• Global IT Spending Barely Ahead of 2008; Some Regions Showing Strength

  March 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  The supply of data keeps piling up. The demand for getting a better handle on that data keeps growing. But the money to convert those mountains of information into a better business strategy is being pulled back. Some organizations may be spending now to be in better shape when the economy starts to warm, but apparently many are keeping their hands in their pockets, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, spending only what they absolutely have to. IDC, in its most recent forecast, trimmed its worldwide IT spending estimate for 2009 to just 0.5 percent growth compared

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• Have IT Vendors Been Hit Harder Than IT Departments?

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know about you, but I keep wondering where the disconnect is between the U.S. unemployment rate and IT departments. And if there is a disconnect, as there seems to be from looking at the data, I am grateful on both your behalf and my own. The rest of the IT Jungle team is grateful, too. None of us–you, me, and them–wants to become a statistic. Here’s what I am talking about. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did its monthly report on employment (or lack thereof) in America, and the news was not good.

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• CFMUG Downshifts from Monthly to Two Yearly Meetings

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Central Florida Midrange Users Group (CFMUG) has announced that it is downshifting from monthly meetings of its users to meetings twice a year. User groups, while still valuable and perhaps even preferable as a means to network among peers, are under pressure as IT professionals have less time to attend meetings and rely, as you might expect, on the Internet to keep in contact with their peers and vendors. CFMUG is no more immune to this as is LinuxWorld (downsized as well), Novell’s BrainShare (canceled), and COMMON, which has shifted to one big meeting a year instead of

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• IBM to Bid for Satyam? Rumors All Over the Place

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Scandal-ridden Indian IT services company Satyam Computer Services may, or may not, have a Big Blue potential buyer sniffing around now that the Indian Securities and Exchange Commission has given its approval for Satyam to sell a 51 percent controlling stake in itself to a suitor. Two months ago, Satyam founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted that the company had forged documents and pumped up the company’s assets by $1 billion. The high-flying application and IT services giant had a market capitalization of over $7 billion a year ago, and now is trading at something around $500 million after the

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• MKS Weathers the Economic Storm in Fiscal Q3

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application lifecycle management software maker MKS polished off its third quarter of fiscal 2009 on January 31, and the strengthening of the U.S. greenback against the Canadian looney, as well as plain old-fashioned growth, helped the company turn in a pretty good quarter, considering how tough the economy is. MKS, which is a public company whose shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, reported $13.2 million in sales in the quarter (that’s in U.S. dollars using U.S. accountancy rules), up 3.2 percent. The company’s license sales in the quarter dropped by 10.1 percent to $3.7 million, but a 6

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• Overworked, Underpaid, and No Free Donuts and Coffee

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic meltdown has caused quite a few business practices to change in fairly short order, and office perks and various benefits that were affordable during good times are downright impossible to justify in the current economic climate. To get a sense of what is going on out there in cubicle land, CareerBuilder.com commissioned a poll of 3,259 human resources managers (working at companies in the United States), which was performed by Harris Interactive in late November and early December last year, just as the economic crisis was ramping up to a scary pitch. Some 38 percent of managers said

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• A Bevy of BIFs: %XLATE and %REPLACE

  March 4, 2009 Jon Paris

  The %XLATE and %REPLACE text replacement built-in functions (BIFs) are often confused, and part of that confusion may be the result of wishful thinking on the part of RPGers frustrated with the limitations of %XLATE. Just as with the %SCAN and %CHECK BIFs that I discussed in an earlier tip, the major difference between %XLATE and %REPLACE is that %XLATE operates on individual characters and %REPLACE operates on strings. Before we study %REPLACE, let’s quickly review the function of %XLATE. %XLATE( from : to : input {: startpos} ) The function of %XLATE is to search the input string

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• Send Messages Unto Others

  March 4, 2009 Ted Holt

  I’ll never forget the guy who used to call my telephone with a cheery “My computer won’t compute!” whenever he had a problem. Ambiguous appeals for help annoy me to no end. The least a guy can do is give me something to go on; some information to give me a place to start to look for his problem. But in fairness to users, I often find that they don’t have much information to give me because the programmer didn’t make the program tell them anything. A crafty CL programmer knows how to easily avoid such situations. When something goes

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• Admin Alert: Things I Learned About IBM Maintenance Contracts

  March 4, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  Due to timing issues in my shop’s upgrade cycle, I’m extending system maintenance for several months on one of our System i boxes, which has allowed me to pick up some pointers regarding IBM maintenance contracts. If the bad economy is forcing you to keep your current machine a little longer than you’d like and your existing maintenance is running out, consider these items when purchasing a new contract. Think About Termination Options When extending maintenance, be sure to carefully review the termination clause in your service agreement. In many cases, you only need to extend maintenance for a month

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• xTuple Reports Strong Growth of Open Source ERP

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  While the recession has forced many major ERP software companies to retrench their operations, open source ERP software makers such as xTuple (formerly OpenMFG) are reporting an explosion of new business. The new momentum, xTuple says, is the result of organizations increasingly questioning the value of existing ERP contracts while simultaneously overcoming their reluctance to bet their operations on the community development approach. Since the dot-com bust of 2000-2001, open source software has made inroads across nearly every aspect of information technology. Up and down the stack, from operating systems and databases to programming tools and Web app servers, traditional

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