• Women With Skills Earn Equal Pay To Male Counterparts

  April 1, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  The IT marketplace should be on the frontline of innovation and business leadership amongst all other industries. Entrusted with caring for one of an organization’s most valuable assets–data–the IT department is charged not only with the daily tasks of network administration, software development and installation, and maintaining, upgrading, and replacing hardware and software, it also sets the pace for success with the adoption of new technologies and finding better and faster ways to store, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data. So it seems natural that IT would be a leader in closing the gap in compensation between the sexes. And the

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• IT Spending Higher Than Expected In 2012, And Will Accelerate In Years Ahead

  April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The prognosticators at Gartner have got out the soft cloth and polished up their crystal balls to gaze into the next two years of IT spending. And they have also rejiggered how much they think the companies of the world blew on IT and telecom hardware, software, and services now that earnings season for the fourth quarter financial results are over. At the beginning of the year, as we previously reported, Gartner figured that aggregate IT spending globally would come in at $3,588 billion, up 1.2 percent compared to 2011. (We’ll speak in terms of billions because rounding up

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• Avnet Describes IBM i Server Market Trends

  April 1, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM i business is not the easiest thing to track these days. IBM and its business partners in the sales channel only want to talk in terms of Power Systems, so instead of having numbers to compare from one year to the next, we have estimations and best guesses based on the old finger-in-the-wind method. Some of our insights come from ISVs, IBM i shops, and consultants. Last week, I talked with several ranking members from Avnet, one of the master resellers in the IBM business channel. Mark Martin is the vice president of marketing and business development for

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Server Makers Shift Shape, Stressing Legacy Customers

  April 1, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Server vendors are doing a lot these days, but one thing they are doing less of is making servers. IBM, the biggest, richest, and smartest of the bunch has long since become a services and software supplier; hardware is a diminishing part of its trade. Dell is on a similar path, and trying to extract itself from public ownership to duck the requisite transparency and restrictive rules of conduct. Hewlett-Packard? Oracle? Who can say what’s going on in those madhouses? Still, it is safe to guess change is underway. Where does all this leave customers? No place

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• Oracle Takes On IBM Power With New Sparc T5 Systems

  April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Larry Ellison knows exactly who he wants to knock down in the midrange systems market, and he is not afraid to call out Big Blue by name when he makes a big processor and systems announcement, as Oracle‘s co-founder and CEO did last Tuesday. That was when Oracle launched its Sparc T5 and M5 processors and six new systems based on those homegrown chips. Ellison did not even mention Hewlett-Packard or Dell once during the launch. And for good reason. Since 2001, the Unix server business of Sun Microsystems has been the whipping boy and revenue generator for Big

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• Worknet Says ‘Burstable’ HA Gives Its Private IBM i Cloud An Advantage

  April 1, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are seeking a private cloud in which to park production or backup applications and data have a growing number of managed service providers (MSPs) to choose from. One you may not have heard about yet is Worknet, an MSP based in Naperville, Illinois, that houses the IBM i apps of highly regulated organizations, including banks and healthcare companies. Worknet says its “burstable” high availability offering gives it an advantage over other MSPs. The private cloud business is becoming a commodity play (if it hasn’t already become one), and that’s good for customers. This includes IBM

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• Midrange Power7+ Servers: The More Oomph You Want, The More It Costs

  April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you though the pricing for various sized configurations of the new Power 750+ and Power 760+ midrange servers using IBM‘s dual-chip module (DCM) variant of the Power7+ processor. That just looked at the system hardware costs. This week, as I have done in the past, I want to walk you through how the raw computing, operating system, and Software Maintenance costs compare across each processor SKU and how those costs stack up with prior Power 750 machines. As has been the case since there was an AS/400, customers

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• Manta Releases More COBOL Courses

  March 25, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  It was just last year when Bill Hansen, president of Manta Technologies achieved his long-time goal of introducing a COBOL training series for programming students. COBOL was the one training course Hansen said customers consistently asked for over the years, so he was pleased to add it to Manta’s curriculum. Now comes the addition of two more courses to the COBOL series: Performing Arithmetic in COBOL and COBOL Table Processing. The curriculum already includes Developing a COBOL Program, COBOL Output Programming, and COBOL Input Programming, which we told you about last year. The two new

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• Toronto Tech Conference An Educational Achievement

  March 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  Successful IBM i tech conferences depend on a couple of key performance indicators. First of all, there has to be attention to the right topics and speakers and secondly there must be a core group of volunteers who are dedicated to getting the conference done right. The Toronto User Group (TUG) consistently scores high with its annual Technical Education Conference (TEC), which this year is scheduled for April 25 and 26 in Toronto. There are good reasons for this. The user group has education professionals that are prominent and they put an emphasis on education that is evident with the

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• Storage Sales Swell Despite Compression, Thin Provisioning, And Dedupe

  March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the best efforts of storage array makers to make their gear less wasteful in terms of capacity, companies keep buying storage both inside their server skins and outside in external arrays like there is no tomorrow. And the amount of capacity that companies are consuming is growing at near historical levels before various kinds of technologies, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, data compression, and other features were added to arrays to try to curb the appetite for gigabytes. In the final quarter of the year, according to market research from IDC, worldwide disk capacity shipped in the quarter

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