• Become Omni-Potent With Your IBM i Skills

  September 4, 2012 Dan Burger

  There’s no mistaking the vibe that is picked up by conference attendees. I don’t want to overstate this and make it sound like walking into a conference is a life-changing moment, but there is something that fuels creativity and ambitions when you escape the daily IT department environs and learn something new. Being in a roomful of people who are sharing the same vibe adds to the feeling. It’s a feeling that not enough people are getting in this era of nervously holding the IT reins too tightly. If you are in the Greater Chicago area, you have an opportunity

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• JDA Software Reports Gains With Q2 Financials

  September 4, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Software license sales picked up for retail and supply chain management software maker JDA Software Group in the second quarter ended in June, rising 6 percent to just over $32 million and helping push up and overall sales for the company by 2 percent to $168.8 million. During the Q2 earnings conference call, JDA president and CEO Hamish Brewer said the company saw some improvement in the first quarter in U.S. retail, which was good news after decline in license sales in North America in the retail market in the fourth quarter of 2011. Software and subscription revenues were a

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• New Software License Sales Stall At Agilysys

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Retailers and hotel and casino operators are on the leading edge of the economy, and when people get nervous about spending money on non-essentials, they are often the first ones to feel it. Sometimes, it is an overreaction to news. Sometimes it is just a reaction. Let’s hope for all our sakes that the downturn in software licensing in the June quarter for Agilysys is just a hiccup and not a spreading flu. Agilysys, which last July got out of the remaining part of its hardware business that it had not already sold off to Arrow Electronics five and a

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• zEnterprise EC12 Mainframe: Still The Big Iron

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Power Systems had better thank their lucky stars that IBM is still investing in mainframes and can still rake in billions of dollars–my guess is around $15 billion over a two-year cycle–selling mainframe hardware and systems software. Because if IBM did not throw off most of that as profits, there would not be an IBM fab and there would not be a Power Systems biz at all. IBM would have long since ditched the server hardware business to focus on software and services. To a very large extent, the System z product line not only keeps the rest of Big

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• IBM Buys HR App Maker Kenexa For $1.3 Billion In Cash

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You remember the days back in the early Gerstner era, when IBM wanted to assure independent software makers that it would not compete with them so they would port their wares to Big Blue’s servers, operating systems, and middleware? Well those days are long gone, and the acquisition of human resources software provider Kenexa last week just goes to show it. Kenexa, which is based in the Philadelphia suburb of Wayne, Pennsylvania, was established in 1987 as a recruiting service for a bunch of different industry verticals. The company rolled out its first suite of software in 1993 and three

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• Server Sales Slow As Buyers Await New Processors

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No one was expecting for the server market to turn in a particularly strong second quarter, with so many different chips for systems either just entering the market or about to enter the market in the summer and fall. New processors always mean price/performance improvements in systems, so some customers buying now insist in price kits on current iron and others defer purchases entirely so they can get the shiny new boxes. Either way, sales in the current quarter have to go down. And that is precisely what the box counters at IDC have figured out as they cases the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Has The PC Lost Its Mojo?

  September 4, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  When the top two suppliers of PCs to American business customers, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, posted financial results for the second calendar quarter, shareholders wept. Their results were bad, their outlook worse. Meanwhile, iPad sales soared. The non-iPad tablet segment, led by Amazon along with Barnes & Noble, recently joined by Microsoft and Google, just kept getting hotter. Moreover, PC makers Lenovo, Asus, and Acer seem to be on the rise, suggesting that the PC business isn’t doomed after all. Maybe it’s only that America’s two biggest vendors are executing poorly in a tough environment. Gartner

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• TEMBO Taps inFORM to Distribute Database Modernization Tool

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  inFORM Decisions is the new master distributor of the Americas for TEMBO Technology Lab, the developer of database modernization tools for IBM i. inFORM is now taking the lead in marketing and selling TEMBO’s AO Foundation, a new tool that automates the task of migrating IBM i applications from the old ISAM database engine to the new SQL database engine, thereby reaping rewards in the areas of application performance and programmer productivity along the way. Executives for inFORM Decisions and TEMBO met at the COMMON conference held at the Disneyland Hotel in May. inFORM Decisions president Dan Forster and

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• Scant New Talent Is Finding IBM i

  September 4, 2012 Dan Burger

  IBM i shops are worried. Some would say things are well past the worried stage and the lack of college grads with skills that match IBM midrange requirements has become a huge concern. Coincidentally, there are a lot of college graduates with huge concerns about finding jobs. It shouldn’t be that hard to raise the success rate for both sides. Where is the breakdown occurring? Let’s start with a positive. At Delta Dental of Wisconsin, the state’s largest dental benefits provider and a company running its core business on IBM i, the IT and HR departments work together on a

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• IBM Power7+ Chips Give Servers A Double Whammy

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are in the middle of acquiring a Power7-based server to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux workloads, you might want to give it a rethink about right now. Because IBM has some interesting twists that are coming out with the next-generation Power7+ processors that will dramatically affect their bang for the buck and therefore what you should be paying now for any processing capacity or whole systems that you acquire. IBM has been vague about exactly when the Power7+ chips and their new Power Systems servers will ship, but has said that the new processors will come out

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