• Tech-Business Skills in Demand, Academic Initiative Expands

  December 10, 2012 Dan Burger

  Developing new technology skills and being better prepared for future job opportunities will keep IT workers and those aspiring to become IT professionals busy these days. According to the just released 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report, 10 percent of the managers surveyed believe their organizations are inadequately staffed due to a lack of technology skills mixed with business skills. To address that situation, IBM has re-purposed its Academic Initiative program, which includes a Power Systems element. Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on headliner type topics such as big data, analytics, digital marketing, mobile computing, and security. Educational materials

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• Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone. What the two companies certainly agree on is that the server market is under pressure, and particularly in the non-X86 portions of the market as most midrange and high-end server makers are in

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• Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, thank heavens, we made it. The holiday season is upon us and it could not have come a moment later as far as I am concerned. Every year has its challenges, and here’s to hoping that 2013 is better and a bit easier for us all. I am thankful that I will be able push my keyboard aside and walk away from the desk for a bit. After a year of writing, I have a pretty acute case of word poisoning, as anyone copy editing me, reading my stories in the past few months, and my family and friends

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• IT Spending To Increase In 2013, World Ascends To The Third Platform

  December 10, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  The overall global financial outlook for 2013 is cause for concern. Many countries in Europe are heading into recession, and in the United States we are driving toward the fiscal cliff that threatens to send us plummeting into a second Great Recession. But lest we believe our financial woes are the only thing that binds our planet together, the folks at IDC say the world is in the middle of a technology shift that occurs only once every 25 years, and they are making some predictions for next year that indicate our addiction to electronic gadgetry is a worldwide phenomenon.

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• As I See It: Still Buoyant After All These Years

  December 10, 2012 Victor Rozek

  IT is a buoyant profession. It stays afloat in turbulent economic waters. Just in the last four years, it has weathered recession, high unemployment, offshoring, outsourcing, looming austerity, and two rounds of quantitative easing courtesy of Ben Bernanke. (Quantitative easing is a banker’s euphemism for printing tons of money with little benefit to anyone but the bankers.) Nonetheless, it appears the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. If so, IT remains the one indispensable asset across all sectors and enterprises. Consider that during the ravages of Sandy, not every business was able to save its inventory, but you

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• New ITG Report Is Reinforcement For The IBM i Advocate

  December 10, 2012 Dan Burger

  Choosing one computer system over another has the potential to significantly reduce costs, but each individual company has to do some homework before coming to a decision. It is disappointing, to say the least, that many of these decisions are made regardless of whether they make good business sense. Can a business case for IBM i running on Power Systems be made when compared to Windows and Linux alternatives? Yes, indeed, when bolstered by reports like the one recently released by ITG. ITG, which is called on regularly to assemble total cost of ownership studies that build a favorable

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• Sandy Shows State Of IT Resilience Has Room For Improvement

  December 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Superstorm Sandy rearranged parts of the Eastern Seaboard a month and a half ago, but she is still remaking the business landscape. Some companies were ruined by Sandy, while some industries in the area, such as construction and car sales, are now flourishing. The National Hurricane Center changed how it categorizes storms as a result of Sandy, which is the model for a new type of storm powered by global warming. Sandy also poked holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of many IT organizations, and highlighted where improvement can be made. Some would say that it was inevitable that

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• We Need A Baby PureSystems Running IBM i

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the holiday season, the time of giving. And, not coincidentally, the time of asking. I figured out a long time ago that you never get what you want if you don’t ask for it, although I must admit that at least in my life, asking has certainly been no guarantee of receiving. But asking is the first step. So here goes. What I want in 2013, aside from world peace, a pony, a little red wagon, and a sailboat, is an entry PureSystems machine that is actually suitable as the main data processing engine for the vast majority

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• IBM Fights Fraud with New Software

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week launched a new release of i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, its Windows-based software application that’s designed to help organizations discover, fight, and prevent fraud. The new release brings a new architecture that should improve scalability and data integration. It can be very difficult to detect fraud, especially when it’s being perpetrated by small groups of highly skilled and motivated people against large organizations that have rigid processes and are slow to react. With i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, IBM hopes to give these large organizations a leg up on the game by giving them powerful tools designed to peer

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• Profound Logic Opts for RPG OA in NiSUG Mobile Challenge

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic showcased its RPG Open Access (RPG OA) technology during the recent mobile application development challenge held during National iSystems User Group‘s 2012 International Power event in London. NiSUG challenged IBM i tool vendors to use their wares to quickly develop the most full-featured mobile application they could as part of the “App-i-Days Mobile Application Showcase” that was held on the expo floor during the recent 2012 International Power event. The vendors, presented with a DB2 for i database and a set of minimum requirement, unleashed their developers and their creativity. Profound Logic, which was represented by its

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