• InfoPrint Solutions Forms Developer Program for AFP Testing

  September 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  IBM‘s former printing division, which it now operates as a joint venture with Ricoh called the InfoPrint Solutions Company, announced a new developer program this week to allow its partners and customers to test their new printing environments–particularly high-end jobs using Advanced Function Presentation (AFP)–before going live. For the last nine months, InfoPrint Solutions and a select group of partners–including Exstream Software, GMC Software, Pitney Bowes’ subsidiary Group 1, PrintSoft, and XMPie–have been piloting a new program called the InfoPrint Solutions Developer Program. Under the pilot program, these partners gained access to printing

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• IBM Spreads the developerWorks Love Through New ‘Gizmos’

  September 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  For years, IBM–and especially the IBM Web site–have been criticized as being slow, cumbersome, and difficult to navigate. With last week’s introduction of four new “gizmos” for IBM’s popular developerWorks Web site, Big Blue is showing that it’s not a technological dinosaur and that it has a few Web 2.0 moves of its own. Last week IBM announced it is using syndication technology to allow Yahoo!, Google, and NetVibes subscribers to easily access any podcast, forum, blog, wiki, story, briefing, or tutorial hosted on developerWorks. The new content delivery mechanism hooks into Yahoo!’s Widget, Google’s Gadget, and

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• Supermegavirtualizationfest 2007

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, server and workstation virtualization superstar VMware will be hosting VMworld 2007, a trade show that VMware, long since owned by disk array maker EMC and most recently partially spun out through an initial public offering in mid-August, started in 2004 to bring partners and customers together to collaborate about all things virtual. Of course, going virtual is nothing new to midrange and mainframe server customers, and it is natural enough to wonder what all the hubbub is all about. Like VMware’s market capitalization valuation, just under $26 billion as I write this, the attendance count for VMworld is

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• Reader Feedback on the Death of DB2/400 for Domino

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you might expect, some members of the System i community are none too pleased about IBM‘s decision to yank support for DB2/400, the relational database integrated into i5/OS and OS/400, as a data store for Notes and Domino databases in the wake of the Notes/Domino 8 launch several weeks ago. I never like the idea that the i5/OS and OS/400 platform is missing some capability that other platforms have, but I also get the impression that IBM is not very likely to change its mind on this one. We’ll see. A lot will depend on feedback that customers

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• Sirius Expands Northeast Presence with SCS Buy

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and software reseller Sirius Computer Solutions last week expanded its presence in the Northeast region of the United States and simultaneously built out its expertise on various IBM software solutions through the acquisition of a competitor, Strategic Computer Solutions. While SCS is a fraction of the size of Sirius, it is a fairly large reseller of IBM wares in its own right and will make Sirius even more formidable in the market for IBM technology. Sirius, which was founded in 1980, is based in San Antonio, Texas, and is currently privately held. But considering the recent investment stake

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• As I See It: The Dons of Dialogue

  September 10, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Back in the 400s BC, two obscure Sicilian poets, Sophron and Epicharmus, wrote what scholars believe to be a series of two-performer plays. Although their work did not survive, it acquired an ancillary importance because it inspired the work of a more notable personage, Plato. He used the theatrical format to develop what would become known as the Platonic dialogues–instructional vignettes in which Socrates and one or more interlocutors expound on the finer points of philosophy. Beyond its dramatic appeal, dialogue proved useful as a non-threatening structure for the discussion of controversial subjects. It became, perhaps, the first communication model,

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• Leasing and Financing Are Important IT Tools, Says IDC

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whether or not the budget money is your own or you are spending it on behalf of your company for its benefit, it is often wiser to seek outside financing or lease a capital asset than to sink precious funds into acquiring it directly. This is exactly what IT procurement professionals confirmed when they were interviewed by IDC to reckon the affect of leasing and financing on their IT purchasing decisions. In putting together a recent report, entitled 2007 IT Leasing and Financing End-User Survey: Customer Needs and Wants, IDC interviewed 206 IT shops about their opinions on how

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• Whatever Happened to Net Neutrality?

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in on the debate on Net Neutrality, having last week filed an ex parte brief to the Federal Communications Commission concerning prospective laws governing traffic on the Internet. While Senators Byron Dorgan, Democrat from North Dakota, and Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, co-sponsored a bill to preserve the neutrality of Internet traffic in May, the bill has not come out of committee and the FCC seems to be in no big hurry to encourage Congress to legislate on the matter or to make rulings of its own that might affect how Internet traffic

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• Gartner Charts External Disk Array Sales for Q2

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Among other factors, compliance regulations, exploding data capacity requirements thanks to rich media, and the need to stage the storage of data across many different devices for high availability and performance are all contributing to the burgeoning sales of external disk arrays. The latest statistics from Gartner concerning external disk arrays sales in the second quarter of 2007 show that the appetite for storage in the data centers of the world has not been sated. During the quarter, global sales of external disk arrays–what Gartner now calls external controller based disk storage–rose by 3.3 percent, to $3.7 billion. EMC expanded

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• IT Shops Consume 2 Million LTO Tape Drives

  September 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Linear Tape-Out (LTO) tape format created by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and a former division of Seagate Technology now owned by Quantum continues to take the data center by storm, pushing aside other tape formats and demonstrating once again the value of standards in creating a dominate technology. LTO tape drives first went into production in September 2000, and since that time, more than two million LTO tape drives, which bear the name Ultrium, have been sold. To date, over 80 million Ultrium tape cartridges have been sold. A year ago, the companies behind the LTO spec and the

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