The Four Hundred Archives - Page 584 of 1510

Tech-Business Skills in Demand, Academic Initiative Expands

December 10, 2012 Dan Burger

Developing new technology skills and being better prepared for future job opportunities will keep IT workers and those aspiring to become IT professionals busy these days. According to the just released 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report, 10 percent of the managers surveyed believe their organizations are inadequately staffed due to a lack of technology skills mixed with business skills. To address that situation, IBM has re-purposed its Academic Initiative program, which includes a Power Systems element.

Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on headliner type topics such as big data, analytics, digital marketing, mobile computing, and security. Educational materials

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IBM Canada Sweetens Education And Training Deal

December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue’s subsidiary in the Great White North not only wants you to build your IT skills, it wants to make a little dough helping you do it. But sometimes, if you want to get a little, you have to give a little.

And so IBM Canada is offering customers who pre-pay for training slightly higher discounts if they pony up bigger wads of cash–enumerated in loonies, not greenbacks–over the next several months. In announcement letter ENUS312-137, IBM is offering customers who spend between $25,000 or more on Education Packs a 15 percent discount off that training. Under the

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IT Shops Buy 7.1 Exabytes Of Disk Array Capacity In Q3

December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to break into the disk array business, you better have a strong stomach and a steel spine. It takes more and more capacity to make a little more money, and it is the most competitive part of the IT sector these days.

According to the box counters at IDC, disk array sales were up 3.7 percent to $7.87 billion in the third quarter, but to get that revenue, vendors had to push 7,104 petabytes–that’s more than 7 exabytes–of new disk capacity. This is the first time that quarter disk array sales have broken through 7 exabytes,

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IBM i Support Through 2025? Hold On Just a Second

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Steve Will, IBM‘s chief architect for the IBM i platform, raised a few eyebrows during his presentation to close the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, last Friday. After Will put up a slide that showed a future release of the IBM i OS being supported through the end of 2025, several audience members posted Twitter messages about it. However, in his blog yesterday, Will said to not take the slide at face value.

While it’s abundantly used in the IBM i marketplace, Twitter hasn’t been an especially fruitful avenue for dispensing actual news that affects

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IBM Ships a Fix for Bugs in RDP 8.5

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

IBM last week issued a fixpack for Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP) that addresses some of the shortcomings that developers have complained about with RDP version 8.5, a major new release of the IDE that was released earlier this year. In particular, Fixpack 1, or RDP version 8.5.1.

If the complaints that RDP users posted to the Midrange.com mailing list are any indication, RDP 8.5 was an exceptionally buggy release. Users posting to WDSCI-L (the product was formerly the WebSphere Developer Studio Client) complained about a number of problems with the integrated development environment (IDE).

One of the most

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InterForm Launches Embedded PDF

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

The big “turducken” craze has passed, to the great relief of responsible foodies and heart surgeons everywhere. But the business IT equivalent of turducken–stuffing business documents inside of other business documents–is just taking off. IBM i document management software vendor InterForm is one of the first companies to take advantage of the new capability in the PDF standard that enables users to literally stuff other documents–including Word docs, TIFFS, XLS spreadsheets, or other PDFs–right into a PDF.

InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen says the new Embedded PDF software will be a big timesaver for accounting departments that are constantly fetching old

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Kronos Launches HR App for iPad

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Kronos last month rolled out a new app that allow users of its iSeries Central suite to access their human resources software from an iPad. The new app, called Workforce Tablet, provides access to command HR management tasks, such as approving timecards or shifting worker schedules around, and also includes basic analytic functionality. The $870 million company also made several other announcements at its annual KronosWorks conference.

Workforce Tablet is a native iOS app designed to provide managers and employees with access to Kronos’ server-based HR and human capital management (HCM) suites, including iSeries Central and Workforce Central, from an

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Infor Partners with NCS for Direct Store Delivery

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Infor last month announced a partnership with Numeric Computer Systems that will result in new integration between Infor ERP systems and the suite of Direct Store Delivery applications from NCS. One Infor LX (BPCS) customer, the beverage bottler Polar Corporation, has already adopted the integration.

Direct Store Delivery (DSD) is a business model whereby manufacturers act as their own distributors and ship their products directly to stores or the place of consumption. The business model is commonly used in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, where delivery times are critical. After all, fresh milk and eggs can’t sit in

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Deploy Cognos in Minutes with New BI Pattern, IBM Says

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Critics have long derided the long deployment times typically required by big business intelligence offerings such as IBM‘s Cognos. However, with last week’s launch of Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0, IBM says it has cut the deployment of a full, fault-tolerant Cognos environment to a matter of minutes.

Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0 is a new piece of software designed to speed up the deployment of Cognos business intelligence applications on IBM’s new PureApplication server platform. PureApplication servers, you will remember, are all-in-one systems that don’t run applications so much as they run “patterns of expertise.”

That concept-bending scheme

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Island Pacific Turns iPhone Into POS Device

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Imagine being able to check out of a store this Christmas shopping season by completing a transaction with an iPhone app, as opposed to lining up at the check-out counter. That future is becoming a reality at retail chains that are customers of Island Pacific, a developer of merchandising and point of sale solutions.

Island Pacific recently announced that it has received accreditation from a payment network provider for use of its Island Pacific Mobile offering, which utilizes software running on an iPhone or iPod Touch and the Ingenico iSMP mobile payment cradle.