• New ERP Installs Get Mixed Returns, Panorama Says

  March 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Implementing an ERP system is a notoriously difficult thing to do. By some estimates, more than 60 percent of ERP implementations are doomed to fail. And yet, companies continue to adopt them, because. . . well, they have to. The ERP watchers at Panorama Consulting recently checked into the state of enterprise software implementations with its annual ERP report, which detected the requisite unhappiness in recent ERP adopters, but also found some satisfied customers, too. From September to January, Panorama Consulting corralled 172 of its customers onto its website to take a survey about their recent ERP installations. The company

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• COMMON Hopes Everything Is Bigger in Texas

  March 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  Computers and the Internet have been important drivers in long distance education, which serves a purpose when time away from the IT department and tight budgets prevent travel. But most educators and students believe in the classroom education leads to greater success. A traditional classroom environment, hands-on lab sessions, as well as the networking with your peers are why people get excited to attend the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, which is coming up April 7 through 10 in Austin, Texas. The COMMON conference, or simply COMMON, as most people refer to it, is a special event–the largest gathering

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• Does Working At Home Really Work?

  March 4, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  When Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer recently dropped the bomb that she was ending work-from-home arrangements beginning this June, telecommuters around the world held their breath. Was it time to close up the home office? Although Mayer’s decision has re-ignited the debate about the pros and cons of telecommuting, whether or not it is a good idea to allow employees to work at home seems to depend on who you talk to. Here in the IT Jungle, telecommuting has been our way of life since our inception back in 1996. In my experience, working from home is not for

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• Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I hate to tell you I told you so. No, really, I do. I didn’t want to be right about this. And as is the case with all prognostication, I was only partially right, so really, I didn’t want to cop to only being partly right. Back in January, in the lead story for the first issue of this year, it was reasonable to expect a maintenance price hike in 2013 on vintage System i and not-so-shiny Power Systems iron. There has indeed been a maintenance price hike, but it was on IBM i software, not IBM hardware. See,

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• Mobility Is The Motivator For Green-Screen Migrations

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM i shops are moving to greener pastures. It’s a migration, but it’s not the one that demonstrates the platform is dead, like some folks have been claiming for longer than a generation of young programmers has been sleeping in their own beds. Those pastures are greener because green-screen applications are steadily being left behind. And the migration within the IBM midrange user base has quickened as a direct result of mobile computing. It is no more surprising than moving mountains. “The majority of customers we deal with have mobility as a significant part of their requirements going forward,” I

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• IBM Locks Down Licensed Internal Code On Power, Mainframe Systems

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again. Maybe. Or maybe not, if IBM‘s lawyers help it close the barn door before the horse escapes. Big Blue is tightening down the licensing of the machine code, often called licensed internal code or microcode, for selected high-end servers based on Power and System z processors. IBM has revised the terms and conditions to machine code on these machines, making it not only explicit that licenses to machine code cannot change hands, but that they may not do so without a customer signing on the dotted line a license acceptance agreement. IBM announced the new

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• As I See It: The Man Who Would Be Kim

  February 25, 2013 Victor Rozek

  He was born in West Germany, the product of a German-Finish union, and for most of his life he bore the surname of Schmitz. From an early age he proved to be a poor model of German conformity, contemptuous of rules and indifferent to authority. But by the time he entered his teenage years, he had found a profession and a place of refuge from the pangs of conventionality: his refuge was the Internet; his profession, hacking. Although he never got beyond junior high school, Kim managed to engineer a thriving career breaking and entering into other people’s phone systems.

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• IBM Dives Head First Into Mobile

  February 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled an expansive new strategy to deliver mobile business solutions under MobileFirst, its new brand of software and services for delivering apps on smartphones and tablets. With MobileFirst, IBM seeks to bring together all of the elements required by an enterprise to successfully roll-out mobile solutions, including development, deployment, device management, and security tools. And, IBM being IBM, it also includes a healthy dose of professional services, but no apparent IBM i hooks at this time. MobileFirst is an umbrella brand that brings together many pieces of software that already existed in IBM’s portfolio, but it introduces

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• Cisco And EMC Chase Midrange Customers With Smaller Converged Systems

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is not the only one chasing midrange shops with converged systems. Last week, the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco Systems and EMC rolled out a new line of Vblock converged systems that the companies hope with help is radically expand its channel and then its customer base. The VCE partnership, which also includes server virtualization juggernaut VMware (which is majority-owned by EMC and therefore no matter what anyone says, this is still an EMC-Cisco partnership), stacks up Cisco’s C Series rack servers and Catalyst 3750-X switches, EMC’s VNXe 3150 disk arrays, VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Plus server virtualization stack,

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• Sony Ditches Power For PlayStation 4, And This Matters To IBM i

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consumer electronics maker Sony gave a sneak peek at its forthcoming PlayStation 4 game console, expected in time for Christmas shopping seven years after the release of the Power-based PlayStation 3. The company did not say much about the technology inside of the new game console, but one thing we know for sure: Power is out, and X86 processing and GPU graphics from Advanced Micro Devices is in. The feeds and speeds of the new PlayStation 4 are not all that impressive: an eight-core “Jaguar” processor with an integrated Radeon graphics chip from AMD, the kind of thing you might

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