• IBM Smart Business Moves into Italy, Solutions List Grows in U.S. and India

  November 16, 2009 Dan Burger

  Back in the day, IBM blew a pretty loud trumpet touting its mastery of technology. These days, the IBM trumpet plays a different song. It no longer touts technology. IBM prefers to sell business solutions. Take, for instance, its Smart Business program that focuses on mid-market customers that need to find, purchase, deploy, and maintain a business computing solution that is application oriented and keeps things as simple as possible. If it sounds like re-inventing the AS/400, it is. It’s also a whole lot more. The keeping things simple part of Smart Business brings in a services element relating to

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• As I See It: High on Quack

  November 16, 2009 Victor Rozek

  It was November 1st and the Pacific Northwest was so vibrantly attired in Autumnal splendor that you’d think God was showing off. I was riding my bike along the Willamette River, through dappled sunlight and a steady sprinkle of golden leaves. The air was crisp and scented with mulch, and the river sparkled like molten silver as it made its unhurried journey to the sea. It was unexpectedly warm and dry for this time of year, and I rode without urgency or agenda, past frolicking dogs, stately blue herons, and lawnfuls of Canadian geese. Beyond the rose garden, the path

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• FBI Arrests AS/400 Programmers in Madoff Scheme

  November 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The FBI on Friday arrested two programmers who allegedly created the AS/400 applications that generated the fake account statements that helped conceal Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme from victims and authorities for nearly two decades. The programmers, who started working for Madoff in the early 1990s, face up to 30 years in prison if convicted. Also, a new report uncovers more details about the programs, processes, and personnel involved with the AS/400 at the heart of Madoff’s scam. Jerome O’Hara, 46, of Malverne, New York, and George Perez, 43, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, were arrested at their homes

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• IBM Converges Systems Software Into New Business Unit

  November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As is usually the case at IBM, the official convergence is often announced long after various product lines were already well on their way toward a confluence behind the scenes. And so it is with a new unit of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group, which put all of its operating systems and hypervisor virtualization software under the control of one group back in early September, but is just talking about it now. The Systems Software division within STG now has control of all of IBM’s own operating systems and hypervisors, and is being tasked with bringing commonality of

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• Maybe They Should Have Called Them iBlocks?

  November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I told you there would be a recurring theme as I watch different server makers and their partners try to usurp the Integration banner that the AS/400 has been waving for more than two decades–and that the theme would be that I get annoyed that no one remembers a movie we all saw a long time ago. My latest annoyance on the integration front is not the sweet nothings that Oracle and Sun Microsystems have been whispering mostly into the ears of Sun’s server customers but also to government regulators and investors that a Sun-Oracle combination would allow Oracle to

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• Arrow, Avnet Report Better Than Expected Enterprise Sales

  November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The mood around master IT resellers Arrow Electronics and Avnet must be a lot more chipper than it was a year ago, with both companies reporting better-than-expected sales of enterprise computing gear in their most recent quarters. Taking the two companies in alphabetical order (we don’t play favorites here at The Four Hundred), Arrow reported revenues of $3.67 billion in the third quarter, down 14.5 percent from the year-ago quarter. Net income collapsed by 83.5 percent to $12.6 million, which certainly doesn’t sound like great news. Thing is, the news has been worse in the past year. Arrow said

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• The Economic Meltdown Hits Different Industries Differently

  November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT spending is not uniform across various industries, and when times are booming or busting, the increase or decrease in IT budgets is also not uniform. This year, some industries are being hit harder than others by the economic downturn. According to the analysts at Gartner, worldwide spending across the 15 vertical industries that the market researcher tracks will fall by 6.8 percent in 2009, to $2.28 trillion. The good news for those of you who like to look ahead (which is natural enough when the economy has been rocky, as it has been since early 2008) is that Gartner

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• Hewlett-Packard Eats 3Com for $2.7 Billion

  November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In one of the truly unexpected, and some might even say bizarre, deals of 2009, IT powerhouse Hewlett-Packard last week said that it would pony up a cool $2.7 billion in cash to buy 3Com, a venerable networking equipment provider that was once a challenger to Cisco Systems but not so much any more. HP, of course, inherited a networking business of its own when it acquired Compaq in 2001, which we all know and love as the HP ProCurve business. While HP makes well-regarded and reasonably priced switches, Cisco has the more exotic gear (which commands high profits)

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• Enable Row Set Paging in a Client/Server Environment Using SQL

  November 11, 2009 Michael Sansoterra

  One of the general paradigms of client/server programming is keeping the server side processing “fat” while keeping the client side processing “thin.” That is, a client/server application should let a server do as much work as possible while making as few assumptions as possible about how much processing power, memory, network bandwidth, etc., the client will have. Of course, sometimes certain applications, such as those requiring a graphics intensive environment, must be heavy on the horse power, but in general it’s good practice to keep network, memory, and processing requirements minimal on the client side. One of the areas where

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• The Case of the Used Unused Object: A Mystery

  November 11, 2009 Hey, Ted

  Put on your deerstalker hat. I’ve got a mystery for you. We are cleaning up disk and stumbled upon something that has us puzzled. The system tells us that a logical file in a test library has been used many times, and according to the object description, was recently used. None of our programs use the file, and no one has used the test library for a long time. Why does the system tell us we’re using a file that we don’t use? –Rick Rick and I solved his mystery with a little effort. There’s something to be learned in

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