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  • As I See It: The Second Concern

    January 23, 2012 Victor Rozek

    Recently, I contacted a number of colleagues around the country to find out what concerns occupy their quiet moments. Not surprisingly, at the top of the list was keeping or, in one case, finding a job. Most reported working for years with no prospect of a raise, and several whose spouses were no longer employed had been forced to make lifestyle adjustments. But close behind employment was the desire to maintain or find affordable healthcare.

    There is an ironic timeliness to their concern. Every January many Americans try to preempt the need for healthcare by getting fit. After a holiday

    … Read more
  • IBM Unveils New Social Media Solutions at Lotusphere

    January 23, 2012 Alex Woodie

    IBM is moving its LotusLive hosting service for Notes onto its SmartCloud infrastructure and calling it SmartCloud for Social Business, the company announced at last week’s Lotusphere. The company also unveiled several new software and services that will be sold under the SC4SB umbrella, including new releases of its flagship social networking platform IBM Connections; an embeddable version of the Lotus Notes social networking features; a new productivity suite called IBM Docs; and new clients for Blackberrys and the new Windows Phone.

    Business software vendors like IBM are trying mightily to hook their horses to the social media train that

    … Read more
  • Power Systems Eating Into Mainframe Sales

    January 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    IBM closed out 2011 on a somewhat somber note in terms of hardware sales, but not because of the Power Systems line. That’s good news for any customer that relies on Power Systems, and so is the fact that Big Blue is stealing away business from Unix rivals Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, and so is IBM’s frank admission that Power7-based machines are also taking share away from System z mainframes in the enterprise segment of the server racket.

    IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011 after the market closed last Thursday, and because of currency fluctuations

    … Read more
  • IBM Slashes Some Power7 Processor Prices

    January 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The new year is well under way and IBM, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, has closed out last year and is facing whatever new challenges it has. The big one is that new Opteron 6200 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Sparc T4 processors from Oracle are out, and the even bigger problem is that the Xeon E5 processors from Intel are shipping under NDA to selected customers and are expected to launch this quarter.

    And so, IBM is tweaking its Power Systems Power7 processor pricing a little bit to blunt the

    … Read more
  • IBM Rules The Patent Roost Again, But Samsung Is A-Coming

    January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    In an extraordinary run that probably shows a commitment to research and development as much as it shows that companies are building up their patent portfolios as defensive and offensive weaponry, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office has awarded a record-breaking 224,505 utility patents to companies and independent inventors from all over the world in 2011. That’s a 2 percent increase over 2010, the former top patent count year.

    “Global companies, and especially Asian ones, are collecting U.S patents at a dizzying pace, and now Asian firms hold eight of the top 10 slots in the 2011 ranking,” explained Mike

    … Read more
  • On the Sunny Side of the Rimini Street

    January 16, 2012 Dan Burger

    When you’re hot, you’re hot. Rimini Street, the prominent third-party maintenance and support alternative for enterprise software from companies such as Oracle, SAP, and others, is once again showing that business is good for a company that provides reduced costs on services, which many software customers believe to be overpriced to the point of being gouged.

    Last week, a Rimini press release announcing fourth quarter and fiscal year financial results brimming with fiscal accomplishments–its highest ever quarterly sales bookings, a 42 percent increase in bookings compared to the third quarter of 2011, and record revenue for the

    … Read more
  • Subscription Revenue Decline Mars JDA Financial Report

    January 16, 2012 Dan Burger

    JDA Software powered its way through 2011 to post decent financial numbers despite the legal battles it fought with Oracle over patent infringements and a lawsuit it inherited with the acquisition of i2 in August 2010. Revenue increased slightly in Q4, and overall 2011 was a good year for the retail and supply chain software pillar.

    JDA has not finalized its financial results for Q4 2011, but because it had a downtick in software license sales, it decided to put out preliminary financial results to give Wall Street the head’s up. JDA estimates it will have approximately $173 million in

    … Read more
  • Flash Storage Gets Cheaper, Disk Storage Gets More Expensive

    January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Here’s a confluence of events that is sure to make IT shops interested in high performance data subsystems happy. Flash storage, which is at the beginning of its adoption cycle in the enterprise, is getting less expensive by the week just as disk shortages due to the flooding in Thailand, where about a quarter of the world’s disk drives are made, are causing disk vendors to raise their prices.

    For now, the disk shortages have mostly centered on drives aimed at desktop and laptop PCs, but some drive component manufacturers are under water (literally, not just financially) and the issue

    … Read more
  • IBM Gets Down to Social Business

    January 16, 2012 Jenny Thomas

    I’m just as sick of hearing the words “social business” as anyone else. But I have come to accept there’s no escaping it so I better figure out how to adapt or risk becoming a social outcast. IBM must also have decided it had better get on this bus, as Big Blue recently announced it is expanding its initiatives to help organizations get on board with the hottest computing trend.

    If all the talk is right, there is a lot of business to be had in the social market. Forrester Research recently reported that the market opportunity for social enterprise

    … Read more
  • SaaS ERP Is Getting A Closer Look

    January 16, 2012 Dan Burger

    What do Dog the Bounty Hunter and Nick Castellina have in common? Both make their living by tracking. DBH, the star of a reality show, tracks the scum of the Earth, and Castellina, a lead analyst at Aberdeen Group, goes after IT trends. Specifically, he hunts software as a service, which gets the shortened handle of SaaS. It’s one of the big blips on the IT radar screen and enjoys Super Bowl quality hype.

    Last month, Aberdeen released its latest SaaS ERP report based on survey results collected in the second half of 2011. Castellina is the lead analyst

    … Read more

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