassGo company did a management

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• The Costs of Data Breaches Continues to Rise, Says Ponemon

  December 10, 2007 Dan Burger

  There are 215 million stories in the naked city . . . and those are just the stories that have something to do with data breaches. That’s the number, dating back to January 2005, established by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. If you find that surprising, wait until you hear about the financial loss attached to those breaches. According to the study released last week by the Ponemon Institute, data breach incidents cost companies $197 per compromised customer record in 2007. Here are some equally sobering statistics to think about: The average per-incident costs were $6.3 million. The cost

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• MKS Swings to a Profit on Revenue Growth in Fiscal 2008 Second Quarter

  December 10, 2007 Dan Burger

  In its most recent round of quarterly financial reporting, the application lifecycle management (ALM) software company MKS scored a profitable second quarter for its fiscal year 2008. Revenue and income increased and new customers were added to the company’s installed base. For the first six months of its fiscal year, however, the company remains in the red. The following specific figures provide a comparison to the company’s second fiscal quarter of 2007 and begin with a revenue increase of 18 percent that amounted to a record $13.6 million. Net income rose from a $0.7 million loss one year ago to

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