• Strengthening Dollar Curtails Global IT Spending Growth

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The new year is well under way and all eyes are already turning toward the end of 2015 to try to guess how much the IT market will grow. The good news is that the consensus seems to be that, in the aggregate, IT spending around the world and across all kinds of devices and services will be up this year compared to 2014. The less-than-good news–but still not bad news–is that the U.S. dollar is getting stronger and that actually cuts global IT spending projections. The prognosticators at Gartner shaved their predictions for IT spending growth throughout 2014 as

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• Under New CEO, HelpSystems Snaps Up Rival Halcyon

  January 12, 2015 Alex Woodie

  New HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim didn’t waste any time making his first big move last week when the company announced the acquisition of Halcyon Software, its closest natural competitor in systems management. The acquisition and the hiring of Heim–a one-time programmer with an eye for product development–kicked off a new era for HelpSystems following the retirement of former CEO Janet Dryer, who has been with the company for 30 years. HelpSystems looks a lot different today than when Dryer took over the top job at Help/Systems (it had a slash in its name until recently) 16 years ago. At

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• IBM Reorganizes To Reflect Its New Business Machine

  January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue did a lot of changing last year, and CEO Ginni Rometty started off this year by making some organizational and personnel changes that reflect the new shape of its company and the opportunities that it sees ahead of it in the global economy that is also undergoing wrenching change. Information technology and the economy have been changing each other for so long that it is hard to say what is cause and what is effect, but what can be said is that IBM has spent more than 10 decades adapting to such changes. In a memo to IBM

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• IBM i Shops Contemplate Collaboration

  January 12, 2015 Dan Burger

  If you know Domino, you’ve known the benefits of collaboration software long before they crowded under the umbrella of social networking. Peer inside a Domino shop and you’re likely to find an organization that understands the value of workflow and peer-to-peer teamwork. Efficiency? Yes. But for most, it is efficiency based on older collaboration technology. There are indicators that a transformation is taking shape. Keep an eye on this in 2015. And, yes, there are IBM i shops involved. Very few Domino shops have adopted IBM‘s flagship collaboration software suite of products known as Connections. It has been less

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Nerves Of Steel

  January 12, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  As 2014 drew to a close, the Wall Street Journal, which undoubtedly can recognize an outfit in decline, said IBM shares would be the year’s worst performing component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM was the biggest loser of the DJIA in 2013, too. The last company to do so poorly was Bethlehem Steel in 1995 and 1996; it was kicked off the DJIA in 1997. In 2001, Bethlehem went bankrupt, and two years after that it was dismembered. If IBM doesn’t change quickly and dramatically, it is a goner. Goodwill impairment may be the ruin of IBM.

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• OpenPower Builds Momentum With New Members, Summit

  January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just as last year was ending and The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the holidays, the OpenPower Foundation that IBM established a year ago added a bunch of new members and also announced that it would be hosting its first summit for system builders, application developers, and other parties that are interested in creating wares based on the Power architecture. While the OpenPower Consortium was created in August 2013 by IBM, Google, Nvidia, Tyan, and Mellanox Technologies, the more formal OpenPower Foundation that governs the effort to open source elements of the Power architecture to

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• End of Year Feedback

  December 17, 2014 Ted Holt

  It’s been a wonderful year, in spite of all the difficulties, problems, and vicissitudes of life that I would rather not have faced. I appreciate all the email that you’ve sent in response to the articles we published. To know that we’ve done something to make someone’s life easier and better gives me great satisfaction. I’d like to share some of your comments with your fellow Four Hundred Guru readers. May you enjoy the holidays, and may 2015 be your best year ever. Hey, Ted: I just read Use Wireshark To Diagnose IBM i Communications Problems. You can bypass

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• In Praise Of One-Off Tools

  December 17, 2014 Ted Holt

  This is the last issue of Four Hundred Guru for 2014, and in the last issue of a year I try to write about something unusual, something different from the routine stuff we usually run in this august publication. I worked on several interesting projects in 2014, but the one I want to talk about today will seem really retrograde to you. I wrote a bunch of System/36 RPG II programs. How I wrote them is the real story. In early 2014, a friend of mine emailed a request. A client of his, who still runs an S/36, was going

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• Admin Alert: What Should an IBM i Administrator Do, Part 2

  December 17, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  Last week, I discussed why shops still need IBM i administrators and started describing a checklist of tasks that are well-suited for less experienced administrators. My checklist showcased duties that can easily be turned over to lower level administrators, leaving more experienced people free to complete projects that benefit your organization. Today, I’ll complete describing the IBM i administrator checklist. The Checklist Continued As discussed last week, here’s a starter list of duties that can easily be turned over to an IBM i system administrator. IBM i user provisioning Auditing the system Software setups and on-going software database maintenance Backup

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• IBM Issues More POODLE Patches, Warns Not to Use SSLv3

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that continue to use SSLv3 to encrypt their communications are susceptible to the POODLE security vulnerability and could have their data compromised, IBM warned today in a security bulletin. IBM also issued new security patches that disable SSLv3 in IBM i’s Java runtime. While IBM recommends moving to the newer TLS protocol, many IBM i applications still require SSLv3 and will likely break when it’s disabled, IBM warns. IBM started patching its various systems against the POODLE vulnerability over a month ago when it became clear that SSLv3 needed to go. Applications patched in November include the

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