• IBM Adds Virtual Component to Executive Briefing Centers

  January 11, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Interested in setting up an executive-level briefing to learn more about the IBM Power Systems server? One option is to arrange a trip to IBM’s facility in Rochester, Minnesota, where last Thursday it was snowing with a wind chill of -20 degrees Fahrenheit. But if sub-Arctic travel isn’t your cup of tea, or your sled dogs are down with the flu, you now have the option to receive briefings remotely at IBM’s Virtual Briefing Center Web site, which was launched last week. IBM’s System and Technology Group (STG) put its Web skills to work with the new Virtual Briefing Center

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• Infor Hires AMR Researcher to be Chief Strategy Officer

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consolidation doesn’t just hit IT vendors. It hits the companies that watch the IT vendors, too. In early December, IT consultancy Gartner announced that it was acquiring application software market expert AMR Research for $64 million in cash, and quickly followed that last week by snapping up IT consultancy Burton Group for $56 million. None of this will matter all that much to IBM midrange shops. However, the fact that Bruce Richardson, who was the chief research officer at AMR and arguably the smartest person following the enterprise application space, has joined application software giant Infor probably will have an

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• Cisco Taps Avnet to Peddle ‘California’ Unified Servers

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one that you could have seen coming a million miles away. With only two master resellers in the global server racket, it was only a matter of time before either Arrow Electronics or Avnet started distributing the “California” Unified Computing System converged blade servers from Cisco Systems. While The Four Hundred was on holiday in December, Avnet announced that its Technology Solutions group, the part of the company that peddles servers, storage, networking gear, and such, had inked a distribution agreement with Cisco that allows Avnet and its downstream channel partners so certified to push the California

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• Dataram Wants to Pump Up Sales with Channel Partners

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are a midrange server distributor looking for something to sell in a tough economic climate, then clone memory for Power5 and Power6 systems might be just the thing. That is certainly what Dataram is thinking as it pumps up its channel sales efforts. Last April, as reported in The Four Hundred, Dataram bought its rival in the clone memory space, MMB, and in June the company started more aggressively peddling alternatives to IBM-branded memory for selected entry and midrange Power6-based servers. But as everyone in the AS/400 market knows, it is hard to get coverage because

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• U.S. Economy Loses Another 85,000 Jobs in December

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, Wall Street and the Obama Administration got a little splash of cold water on their faces last Friday as the Department of Labor said that the U.S. economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December. While the economy is certainly in better shape in terms of monthly job losses than it was in December 2008, when the employers removed a stunning 760,000 people from their payrolls as the economic meltdown was heating up, the expectation after a pretty good jobs report for last November, when the economy only shed 11,000 jobs, was that December would be about the same, with

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• CIOs Say There’s Work Piling Up and They’re Ready to Hire

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Robert Half Technology, an IT compensation and headhunting consultancy, says that chief information officers are seeing IT work pile up and they are gearing up to do some hiring this year. RHT did a survey of 1,400 CIOs in December at companies located in the United States with 100 employees or more, and 10 percent of them said they were very understaffed and another 33 percent said they were somewhat understaffed. Some 53 percent said they had the right number of IT employees, and only 3 percent said they had too many people. “Many companies have cut technology staff

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• Let’s Start Over With a New Beginning

  January 6, 2010 Hey, Ted

  I’m writing in response to your article Let’s Start Over from the Beginning. Neither specifying CLOSQLCSR(*ENDMOD) nor running your program in a activation group *NEW (which is not even possible if your procedure is located in a service program and repeatedly called) is a good solution. In both situations the open data path (ODP) will be deleted after execution and cannot be reused. That means each time you execute your query, the system performs a full open, which is a time-consuming process. A full open is always necessary the first and second time a query is executed within the

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• A Helpful Tool for Dealing with Unexpected Problems

  January 6, 2010 Ted Holt

  In the Pink Panther movies, Chief Inspector Dreyfus dreaded to hear the name Clouseau. Just the mention of that name was enough to cause Dreyfus to lose control of himself, and even landed him several stays in psychiatric hospitals. In the same way, there are certain words I hate to hear when I’m at work. In my day job, the words I hate to hear are “There’s a message on QSYSOPR.” A message on the QSYSOPR message queue is rarely good news. It means I’ve got to stop what I’m doing and deal with a problem. (I am proud to

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• Admin Alert: Upgrading a 550 to a 520 with V5R4?

  January 6, 2010 Joe Hertvik

  On December 8, 2009, IBM made a little noticed announcement that opens up its 4.7 GHz two- and four-core Power i 520 systems to additional organizations and users. When originally announced, these servers were only available with i 6.1 support. Now organizations running the i5/OS V5R4 operating system can take advantage of these lower cost/higher capability machines. Here’s what happened and why it could be significant for your upgrade plans. What IBM Announced As originally released, IBM’s Power i 8203-E4A 520 two-core and four-core 4.7 GHz servers were limited to only running the i 6.1 operating system. They were not

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• Datawatch Yields BI Gems from Existing Reports

  January 5, 2010 Alex Woodie

  The business intelligence project gone array is one of the most feared events in an IT professional’s career. Perhaps you’re familiar with an organization that spent millions of dollars on complex software, powerful hardware, and high-priced developers, only to be left with a cantankerous data warehouse that is more trouble than it’s worth. One BI software vendor with a decidedly different approach to information illumination is Datawatch, whose Monarch suite bases BI development efforts on a trusted asset that most organizations already have in abundance: reports. The special trick that makes Monarch unique is its capability to recreate live

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