• SMB Shops Optimistic About IT Spending in 2008

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) recently co-hosted the SMB Summit in Boca Raton, Florida, and used the event to reveal the results of a survey that it commissioned among small and medium businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to figure out what they expected to do in terms of IT hiring and technology investments over the next year. The news is good–particularly for those running small IT operations or providing products and services to them. CompTIA hired AMI-Partners, a consultancy that specializes in the SMB space and that co-hosted the SMB Summit with the

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• The Blue Cloud Is IBM’s Commercial Cloud Computing

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like other server makers, IBM has conflicting desires to both embrace and to ignore the what seems inevitable advance from proprietary computing–under both senses of the word proprietary–to open, on-demand, utility-style computing. Because companies still like to own their computing infrastructure but nonetheless want to experiment with new architectures, IBM this week is rolling out a new product called the Blue Cloud, which lets companies build their own utilities–often called “clouds” in deference to the Internet’s old nickname, the Big Gray Cloud–using similar technology deployed by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and similar Internet powerhouses. The conflict that IBM

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• Record Sales Extend Magic Software’s Growth Spurt

  November 19, 2007 Dan Burger

  The resurgence of Magic Software, an application development tool vendor with strong ties to the IBM System i user base, remains on track as indicated by the financial reports the company turned in for its third quarter, which ended September 30. The Yehuda, Israel, software company reported record sales of $17.6 million, which follow three consecutive quarters of financial gains. Compared to the third quarter of 2006, revenues were up 17 percent. On the basis of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) methods, operating income for the third quarter was $1.1 million. That’s good enough to qualify as a resurgence

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• Merged CMS and XKO Software Businesses Renamed Solarsoft

  November 19, 2007 Dan Burger

  After the merger of CMS Software and XKO Software, two mid-tier ERP software providers, it was highly likely one or both of company names would be eliminated. It turned out that both were dropped. The combined development efforts and resulting products will be marketed under the Solarsoft name. CMS and XKO merged in April 2007 with the private equity firm, Marlin Equity Partners, orchestrating the deal. CMS, which was based in Ontario, Canada, specialized in ERP for small to mid size manufacturers. Its customer base was located primarily in North America. The majority of its customers run the

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• Be My Guest

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like most people who have been following the server racket for a long time, I have been singing the praises of server virtualization as a means to make servers more efficient and thereby help companies not only get more for their money, but hopefully–if not now, then in future years–to actually save some money that they can spend on other things. While virtualization is a great advancement in server technology, it is breaking down a lot of barriers even as it erects virtual ones inside servers of all stripes and sizes. For one thing, the barriers between platforms are eroding

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• Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top For every generation of AS/400, iSeries, or System i servers and the related OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems, there is a person who, more than anyone else, is associated with the technology that IBM delivers. This person has historically been in charge of steering the development of the hardware and software for the product line and managing the operations of the factories that made the AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers and the supply chains that fed them. This is a big job, and for my money, a much tougher job

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• IBM Acquires BI Software Specialist Cognos for $5 Billion

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The third shoe in the business intelligence market has finally fallen, now that IBM last week announced that it would spend $5 billion in cash to acquire Canadian BI software maker Cognos. The IBM deal follows Oracle‘s snapping up of Hyperion Solutions in March for $3.3 billion and SAP‘s purchase of Business Objects in October for $6.7 billion. With this deal, the three biggest independent suppliers of business intelligence and analytics software are no longer free agents, no matter how much their new owners will protest otherwise. IBM has long had high hopes for data warehousing and

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• Mad Dog 21/21: It’s Your Gaul

  November 19, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  Like Gaul before Charlemagne, office desktops can be divided in three. One nation uses PCs running a mix of generic and corporate applications. Another nation uses thin, fixed-function clients, even if some of the machines have full-fledged computers inside. The third nation uses PCs, but works with software that shifts most client functionality to a shared terminal support server. For decades, friends and enemies of these nations have made more or less the same old arguments. But now client technology is really different, and so are the end users. Some choices that were right yesterday may be wrong tomorrow. What

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• Does Native .NET Support Matter for the System i?

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I have a question for all of you. A number of development tool vendors have been putting on their thinking caps as we close one year and get ready to open a new one, and just by way of coincidence, have asked the same question in a number of slightly different ways. The question is this: Does the lack of native .NET support hurt the System i platform? Said another way, would some kind of native .NET support help it? What these vendors and IT Jungle are looking for is more than just an opinion, of course. What we really

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• IBM and 3Com Chop System i VoIP Software and Support Prices

  November 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, server maker IBM, which is trying to boost System i sales by peddling Voice over IP software on the box, and 3Com, IBM’s original software partner for this effort and a company that was recently taken private by Bain Capital, announced that they were reducing prices on key software components in the VoIP solution they delivered a little more than a year ago. The pricing and configuration of the 3Com IP Telephony Suite for System i software stack is about as complex as the genetic code of an paramecium, so figuring out the effect of these

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