• EVault Taps Cequel Data Centers for Cloud Partnership

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  EVault last week announced that it has formed a partnership with Cequel Data Centers, owner of a series of data centers in Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington state, to offer EVault’s online backup and recovery software and services from each of its locations. Cequel Data Centers was created in 2010 by a group of private equity and investment firms, led by Cequel III of St. Louis, Missouri. The group owns and operates more than 100,000 square feet of data center space through three subsidiaries, including Colo4 of Dallas Texas, which was acquired in 2010; Perimeter Technology of Oklahoma City and Tulsa,

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• Profound Logic Opts for RPG OA in NiSUG Mobile Challenge

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic showcased its RPG Open Access (RPG OA) technology during the recent mobile application development challenge held during National iSystems User Group‘s 2012 International Power event in London. NiSUG challenged IBM i tool vendors to use their wares to quickly develop the most full-featured mobile application they could as part of the “App-i-Days Mobile Application Showcase” that was held on the expo floor during the recent 2012 International Power event. The vendors, presented with a DB2 for i database and a set of minimum requirement, unleashed their developers and their creativity. Profound Logic, which was represented by its

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• IBM Fights Fraud with New Software

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week launched a new release of i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, its Windows-based software application that’s designed to help organizations discover, fight, and prevent fraud. The new release brings a new architecture that should improve scalability and data integration. It can be very difficult to detect fraud, especially when it’s being perpetrated by small groups of highly skilled and motivated people against large organizations that have rigid processes and are slow to react. With i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, IBM hopes to give these large organizations a leg up on the game by giving them powerful tools designed to peer

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• Power Systems Cloud Builders Get Huge Discounts

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is good news for Power Systems shops who are looking to move some of their IBM i and AIX applications out to the cloud or use cloudy capacity managed by a third party for disaster recovery. First, Big Blue is licensing both IBM i and AIX under special terms to managed service providers, or MSPs as they are called. And second, IBM has just launched a special utility pricing deal for MSPs that gives them deep discounts as they build out their initial Power-based clouds. Both moves will go a long way toward lowering the initial capital expenditures that

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• IBM Adds IBM i Support To Traveler And Kills Lotus Name

  December 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Great news for IBM i shops: IBM will enable Traveler, the email and messaging server for mobile devices, to run on the IBM i operating system as part of the forthcoming Notes/Domino version 9.0 platform, the company has announced. Big Blue also said that, with the launch of Notes/Domino 9.0 Social Edition in the first quarter of 2013, it will no longer use the Lotus name, marking the end of the 20-year-old, sunny yellow brand. IBM takes a tremendous amount of flack for its seemingly endless re-branding exercises, and at least some of it is well deserved. IBM’s marketers did

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• Mobile Developers Battle Complexity, Deployment Time

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  It is a simple and irreversible fact that application development teams are consumed by mobile computing. Smartphones and tablets have put the pressure on companies in the IBM midrange community (users of IBM i on Power Systems, i5/OS on iSeries, and OS/400 on AS/400s), where it is not far-fetched to say 50 percent are still dependent on the green-screen interface. A reluctance to convert at least some of their applications to a graphical interface is coming around to haunt them. Meanwhile, there are businesses, particularly start-ups, that recognize the power of the graphical user interface and that the need to

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• As I See It: How IT Decided The Election

  December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek

  In retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner. The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides

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• Excepting X86 Iron, Server Sales Continue To Slip In Q3

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might be better for all parties concerned in the server racket if they didn’t stagger their new processor releases over the course of a year. But server processors are an increasingly complex thing to develop, the fabrication plants that make them are increasingly more expensive, and vendors have to slow down, get it right, and milk each chip generation for all it is worth. When the economy is running a little cool and chip makers are all in the middle of processor transitions, it is generally not going to cause server sales to go up. The late summer and

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• IBM To Charge For Lapsed Hardware Maintenance

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years now, IBM has charged a maintenance after license fee if you have a bit of its software that you have let fall off Software Maintenance. This after license fee is basically back maintenance that IBM thinks it is entitled to because you didn’t help pay for the support costs for a period of time, but now you want all of the cumulative benefits of Software Maintenance again. Now, IBM is going to do a similar thing with hardware maintenance, and it is called a “reestablishment fee,” hyphen not included. As you can see in announcement letter 612-042

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• A BI On IBM i Partnership Blooms

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  Executives love the idea of business intelligence. The promise is that it can quickly provide dividends, but that rarely happens. Why is that? In IBM midrange shops, the situation is no different than anywhere else. IT departments are understaffed and overworked. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when new projects are added someone has to have the time to implement them. The path to completed projects is often paved by service companies. The recent partnership between Coglin Mill and GEMKO is a good example. Coglin Mill is has an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool called RODIN for

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