• IT Job Market Slides In February, But Could Rebound In Summer

  March 18, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  What goes up, must come down. Sometimes this is good news, like in the case of gas prices or the Frisbee you stuck on the roof of your house last summer. But when you are talking about the job market, in particular the number of IT jobs available, down is not the direction you’d be hoping to see. It was just one month ago that the analysts at Janco Associates offered some hope to IT job seekers, with news of a spike in the number of new jobs for IT professionals in North America in the month of January. But

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Clouds Gather Over The Server Business

  March 18, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Aggregate revenue in the server business didn’t grow last year. As we previously reported, based on Gartner data, it might not grow next year either. This is tough but tolerable for vendors with market breadth, but it is punishing for players with a tighter focus. Moreover, in an ironic twist worthy of an O. Henry plot line, the effort by vendors to boost cloud computing have exacerbated matters, draining funds that might otherwise be spent in customers’ glass houses. This is particularly so in the midrange, which, like Newport, once attracted The Four Hundred but now often

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• Power Systems: The Secret To SMB Innovation?

  March 18, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Technological innovation is viewed today as a necessary ingredient for business success in many industries. Fail to keep up with pace of change, and your business will begin to stagnate and eventually be overtaken by more innovative competitors. In an online roundtable discussion last week that was, in and of itself, a symbol of innovation, IBM helped to share the innovation stories of two Power Systems shops that fall into the small and midsize business (SMB) category. Of course, the Power Systems server running the IBM i operating system isn’t the source for all technological innovation in the world. Some

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• Big Blue Backs Off On IBM i Maintenance Price Hike

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well you lose some, and every now and then, you win some. Or more precisely, we all win some. Back in the February 25 issue of The Four Hundred, I told you about an announcement buried deep in Big Blue’s February 5 Power Systems announcements that had some pretty steep price increases for selected features of the IBM i operating system. Well, on March 11, IBM rescinded that price increase, after what I presume was a lot of complaints from customers, business partners, and wiseguys like me. As I explained nearly a month ago, these IBM price change announcement

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• Entry Power7+ Servers: How IBM Sees The Deal

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’ve been going through the feeds and speeds, slots and watts, and dollars and sense of the new entry Power7+ processors to help you sort out what machines might be in your future and what kind of dough you will have to come up with to get there. It takes lots of points of view to make a proper landscape, and this week, I’ll take a look into the analysis that IBM has done for business partners to give them a starting point when they are peddling the new Power7+ entry servers to customers. The Power 710+ and Power 730+

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• Canadian Office Supply Company Taps VAI for ERP

  March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Monk Office Group, the biggest office supply company in British Columbia, has adopted the latest release of VAI‘s IBM i-based ERP system, called S2K, the software company announced recently. Over the last 50 years, Monk Office has expanded to become a veritable office giant on the West Coast of Canada, particularly on Vancouver Island, where Monk sells everything from commercial stationary to office furniture out of a network of 10 retail stores stocked from three distribution centers. The company first adopted S2K in 2005, and today, the company uses several S2K components to streamline various business functions, including ecommerce,

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• Cloud Adoption Increases Steadily, According to Reports

  March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Nearly 40 percent of organizations are running or implementing cloud solutions, according to the results of a survey by IT reseller CDW. Meanwhile, another survey by security firm SilverSky found that organizations have moved 25 percent of their business functions to the cloud. In its 2013 State of the Cloud Report, CDW found that 39 percent of organizations are implementing or maintaining cloud solutions. That’s an 11 percent increase from 2011. The survey, which involved 1,242 IT professionals in the United States, also found that more than half of organizations are migrating or planning to migrate specific applications or

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• Rimini Touts EMEA Growth, Shrugs Off Loss of GM

  March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Despite losing its top European executive to its closest competitor in February, third-party maintenance provider Rimini Street nearly doubled the number of customers in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region in 2012, the company announced last week. Rimini Street’s EMEA business did well in fiscal 2012, according to several metrics published by the firm, which expects to go public later this year or next year. The company says that it doubled new client sales, that it grew new client invoicing by 117 percent, and that it had $42 million in new sales bookings, which is a 175 percent

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• Attunity Pushes Data into Amazon Redshift

  March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The partnership between Amazon and Attunity reached a new level last month when Attunity announced that its Databeam data integration service can now pump data into RedShift, the new cloud-based data warehouse Amazon recently made available. RedShift is a big data analysis service first unveiled by Amazon Web Services (AWS) last November, and released to wider availability in February. The offering gives customers access to database hosting services that are cheap and readily available. For example, a user will pay about $1,000 per year to host 1 TB of data in RedShift–much less than it would cost to provision and

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• Mrc Gives i Web Dev Tool More Smarts

  March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Last month mrc added several new features to its flagship Web application development tool, m-Power, that should help customers in several ways, including easier updating of CSS themes, the capability to generate event-triggered messages from m-Power apps, and improvements to how customers document and promote changes to their applications. The new message triggering functionality in m-Power has several uses. For starters, it could be used to automatically send an email or a SMS message when a certain event occurs on the system, such as completion of a form on a customer website, or the cancellation of a customer account. Message

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