• iManifest Begins i Marketing Fundraising in the States

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  And then there were three. iManifest organizations that have been set up to do IBM‘s job of trying to market the Power Systems i platform, that is. Jeff Olen, who runs Olen Business Consulting and who has put his two decades into the AS/400-i market like many of us, has grabbed the iManifest baton and is off and running with an iManifest organization for the United States. iManifest, you recall, got its start in Japan in late 2008 and culminated in a group of Power Systems i partners banding together and pooling resources to take out a full-page

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• SafeData Makes Backup and Recovery Deal with Omni Solutions

  October 5, 2009 Dan Burger

  SafeData, a company that specializes in subscription-based backup and recovery services that include high availability, electronic vaulting, virtualized recovery, and telecom recovery services, has added Omni Solutions to its expanding business partner program. Omni is a communications consulting firm with clients throughout North America. Its business strategy is to be a single point of contact for companies’ communications, data, disaster recovery, and business continuity needs. SafeData introduced managed disaster recovery services for IBM System i servers in 2005 and quickly added the same capabilities for Windows. It added AIX to the fold in June of this year, making use

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• Mad Dog 21/21: CIO, Get Out Of That Glass House

  October 5, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Chief information officers whose companies’ profits grew rapidly during the boom years of this decade seem to be outward-looking, ambitious, and interested in extending their influence far beyond the walls of their glass house computing facilities. That’s what IBM says, based on interviews it conducted with more than 2,500 CIOs, distilled into a study anyone can register to receive. The CIOs that IBM characterizes as leaders and IBM itself seem to be in harmony, which might not be such a bad thing if their companies can adjust to current business conditions as well as IBM has. Spanning the IT

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• Ellison Wants Oracle to Be IBM 1.5

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just because Larry Ellison, the chief executive officer of Oracle and presumably the hardware subsidiary that Sun Microsystems will eventually become (facilitating a spinout should that become necessary in the future), wants to kill IBM in the IT space doesn’t mean he doesn’t admire Big Blue. Quite the contrary, said Ellison last Monday at a talk hosted at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Like most of you, I was not able to attend the event, so I have to rely on press accounts to get the gist of what Ellison said. (If you want to listen to the talk,

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• COMMON is on the Hunt for New Board Members

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  COMMON, the midrange user group that bills itself as representing the Power Systems user base but which is still largely focused on the AS/400 and its progeny because of the makeup of its membership base, is looking for a few volunteers. Next spring, three current members of the board of directors will have fulfilled their three-year terms, and the user group is looking for volunteers to step up and contribute time and brainpower to the job of running the business of the user group. The board has a nominating committee, which is taking applications through October 9, and that

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• Lawson Software Has Ups and Downs in Fiscal Q1

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange ERP application maker Lawson Software has finished out its first quarter of fiscal 2010, and the results are mixed as they have been for all hardware and software suppliers, but there are hopeful signs in Lawson’s most recent quarter that the economy might be stabilizing. For the quarter ended August 31, which is the end of Lawson’s first quarter of fiscal 2010, the company’s sales fell by 11 percent to $169 million. Any decline is not great news, of course, but this one is in line with other application software makers, and when reckoned in local currencies, global revenues

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• Arrow to Expand Services for ECS, Sells Some Debt

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and storage distributor Arrow Electronics wants its Enterprise Computing Systems (ECS) division to get a bigger piece of the services action out there in IT Land, and has tapped a new executive to chase services along with Arrow’s channel partners. Arrow has created a vice president of worldwide services position at the ECS group, and back in February tapped Joe Burke, who has held numerous senior-level management positions within ECS for the 20 years he has been at Arrow, to take on the job of building out the breadth and depth of the ECS services portfolio. As IBM‘s

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• Cisco to Make Nexus Converged Switches for Blades

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If IBM is your blade server vendor of choice and Cisco Systems is your preferred switch vendor, then it looks like there’s a chance that these two companies are going to be working together to create a line of Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) switches for BladeCenter blade servers. Last week, Cisco announced that it was going to be shrinking down its Nexus 5000 line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, which can handle plain old Ethernet traffic between servers and the outside world as well as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic over the same 10 GE switch, to create a

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• Security Software Still Selling Like Hotcakes

  October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the spring of 2008, the analysts who track what is hot and what is not at Gartner said that, despite what then was a slowing economy that had not turned into a meltdown, sales of security software would be one of the bright spots in 2008 and beyond. And as it turns out, this is still true. Gartner is now projecting that the worldwide security software market is going to grow by 8 percent this year, to $14.5 billion. While security software sales certainly took a hit in 2009, considering sales had grown by 19 percent from the

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• Subprocedure Return Values–Food for Thought

  September 30, 2009 Jon Paris

  Those of us who have adopted subprocedures as a way of life often use their ability to return a result without thinking too much about the possible implications. But no technology should be thrown blindly into production without some understanding of the underlying tradeoffs. Ted Holt has previously written tips on the performance aspects of parameter passing (Parameter Passing and Performance) and on the basics of subprocedure performance (Performance of Function Subprocedures). In this article, I want to take that discussion one step further because I find that many people still fail to appreciate the potential

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