• Arming The IBM i Nation

  October 1, 2012 Dan Burger

  It could happen to you. Like a sucker punch from the president of your company, one day you get the word the IBM midrange system is being replaced. And before you can even ask–“How could this happen?”–you’re flat on your back seeing stars. You should have seen this coming. The murmurs about old technology unable to solve modern business problems, inaccessible silos of information, and the surge of the Window/Unix manifest destiny have been heard for years. Just like ignorance of the law isn’t going to get you off the hook for a speeding ticket, claiming you didn’t notice other

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Shamoon And Six Trends

  October 1, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In a lengthy study published in September, IBM says vendors and users have done a pretty good job tackling computer security problems lately, despite some persistently festering issues. The report deals with threats to user organizations that arrive via the Internet. This was unfortunate because sabotage had just become a very hot topic in security circles. In August, destructive malware called Shamoon trashed 30,000 workstations at Saudi Aramco and an unspecified number of client systems at Qatar’s Rasgas. The vector was most likely a flash drive carried by an insider, not a website or email. IBM’s star-crossed (or perhaps Shamoon-crossed)

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• IBM’s Rometty Takes Over As Chairman Of The Board

  October 1, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  It hasn’t quite been a year since IBM tapped Virginia M. Rometty as president and chief executive officer, and now comes the announcement from IBM’s board of directors that Rometty will take over as chairman of the board, effective October 1, 2012. Rometty succeeds Sam Palmisano, who will stay on as a senior adviser to the company until he retires on December 1, 2012. So as of today, Rometty is driving the Big Blue bus. IBM CEO, president, and newly appointed chairman of the board, Ginni Rometty. There is no doubt that Rometty, 55, is ready to take the wheel.

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• Jack Henry Busts Through $1 Billion Barrier In Fiscal 2012

  October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Banking software and payment processing service Jack Henry and Associates has pumped up its sales to above $1 billion for the latest fiscal year just ended, the first time the company has hit that sales level and almost assuring that someone–Oracle, Infor, or even Microsoft–is going to try to try to buy the company. But Jack Henry has done just fine on its own, thank you very much. In the fiscal 2012 year ended on June 30, the software and service provider that specializes in sales to small and regional banks, booked $1.03 billion in sales,

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• External Disk Array Sales Slow Down A Bit

  October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The use of internal disk arrays inside of database, data warehousing, and Hadoop data munching clusters seems to be having an effect on sales of external disk array sales. Maybe. In the second quarter, according to Gartner, external controller-based disk arrays (meaning they have their own brains instead of relying on controllers under the skins of the servers that the arrays attach to) accounted for $5.5 billion in revenues, up 6.7 percent and marking the eleventh quarter in a row that external disk array sales have gone up. However, Gartner was expecting for 7.9 percent growth and around $62

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• Trial Date Set in Vision-Maxava Case

  October 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  An April trial date has been set in the false advertising and trade libel case that IBM i high availability software maker Maxava brought against its rival Vision Solutions and the reseller Sirius Computer Solutions. A jury in a Los Angeles courtroom will decide the case next spring–unless the two sides agree to a settlement or the trial is delayed once more. Maxava and Vision have been going at it since December 2009, when Maxava filed its false advertising lawsuit in U.S. District Court Central District of California Western Division, based in Los Angeles. Maxava (which at that time

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• IBM Fishes For Managed Service Providers; Nice Bait

  October 1, 2012 Dan Burger

  Managed service providers (MSPs) are lined up like suitcases at the baggage claim. Their destination is the small to midsize market. For years, IBM and the rest of the IT giants have searched for ways to crack that market, without a great deal of success. Managed services, via the cloud, are their best opportunity to date. Another indicator that managed service providers are gearing up for a coming change in IT buying behavior is IBM latest program designed for expanding its MSP network. Central to this program are two of Big Blue’s favorite topics: SmartCloud and PureSystems. IBM claims there

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• IBM Gives A Deal To Online Software Buyers

  October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sending people around to make the sales pitch and then take orders for product sales is expensive and inefficient even if it is more personable, and IBM wants you to try something new and buy software online. In a deal running on IBM’s website, Big Blue is opening up its online software catalog in the United States and Canada and sweetening the deal a bit if customers buy online. IBM is not offering discounts on the software, so it is reasonable to expect that big ticket items like operating systems and middleware will be bought this way. But the

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• Orati Systems Debuts With a Lineup of IBM i Tools

  September 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There’s a new player in the market for IBM i utilities. Orati Systems, a British software consultancy and developer, is rolling out a series of tools for the midrange server, including a spool file converter called SpoolMagic and a file transfer tool called iSFTPpro. The company has also written a bunch of open source products that it will distribute free of charge, including a PDF generator called iPDF that promises to be popular. SpoolMagic is an IBM i utility that converts *SCS spool files into other formats, including HTML, TXT, CSV, XLS, XML, physical files, standard and enhanced PDF,

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• State Tax Collector Modernizes iSeries System, Wins Award

  September 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Instead of ripping out its customized iSeries systems and installing a brand new pre-packaged system to the tune of about $40 million, the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (DRA) elected to modernize its existing iSeries infrastructure, using integration and business intelligence tools from Information Builders. In addition to saving tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, the implementation won an award. The DRA is a critical component of government operations in the state of New Hampshire. The agency collects about $1.4 billion annually from 253 state municipalities, and is responsible for overseeing the statewide property tax system

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