• IBM Tweaks Some i Deals, Nukes Some Old i Tools

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last Tuesday, on IBM announcement day, the sales and marketing people at Big Blue were out tweaking a few deals here and there that affect the Power Systems i platform, and the company also removed some i-related tools from the product catalog. Considering that we are in the second quarter and that the now annual COMMON midrange user group meeting is coming up, you’d expect more action out of the company on the announcement front. Perhaps the first quarter was a decent one for IBM, despite its need to cut untold thousands of jobs. Who can say for sure, except

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• Come On Out, Power6+, You Win

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes to the Power6+ processor, IBM has been as quiet as a child playing hide and seek that wants to win the game so badly that she ends up falling asleep in the hall closet where the sheets and towels are and can’t hear that everyone has given up the game. This is a great way to win the game–my wife actually did this as a child–but it also has the effect of scaring the living daylights out of the adults. The Power6+ chip is, of course, the presumed kicker to the dual-core Power6 chip that IBM launched

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• As I See It: Berry Berry Annoying

  April 20, 2009 Victor Rozek

  A story, perhaps apocryphal, made the rounds a while back about a newly hired manager. The day he was scheduled to attend his first meeting, he was running late. As he hurriedly entered the conference room, he was surprised to notice that the people around the table were all sitting in silence, with their heads bowed and their hands clasped in their laps. Not knowing what to make of this, it occurred to him that perhaps in this corporate culture meetings started with an invocation or a moment of silence. Then he noticed what was actually going on: they were

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• First Quarter Sees Largest Tech Job Losses Since 2002

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were getting the impression that the IT job market in the United States hasn’t been this tough since the dot-com bust, your worries have just been confirmed by outplacement expert Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. According to the company’s estimates, the job losses in the technology sector in the U.S. have not been this steep since the end of 2002. Specifically, Challenger says that some 84,217 IT-related jobs were cut in the first quarter of 2009, which was a 27 percent rise over the 66,312 jobs that were cut in the fourth quarter of 2008, when the economic

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• IBM Really, Really Doesn’t Want Sun

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is getting ridiculous. Well, maybe it was ridiculous from the beginning. Anyway, the latest reports are that server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems was, as of the end of last week, still interested in renewing acquisition talks with IBM. However, Big Blue has, according to sources, lost interest. Again. Bloomberg reported on late Wednesday (April 15) that people familiar with the situation said that Sun was still interested in selling itself to Big Blue, but it was sticking to its line that IBM had to assure Sun’s board of directors that it would commit to the deal

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• Lawson Sways BPCS Consultancy to M3’s Reseller Rolls

  April 20, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Lawson Software last week announced a reseller partnership with PHOENIX Business Consulting, a Greensburg, Pennsylvania, IT consultancy that focuses on ERP systems for manufacturers. As the latest addition to Lawson’s channel, PHOENIX–which previously specialized in Infor ERP LX/BPCS consulting–will sell and work with Lawson’s competing product, the M3 ERP suite. PHOENIX Business Consulting has more than 20 years of experience helping manufacturers across the U.S. to develop and maintain their ERP systems. The company, which has locations in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, today focuses on the IBM Power Systems platform, which has a loyal following among manufacturers. For many

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• IBM and Chip Partners Plot Course for 28 Nanometer Designs

  April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM and the chip partners it has rounded up to share the burden of creating future chip manufacturing processes announced last week that they have nailed down the technologies that they will roll up to comprise their 28 nanometer chip making processes. In the current Power6 family of chips, IBM is using a relatively new 65 nanometer process, which will probably also be used with the Power6+ chips expected sometime this year (and hopefully sooner rather than later). IBM is fixing to shift to a 45 nanometer process with the Power7 generation of chips, due in 2010. So that probably

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• Economic Stimulus Programs Put IT Under the Microscope

  April 20, 2009 Dan Burger

  Information technology has been a clear advantage for the United States as the global economy–weak as it is–drives business decisions. But the unevenness of how IT is applied is retarding much of the progress in businesses. Americans debate whether the government’s economic stimulus programs are the wisest investments given that it’s piling up the national debt like never before, but few question that the IT industry will benefit and that companies fitting into certain niches stand to gain the most. Implications of the economic stimulus plan are being studied by analysts at IDC, and an early report titled Business

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• IBM Expands SOA Marketing With Partners in Mind

  April 20, 2009 Dan Burger

  Years ago, IBM chose service oriented architecture (SOA) as its preferred method for customers to reconfigure applications and improve flexibility based on platform and language interoperability. Last week, the IT goliath introduced a sales channel and partnership plan designed to open new markets and help partners compete more effectively. The plan consists of social media tools, education programs, and expanded technologies that are aimed at the SOA market. Highlighting the social media tools is a feature known as Virtual Forum, which was designed to help partners develop leads. Virtual Forum simulates a trade show, IBM says, by creating a virtual

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• A Bevy of BIFs: Dealing with a Bad Date

  April 15, 2009 Susan Gantner

  In an earlier tip, I talked about how %Date simplifies our logic by converting our “date” values stored in numeric or character fields into true dates. In that tip, I mentioned that using %Date could potentially result in an error message in the event your “date-like” fields contain an invalid date value, such as zero or blank or a month value of 25. Here I’ll cover how to avoid getting run time errors due to bad date values. Since many of the “date-like” fields we deal with in our applications come from screens, database fields, HTML or XML documents,

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