• Data Skills Crashes Dice Top Five Hiring Demands

  January 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  The sun has just eased over the horizon of calendar year 2013, but those up-at-the-crack-of-dawn, career-minded folks at Dice are already predicting steady growth in the hiring of tech talent in the first half of the year. Recruiting priorities are essentially unchanged with Java professionals leading the way, but a new skill category has slipped into the top 10. Hiring managers and recruiters say data skills are a hot–and getting hotter–ticket in the job market. Not quite on the radar last year, data wranglers are considered a necessary investment, especially when those talents are tied to communication skills. Just a

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• IBM Europe Gives Rebates To Power Resellers Who Push ISV Wares

  January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM‘s customers in the United States are being treated to a sweetened trade-in deal if they are buying new Power7 or Power7+ iron and trade-in old Power or non-IBM iron in the process. IBM Europe is taking a slightly different approach in a deal that it announced last week: it will pay Power System resellers an extra rebate it they peddle the boxes with specific software created by third parties. In announcement letter ZA13-1004, which came out on January 15, IBM says that it will pay “business partner solution providers,” perhaps

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• IBM: I Have Seen the Future And It Works

  January 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  It’s quite a ride from the era of the common man to the era of cognitive systems, but get on board, the Big Blue train is leaving the station. IBM has some fun each year, and creates a little publicity buzz, by mixing budding technologies with market and social trends to whip up what it calls the “IBM Five in Five.” That is, the selection of five innovations made possible by computing and chosen because of their potential to change–within five years–the way humans work and play. According to IBM, we are about to enter the era of cognitive systems.

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• IBM Doubles Up Rebates On Power Systems Trade-In Deal

  January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I told you so. It is the new year, and as I said in the opening issue of The Four Hundred, IBM would be doing some wheeling and dealing to move Power Systems machinery ahead of the rollout of the rest of the Power7+ systems in 2013. So if you are looking to upgrade a vintage AS/400, iSeries, or System i box, their RS/6000, pSeries, or System p equivalents, or any number of non-IBM server iron, listen up. Because IBM has just doubled up the rebates on its long-running, on-again-off-again, Power Systems Trade-In Program. Actually, if you sift through

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Google Evildoers Filched Funds From My Wallet

  January 21, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Late last year, Google said its Wallet mobile payment system had completed its larval stage. Google was going to phase out the special debit card used for the launch. The emerging adult Wallet could hold virtual versions of any debit or credit cards the user chose. These cards were wrapped in security and wired into a robust services framework. Wallet looked like another well executed Google launch. But that was before the letters started showing up, the ones talking about a lost or stolen MasterCard the Wallet user had never heard of. The letters came from MetaBank Everywhere Reward Cardholder

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• Steve Will Keeps His i On The Prize

  January 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  Steve Will was in junior high school when Frank Soltis and a small group of Rochester, Minnesota-based brainiacs were rolling up their sleeves and burning the midnight oil while drawing the blueprints to what would become the Application System/400, the business computer that defined midrange computing. Soltis is an IBM legend–retired but still actively involved in representing IBM and the IBM i-Power Systems platform. Will is considered by many to be a modern day Soltis, but he is having none of it. Replacing a legend is never easy. And it’s not really fair to Will to ask him to carry

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• IBM Taps Ingram Micro, Tech Data To Peddle Power Systems, Storage

  January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not every week that the Power Systems platform gets big news that is not related to hardware or systems software that has the potential to shake up the competitive position of the Power business, but last week was one of them. We have been telling you about the Power7+ systems and how IBM is looking to better compete against X86 iron. In November, IBM put $4 billion on the table for partner financing to move more iron. And now, Big Blue is tapping Ingram Micro and Tech Data to broaden its channel sales for Power Systems and enterprise

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• Dell Wyse Unveils Thin Client of Last Resort

  January 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Dell‘s Wyse group last week took the wraps off Project Ophelia, a new thin client computer that’s about the size of a USB memory stick. The device is designed to allow consumers and employees who don’t have a smartphone, tablet, or laptop to still access to their computing environments by plugging into monitors and keyboards they stumble across in the wild. Project Ophelia is the latest brainchild of Dell’s “cloud client computing” group, which is composed in part of the Wyse organization that the Round Rock, Texas, company bought last spring. The idea behind the project, which will

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• Raz-Lee Gains PureSystems Cert

  January 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security last week announced that its iSecurity suite of security software has been certified to run on IBM‘s PureSystems. The Nanuet, New York, company also received certifications in Security Intelligence, Tivoli, and Power Systems. IBM last year launched its new PureSystems line of “expert-integrated” systems, which combine servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and management into a single box (sort of like a “magic box”). The PureSystems lineup consists of three servers, including PureFlex, PureApplication, and PureData. In addition to rethinking the hardware, IBM rethought how software will run on the systems. Instead of applications or tools, software is considered

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• Oracle Debuts StorageTek LTO 6 drives

  January 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Oracle last week debuted new LTO 6 drives, as well as the capability to hook the new drives into StorageTek libraries via Fibre Channel. Oracle sells four StorageTek LTO 6 tape drives, full-height and half-height drives with either SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces. The drives can be implemented as stand-alone devices, or installed in an autoloader or tape library configuration. The drives can be used with the full range of supported servers, including those running IBM i, mainframe, Unix, Linux and Windows operating systems. LTO 6 drives offer a maximum data transfer rate of 160 MB/sec, up from 140 MB/sec

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