• 3M and Infor in Legal Dispute Over 3rd Party ERP Support

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A dispute over third-party support for BPCS and Infinium software has landed 3M and Infor in a Minnesota courtroom. Last month, 3M filed a complaint against the ERP giant for allegedly demanding about $21 million in exchange for allowing a third-party to service and support the heavily modified versions of BPCS and Infinium for 3M. According to the original complaint filed by 3M on November 23 in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, 3M originally licensed the AS/400-based software from SSA Global in 1997. Along with a perpetual license, 3M bought a support agreement from SSA to obtain

  … Read more

• Cloud Integration Issues Loom on Horizon, EXTOL Says

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  What’s your cloud integration strategy? If you’re like most IBM i shops, much of your data interchange is handled via good old EDI or flat file transfers. But the rapid spread of cloud services is hastening the move to more sophisticated forms of data and application integration and interchange. According to EXTOL, which develops integration broker software for IBM i and other platforms, the day is fast approaching when companies will need new techniques for integrating cloud services into their business processes. IT Jungle caught up with EXTOL vice president of product management Jim O’Leary telephonically as he attended

  … Read more

• Cloud and Virtualization Hurting State of Resiliency, Vision Study Finds

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Organizations need to do a better job of understanding the potential downsides that cloud computing and virtualization can have on their ability to maintain the resilience and availability of their applications and data, Vision Solutions concluded in its State of Resilience 2011 report, which it unveils today in a Webcast at 10 a.m. CST. The overall state of resilience has suffered as the result of increased level of complexity due to the different IT protection schemes put in place to cover virtualization and cloud. For the fourth year in a row, Vision Solutions and its Information Availability Institute have published

  … Read more

• LANSA Launches LongReach, a Free iOS Client for the IBM i Server

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  LANSA this week unveiled LongReach, an iOS client that allows users to securely share files, folders, and data between an Apple device and an IBM i server. The iOS client is a free download available now on the iTunes app store, and LANSA is also giving away the IBM i server component to the first 1,000 people to download it. LongReach can be used as a standalone iOS client, where it enables users to store files on the iOS device; create, copy, paste, rename, and delete files and folders; share files with other apps; and manage email attachments. But in

  … Read more

• JDA Settles Lawsuit With Dillard’s Over i2 Software

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The acquisition of supply chain specialist i2 Technologies may have helped drive the revenues and profits of JDA Software in the past year, but the acquisition cost JDA perhaps more than it expected. JDA tried to buy i2 back in August 2008, the belly of the Great Recession, for $346 million, but four months later, when it was unable to line up the financing, it called the deal off. Then in November 2009, when the economy had improved a bit, JDA took another run at i2, shelling out $396 million to acquire the company, adding it to its already-acquired set

  … Read more

• Disk Drive Shipments To Dive 30 Percent in Q4

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fears that the catastrophic flooding in Thailand that has killed hundreds of people and dislocated millions more would have a dramatic impact on the hard disk drive business are apparently going to be realized. The looming disk drive shortage is already driving up raw disk and PC prices and it won’t be long before server prices start rising, too. This tragic situation, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan back in March, demonstrates the need to diversify the IT supply chain and second- or third-source parts despite our tendency to want to ramp up volumes at a limited number of

  … Read more

• PCI-Express 4.0 Spec To Double Up Peripheral Bandwidth

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems using PCI-Express 3.0 peripherals are not yet on the market–unless you count Xeon E5-based machines shipping ahead of next year’s launch–and the basic feeds and speeds of the PCI-Express 4.0 spec have been hammered out by the PCI-Special Interest Group that controls the spec. After about nine months of running simulations, PCI-SIG said that it would be able to push the bandwidth on the PCI-Express bus to 16 GT/sec (that’s gigatransfers per second), double the 8 GT/sec of the shiny new PCI-Express 3.0, and still remain on copper interconnects between adapter cards and peripheral slots on systems. This will

  … Read more

• Big Blue Sneaks Out Power Systems Price Changes

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we keep pretty religious track of IBM‘s weekly announcements, which historically have come out on Tuesday mornings around 9 a.m. Eastern. But over the years, Big Blue has been wandering from its traditional announcement days, launching things any old day and often not in conjunction with the actual announcement to the press for a new product. And, this year, IBM has put a new front end on its customer resource system that seems to have a mind of its own. That’s the excuse we are using for why we didn’t see some Power

  … Read more

• IBM Tweaks Power Systems-IBM i Licensing Deal

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping to get a cheaper IBM i license for old Power6+ blade servers you have in your shop, you just missed the boat. On November 22, while The Four Hundred was on hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, in announcement letter 311-171 IBM cut out the old JS23 and JS43 blade servers from the IBM i Licensing by User promotion. This deal has been running since August 2010. It gives customers that have user-based pricing for the IBM i operating system–meaning Power 520-class systems, Power-based blade servers (old and new), and the new Power 710 and 720 machines–a

  … Read more

• Cooling Server Sales Reach Pre-Recession Levels

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like the data centers and data closets of the world, which have been eating servers like crazy in the second half of 2010 through now, are starting to get full. The appetite for system buying was starting to slow in the third quarter, according to statistics from Gartner, but was still pretty healthy nonetheless. The question now is whether the market can have a bumper fourth quarter and beat last year’s high, and while this is possible, it seems unlikely. Gartner reckons that server makers sold $12.97 billion worth of machines in the third quarter ended in

  … Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles