• New ERP Installs Get Mixed Returns, Panorama Says

  March 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Implementing an ERP system is a notoriously difficult thing to do. By some estimates, more than 60 percent of ERP implementations are doomed to fail. And yet, companies continue to adopt them, because. . . well, they have to. The ERP watchers at Panorama Consulting recently checked into the state of enterprise software implementations with its annual ERP report, which detected the requisite unhappiness in recent ERP adopters, but also found some satisfied customers, too. From September to January, Panorama Consulting corralled 172 of its customers onto its website to take a survey about their recent ERP installations. The company

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• IBM Server Partners Get Extra Incentives, IBM i Scores Another Supply Chain Win

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM hosted its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas last week, and there was lots of talk about cloud, mobile, and big data, as is the case with everything Blue and Big these days. But IBM wanted to give a couple of shouts out to the partners in who peddle products that come out of its Systems and Technology Group, and outlined a number of actions it was taking specifically to help partners push more Power Systems and PureSystems iron. Specifically, IBM told partners that it would: Increase its dedicated channel sales and technical sales specialists by 50 percent in

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• Reader Feedback On Big Blue Jacks SWMA For IBM i, Application RISC Machine System/500

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hi, Timothy: What I am guessing IBM is referring to in your story, Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i, with the “45 other products” covered by SWMA are the Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that most i clients use. It is rare for a machine running a business app to not use a combination of WebSphere Development Studio, iSeries Access, Query/400, SQL Kit, Performance Tools, BRMS, etc. However IBM does not charge extra maintenance for these products. Compare that to a Windows or Unix system, where you have to buy all these features as standalone products from

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• The Server Racket Holds Its Own In The Fourth Quarter

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server business is sputtering a bit with the economic uncertainty out there, but it has, at least according to the numbers coming out of Gartner last week, put the Great Recession a few miles back in the rear view mirror and is holding its own despite all of the wrenching changes going on in the data center these days. We may be witnessing another big wave of a virtualization of another kind, where new applications don’t end up in our own data centers, but in someone else’s, and therefore some of the server sales shift from your data center

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• Mad Dog 21/21: If You Want Cheap Cloud Backup, Raise Your ARM

  March 4, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  If you are using a smartphone, tablet or PC, you can back up data to the cloud, 5 gigs or more, for free using Dropbox,Evernote, Google Drive, or Microsoft Skydrive. Want more capacity? It’s cheap. Want to share stuff among your machines or with others? Easy. Security? Pretty good even before you encrypt. Compare this with IBM’s backup schemes for an IBM i shop. You could write a book about your experience: Fifty Shades of Blue. But do it fast, because disruption may be imminent, and you don’t want to get caught with

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• Enthusiasm, Persistence, And The IBM i Payoff

  March 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  Innovation is an overused word that gets nailed to everything from a pair of socks to cures for baldness. Let me give you a place where it actually applies: the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group (SEMiUG). Membership in local user groups is not what it once was. The IBM midrange community is no different than most in that regard. One reason for the membership decline is a dearth of educational innovation with the result being decreased value. I’ve written about the SE Michigan user group before. Check out the “Related Stories” at the bottom of this article. In November, the

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• Power7 Is The End Of The Line For Power Blades

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping to see Power7+ processors in blade servers later this year to build out your existing BladeCenter infrastructure, I have some bad news for you. As I had been suspecting with my newsy-sense (not as good as spidey sense, but it keeps me employed just as that sixth sense keeps Spiderman alive), IBM has no plans to put the shiny Power7+ processors into the existing PS700 through PS704 series of blade servers. I had been guessing that Big Blue might cut off the BladeCenters with the Power7+ or Power8 generations, especially given the launch of the Flex

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• Entry Power7+ Servers: Those 720+ and 740+ Boxes Are Gonna Cost Ya

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Let me give you a piece of advice. If your IBM i workloads are such that they are compute intensive but not data intensive, and you can cram all of the peripherals you need into a 2U rack server, such as the chassis used with the new Power 710+ and Power 730+ servers, then you most assuredly should do so. Because the expandability inherent in the 4U rack or tower enclosures used with the Power 720+ and Power 740+ servers, including the ability to hang lots of external disk off the box, are going to cost you. I have come

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• Manta Offers Free Student Reference Guides To Students

  February 25, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Most of us have adapted to the new and improved paperless way of life. Heck, many of you out there have led the charge to rid your company of wasteful pages that must be filed in favor of electronic documentation and storage. But you’re not alone if you wouldn’t mind seeing a good, old-fashioned hard copy every now and then. Budget cutbacks and rising costs have forced companies into eliminating expensive luxuries like paper, printers, and ink, but it’s not just about doing away with endless print jobs. The online world has many resources available. We get our news more

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• IBM Tech Conferences Feature Power, Hot Technologies

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM has three big technical conferences coming up in the next three months: one specifically for Power Systems, while the other two will take on strategies and best practices for all the hot technologies including mobile, social, big data, and cloud. The conferences begin with Pulse2013, which begins next week, March 3 to 6, in Las Vegas. IBM anticipates attendance to hit 8,000 and has put together an agenda of more than 450 technical training sessions, hands-on labs, skill certifications, and product demonstrations. The four educational tracks, sort of mini-conferences within Pulse, are Cloud and IT Optimization, Smarter Assets

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