• IBM Loses Money On Hardware In Q1

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have a new president and CEO, but you would be hard-pressed to find any difference between the numbers turned in by Ginni Rometty in her first quarter at the helm of Big Blue and those of her predecessor, chairman Sam Palmisano, in his last quarter standing at the wheel in the fourth quarter of 2011. To many, this makes IBM almost boring in its predictability, but if you are counting on rising earnings driving a rising stock price as well as dividends, this is probably the kind of hum-drum thing you like. In the first quarter ended in

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• Summit Partners Acquires Control Of Help/Systems–Again

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “In the private equity world, you rarely double in on a company,” explains Mark Ties, chief financial officer at Help/Systems, the maker of automation tools for IBM i, Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms. But doubling in, as Ties called it, is precisely what private equity giant Summit Partners did on April 17 when it bought the majority stake control of Help/Systems. Summit Partners was founded in 1984 and has raised more than $14 billion in capital from investors in those ensuing 28 years, which has been invested in more than 340 companies in North America, Europe, and Asia. Of

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage

  April 23, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In the old days, to print a document you had to have driver software on your computer that matched an attached or nearby printer. In offices with a diversity of computers and printers, this was a nightmare. New applications, new types of documents, new clients, or new printers meant finding new paths through the thicket of operating systems, networks, drivers, and page description languages. These days you can let your printer vendors deal with linkage. You can even consider tossing out those persnickety PCs and riding out on the new frontier where the mobile clients range. Some of the inspiration

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• Third Party’s A Charm For JDE Maintenance Contracts

  April 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  Like a fur coat on a hot summer day, the cost of software maintenance is making a lot of companies sweat. Maintenance has always been a factor whether it relates to purchased or home-grown software, but in recent times its shadow grew while budgets were pinched. Nowhere in the IBM i community has this issue been more apparent than among JD Edwards users. JDE apps have a large installed base, and ever since Oracle took over JDE, it has become the lightning rod example. On average, the annual software maintenance fees come in at around 20 percent of the total

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• IT Spending Projections Crimped For 2012

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The strengthening U.S. dollar and slightly higher spending last year on hardware, software, and services as well as a reduction in projected spending by companies have combined to make Gartner revise its IT spending expectations for 2012 downward a bit. Here’s the deal. Gartner reckons that IT spending was a little bit stronger in 2011 than its projections earlier this year pegged it, with sales of $3,661 billion worldwide across all categories of IT spending, including computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services, telecom hardware, and telecom services. In January, just after 2011 had ended but before many of the IT

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• IBM Sells Retail Systems Biz To Rival Toshiba For $850 Million

  April 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  IBM, the global leader in point of sale and related retail store systems, has checked out. Big Blue has bagged another portion of its hardware business, and the IBM cash register is singing to the tune of $850 million. Stepping up as buyer and partner is Toshiba TEC, which cartwheels from fourth to first in the POS field leaving behind the likes of Hewlett Packard, NCR, Panasonic, and Fujitsu. That trio has yet to react to the sale and multi-year agreement between IBM and Toshiba, which creates a formidable tandem. Toshiba, which is Japan’s

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• IBM Rochester Gets A Piece Of the PureSystems Action

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The PureSystems converged system platform might be largely a product of IBM‘s System x division, which was officially renamed the Modular Systems division several years ago but no one uses the name. But the Power Systems division has a hand in the design and manufacturing of the machines, too, as it turns out. Tim Alpers, a local product manager at IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, told the local Post-Bulletin newspaper that the PureSystems launch “was a big deal” for the facility, which had a hand in the research and design of the converged systems and will be taking part in

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• What’s Your Digital Personality?

  April 23, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  No, you haven’t accidentally clicked over to the results of the latest Teen Beat poll. IBM recently released the results of a survey that reveals an individual’s digital behavior, part of IBM’s continued effort to help its customers understand and capture the elusive and growing digital consumer. You might be wondering how this news is relevant to the IBM i aficionados who rely on IT Jungle for all things i-related? So let’s go straight to the most interesting finding from this survey before we hash through the details and discover your digital personality: IBM’s Beyond Digital study discovered that the

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• Coglin Mill And Help/Systems Tag Team For Analytics

  April 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  It’s fair to say business analytics on the IBM i platform has a more serious business attitude compared to some of the lightweight activities that get lumped into this category on less robust systems. And you’ve probably heard the complaints about insufficient analytical capabilities that do little or nothing to solve real business problems. The failure of deployments to achieve the hoped for objectives shakes the confidence of CEOs contemplating business intelligence projects at all levels. It also raises questions about the wisdom of taking data from the IBM i platform and feeding databases on other platforms when the decision

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• A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters

  April 18, 2012 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Too often we humans give little thought to what we do or why we do it, even though taking an organized approach to an activity has its advantages. In this article, I present one approach to the handling of parameters in programs and tell why I consider this a good way to process parameters. Parameters are data that are supplied to a program in order to affect the way it behaves. For example, the ability to supply file names, member names, and various options to the Copy File

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