• An Insider’s Look Back At The IBM

  September 12, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  It would be a safe assumption to assume that anyone who had worked for one company for 30 years might have some insights and opinions to share about that employer. During his three decades at IBM, Peter Greulich worked in administration, worldwide sales, marketing, and technical roles in Software Group. That gave him an insider’s view on what makes Big Blue tick and time to develop some strong opinions on why it continues to thrive. Greulich holds IBM up as a company that should be studied and admired for its ability to weather multiple recessions and the constant change

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• Tape Consortium Makes The Case For Tape Storage

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Online backup and real-time replication of data to the cloud are something that most IT shops and many consumers are looking at these days as the amount of data they are handling goes through the data center roof and living room ceiling alike. But the Ultrium Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium wants IT shops to remember that ultimately they want to have archives on tape stored somewhere secure for extra redundancy and safety. Apropos of nothing in the dull days of August, the LTO consortium pointed out two studies that would be useful for IT shops trying to justify the

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• IBM Ponies Up $1 Billion In Cost Busters Financing For SMBs

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With all the talk about jobs, jobs, jobs–and not just the ailing co-founder of Apple–and people not creating enough of them, IBM, with typical enlightened self-interest, is putting up $1 billion in financing for small and medium businesses to modernize their hardware and software and to acquire services. “We are in no way, shape, or form making political statements here,” explains Ed Abrams, vice president of midmarket business at IBM. “We are just trying to help SMBs grow the way that we know that they can and the global economy needs them to.” According to Abrams, most of

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• Reader Feedback On As I See It: Piling On

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Victor: I don’t usually agree with the premises in your articles, but I have to give credit where it is due: you were “spot on” in your discussion of “the unemployed need not apply.” I am a recruiter and see it time and again. It goes along with a discussion I heard in a gathering of Young i Professionals (YiPs) recently. There is clearly discrimination and disdain toward the unemployed and to those that may be “seasoned” even if they are making the effort to keep their skills current. Great job! –Carole Victor: Thanks for that summary of what we

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• A Big Data Hungry IBM Buys i2 and Algorithmics

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the exceptions of Lotus and Cognos, IBM doesn’t like to do large acquisitions of software companies. Big Blue likes to acquire niche specialists that have made it out of startup mode and have established a few hundred to a few thousand customers that could use the immensitude of IBM’s partner channel and direct sales force. While The Four Hundred was on hiatus, IBM snapped up two such software companies, each with its own industry-focused twist on big data. On August 31, IBM paid a rumored $500 million to acquire i2, a British software company with a specialty in

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• As I See It: Going Silent

  September 12, 2011 Victor Rozek

  My first IT job was working swing shift computer operations for a Silicon Valley wafer manufacturer. In those days, disc packs were removable and resembled layered cakes consisting of a stack of platters coated with oxide icing. Each evening I would run a long series of sequential jobs. The process needed to be expeditious if there was any hope of finishing by shift’s end, which meant starting the next job as soon as the preceding one ended. But even if I wasn’t glued to a monitor, the movement of the heads across the platters provided an accurate indicator of progress.

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• Second Quarter Server Sales Humming Right Along

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were deep into the third quarter of 2011, but the data about how well or poorly different systems did in the second quarter had just come out while The Four Hundred was on its Labor Day hiatus. The good news is that the server business–a bellwether for the national and global economies–continues to grow and looks to be back to something close to normal. With so much mixed economic news out there, the fact that server sales continue to be robust, coming close to setting all-time volume record for a second quarter, may be more of an indication about

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• Aussies And Kiwis Get Killer Power 720 Bundle

  September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The exploding Chinese economy has been a boon for both Australia and New Zealand, which sit close together and are packed with food and raw materials that the Chinese economy needs. New Zealand has suffered an earthquake that has literally and economically rattled the country, but it is running trade surpluses according to The Economist. Like its larger neighbor, Australia, and the United States, New Zealand has its own deficit spending and housing bubble, too. But both Australia and New Zealand managed to escape the clutches of the Great Recession. Given all this, I found the announcement of a

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• Appreciation Rising for Web Serving on IBM i

  September 12, 2011 Dan Burger

  Web serving using the IBM i platform is uncharted territory for most of the companies running their core applications on this often under utilized box. They don’t go there. They don’t think to go there. Or they think they don’t want to go there. No one knows how many shops are serving Web apps on their i boxes, but it’s likely the number is growing. It’s also likely the number is less than 20 percent of the installed base. That number is a stab in the dark. I’ve heard guesses from members of the independent software vendors’ community as low

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• Admin Alert: Starting Multiple PC5250 Sessions in a Batch File

  September 7, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In a recent column, I demonstrated how to configure a PC5250 session so that you can run multiple sessions on the same PC to a single iSeries/System i/Power i partition. The problem with that technique was that it only worked using sessions that connected to the same partition. This issue, I’ll demonstrate how to automatically start multiple PC5250 sessions on the same PC that connect to different partitions. Today’s column was inspired by reader Bill Swann, who reminded me that the iSeries Access for Windows package includes a very simple procedure for launching multiple PC5250 sessions at the same time

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