• JD Edwards Users Pondering Upgrade Options

  June 18, 2012 Dan Burger

  The Southern California JD Edwards user group (JDE SCUG) gathered last Wednesday for one of their quarterly collaboration sessions. It gave me an opportunity to talk with someone on the front lines working with a subset of customers that have the same or very similar IT dilemmas as everyone else, except that in this case, we’re talking about IBM i shops where the mix of Oracle and IBM can sometimes be volatile. Steven Colgrove is the senior director of the west region for Denovo, an application and technology consulting company specializing in helping companies running JD Edwards

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• IT Hiring Plans More Or Less Level In Q3

  June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some chief information officers are looking to hire people, and others are looking to fire people. That’s the latest result from surveys done by Robert Half Technology, the division of the headhunter by the same name that works in a number of different industries, including the IT sector. The news is not unexpected, given the uncertainty in the economy, and as we all know, it could be a lot worse. And it has been, in fact. Robert Half has just finished up surveying 1,400 CIOs across the United States to take the pulse on the human side of the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Transit Of Venues

  June 18, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  The world of wankerware: Did you think Facebook was the number one social networking venue despite a slapstick $100 billion IPO? That Twitter was a big hitter? That Google+ was looking up? That LinkedIn was how business people passed the word? That Foursquare was hot hot hot hot? That Yammer went for a billion under the hammer? So how can IDC say that IBM is number one in social platforms, taking in a piddling $60 million in 2010? Well, if you are rich, delusional IBM, then you can play at social media and still live in your own untethered

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• Infor Buys Cloudy Software Company Easy RMS

  June 18, 2012 Alex Woodie

  It turns out the “new” Infor is a lot like the old Infor in at least one way: a hunger for acquisitions. The new tenant of New York City got back on the acquisition train last week with the purchase of Easy RMS, a provider of cloud-based revenue management software for companies in the hospitality industry based in London, England. Easy RMS develops revenue optimization software designed to help hotels, casinos, and other companies in the hospitality industry maximize their profits by renting the right room to the right client at the right price at the right time. The

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• IBM Beats Out Cisco For Modular Server Deal

  June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s not a particularly large deal as these things go, but IBM has won a head-to-head competition pitting its new PureSystem platform against similar modular systems from Cisco Systems and come out with the sale. As I explained when the Flex System modular servers were announced back in April, Big Blue is not expecting companies to rip out their existing IT infrastructure and replace it with the new X86 and Power system nodes, the Flex Manager management stack, and integrated switching and storage. But, in some cases, such as in this win against Cisco and its “California” Unified Computing

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• The SDMC Is Dead, Long Live The HMC

  June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ah, Systems Director Management Console, we hardly knew ye. Those of you in the Power Systems market who had been dreading the transition from the not-much-liked Hardware Management Console (HMC) to its kicker, announced a year ago and based on a souped-up version of IBM‘s Systems Director, don’t have a reason to dread because as part of PureSystems launch back in April, the SMDC was discontinued. So forget all that. Systems Director, of course, was the management tool that IBM created for the BladeCenter blade servers and then eventually extended to cover Power Systems and System z iron. The

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• How Bright Is Your Future?

  June 18, 2012 Dan Burger

  At a time when skeleton crews are manning the data centers and the norm is to maintain the status quo, increasing budgets for IT training and education are as hard to find as dry palms during the next round of layoff announcements. Maybe it’s not as bad as it was three years ago, but there are still plenty of stories going around about IBM i-based companies that want the latest and greatest technology, but they don’t have or can’t find the skilled people they need. Companies that invest in IT training and education still exist and it only makes sense

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• Disk Array Price Erosion Slows In Q1, Software Stalls

  June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the hard disk drive shortage due to the flooding in Thailand more or less over, the reactive price rise for SATA and SAS disk drives over the past several months due to shortages has helped in part to prop up the worldwide disk storage market. The insatiable demand for hoarding data, which has only been aggravated by the hyper around big data, did its part to help push disk array sales, too. In the first quarter, IDC reckons that disk array revenues were up 6.8 percent, to just under $8 billion, and total disk capacity shipped across internal arrays

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• BYOD Brings New Challenges For Businesses

  June 18, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  In theory, the explosion of mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablets should be great for businesses around the globe. Employees are more connected to their jobs than ever before, and they are footing the bill for the privilege of using their personal devices. Why wouldn’t companies be jumping for joy at this new computing trend? While business are adapting quickly to mobile-enable their IT infrastructures to meet the growing demand for mobile device use in the enterprise IT environment, a survey recently conducted by the analysts at Gartner found that this willingness to include personal mobile computing devices–meaning those

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• The New Basics

  June 13, 2012 Jon Paris

  Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the D-spec enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases. Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here 10 years ago if they didn’t use it. And yes,

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