• 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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• Too Much Data or Not Enough Analytics?

  March 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  It’s a data-driven world, folks. You might say we already have more data than we know what to do with, but that’s a problem that can be fixed as organizations turn to business intelligence with an emphasis on analytics. Taking information that’s disjointed, sometimes redundant, and probably of limited availability to those who can make best use of it, and putting it to work is a great untapped resource. Using predictive analytics organizations can analyze trends and patterns found in historical and current data. The benefit comes from increasing the accuracy of forecasting trends affecting products and services, and gaining

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• Customer Service is Serious Business for IBM i Software Vendors

  March 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Question: What do ACOM Solutions and deposed North African dictators have in common? Answer: They both claim a 100 percent customer satisfaction rating. OK, nobody outside of Africa actually believes the dictators’ claims that they have the full support of their people. But there is good reason to believe that ACOM did in fact record a perfect score with its customer service during the month of November. That’s because, for many IBM i software vendors, delivering good customer service is a very big deal. ACOM says its IBM i tech support center in Atlanta, Georgia, pitched a perfect game in

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• Q&A with UC4 on the Future of Workload Automation

  March 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Q&A with UC4 on the Future of Workload Automation Virtualization and cloud computing are making IT a very complicated place. Enterprises in the future will need to utilize these productivity-boosting technologies, but do so without losing their hold on existing processes. One vendor that’s working on forward-looking workload automation tools is UC4. Recently, two UC4 executives, Fred Kohout, chief marketing officer, and product marketing executive Kerry Lebel briefed IT Jungle on UC4’s work in this area. IT Jungle How do companies know if they need workload automation software? Why should they be looking into this? Fred Kohout We find

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• nuBridges SFTP Software Now Native on IBM i

  March 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use managed file transfer (MFT) software from nuBridges will be happy to know that the latest iteration of nuBridges Exchange i includes an implementation of the SFTP protocol that’s native to the IBM i OS. nuBridges says customers will see easier implementation and maintenance, and better throughput compared to the previous iteration of the Secure Shell-based protocol in Exchange i, which was written in Java. nuBridges Exchange i is an MFT solution that enables organizations to manage the secure distribution of files among internal and external users. Like most MFT solutions, Exchange i supports a range

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• JobQGenie Delivers Better Job Queue Replication for HA and DR

  March 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the JobQGenie software from Shield Advanced Solutions does a better job of sharing IBM i job data between primary and backup target servers, which should lead to smoother IBM i operations and more accurate job re-creation following a high availability failover or disaster recovery scenario. JobQGenie was developed to address a functionality gap in IBM i high availability and disaster recovery software. While HA and DR products generally do a thorough job of replicating data, program objects, and settings like user profiles, they don’t provide much functionality when it comes to replicating job queues between source

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