• VAI Completes Dual ERP Integration for Two Distribution Companies

  March 15, 2011 Dan Burger

  So many companies are looking to streamline disparate systems into one integrated system, particularly when it comes to tightening supply chain management. VAI, a company known for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that runs on the IBM i platform, seems to have a talent for helping distribution, manufacturing, retail, and service companies tie up the loose ends inherent in those multiple silo nightmares. Its most recent call to aid came from a hydraulic and industrial hose distributor with an 80,000 square foot facility in Spokane, Washington. Spokane House of Hose needed one centrally managed and scalable ERP system

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• Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM is finally getting around to adding features to the Power Systems-IBM i combination to make it more amenable to so-called cloud computing. It is not clear when these features, such as live migration of logical partitions, will be available, but hopefully it will be soon. Once these updated features are available in the next release of the operating system, it will be truly possible for IBM, hosting companies, or maybe brand new start-ups to offer cloudy i infrastructure. As The Four Hundred reported three weeks ago, Colin Parris, the new IBM vice president in charge

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• Infor Makes a $1.83 Billion Bid for Lawson

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With rumors going around early last week that it had hired Barclays Capital to advise it on its options, midrange application software supplier Lawson Software finally fessed up that late on Friday night that something was indeed afoot. The Barclays Capital rumor had caused an 18 percent run-up in the company’s stock and that was because everyone figured that it was because the software maker was looking at buying something or selling itself. As it turns out, it was the latter, not the former. In a statement released at 9:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Lawson said that it had received

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• IBM Lays Out Plans for Future Growth and Profits

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s not every day that I get invited up to IBM Country up north of me to spend the day with the top 20 executives at Big Blue. In fact, it was only last Tuesday. So I decided to go, despite the flooding on the local roads between where I live in upstate Manhattan and IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. My faithful rented Zipcar and a general sense of direction got me where I was going despite the road closures, and the highlight for me was meeting some of the techies who work at IBM Research, including

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Tablet Vivant, Memories Mordant

  March 14, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  Hitachi, which once ate IBM‘s disk drive business, has regurgitated, selling its rotating storage operations to Western Digital. Meanwhile, outfits that track memory prices generally agree that DRAM has become a drug on the market. The only storage chips selling like hotcakes are the kind used to build flash memory devices. Even those current darlings of the electronics world may get whacked, pricewise, as the Korean kings of NAND segue to 30 nanometers. What’s going on here? It’s iPads on the client side and green blades on the server end of the wire, that’s what. A century

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• Encouraging News on IT Jobs in Q2

  March 14, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  If you’re one of the many people who has lost a job and has been struggling to find work as our the United States struggles to get out of its current economic mess, you’ll be encouraged to learn that CIOs here are feeling optimistic about hiring in the second quarter of 2011. Robert Half Technology, which finds jobs for IT professionals on a project and full-time basis, recently conducted telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees. The results of those interviews were released last week in their IT

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• No More Power Systems Quick Ship; IBM Has a Better Way

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Linda Sanford, senior vice president for enterprise transformation at IBM, is in the prowl to wring $8 billion out of IBM’s internal cost base to do business. And many of the things that Sanford and her team will be doing to change the way IBM works internally and with outside partners and customers are going to affect you. Sometimes, it will be for the better. And Sanford gave an example of an improvement that is also saving Big Blue a little money at last week’s Investor Day, held at the TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

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• Western Digital Buys Hiatchi Disk Biz for $4.3 Billion

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The disk drive business created by IBM in 1956, which found itself sold to Hitachi back in June 2002, has a new home: Western Digital. Under the deal announced last week, Western Digital is paying $3.5 billion in cash and $750 million in stock to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technology. That will give parent company Hitachi a 10 percent stake in Western Digital when the deal is done. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. While solid state drives (SSDs) and other kinds of flash memory are making all the headlines

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• Disk Array Revenues and Capacity March On, Unabated

  March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to LUNs. Well, in the case of the OS/400 and i platform, auxiliary storage pools, but that doesn’t scan well. According to the people who count bits and bytes and boxes at IDC, companies consumed a staggering 5,127 petabytes of disk storage in the fourth quarter, up 55.7 percent from the year-ago period. Revenues only grew by 14.3 percent to $8.3 billion in the quarter, kept in check by competition and Moore’s Law. But just barely. Those figures include both internal and external disk arrays. External disk array sales

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• Northeast User Groups Conference Coming April 11-13

  March 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  Education and training considerations for IBM i shops are getting more closely examined as new technologies and continue to impact the way all businesses perform. Specialized skills are in demand and employers are choosing to upgrade their current workforces rather than attempting to find outside people who can contribute the combination of technical skills and industry-specific experience that provides the best fit. Up in New England, the annual Northeast User Groups Conference (NEUGC) has been delivering IBM midrange education and training for 20 consecutive years. It’s the largest IBM i (Power Systems, iSeries, AS/400) conference in that region. But it’s

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