• Vision Solutions Partners with SASIT Down Under

  August 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software maker Vision Solutions, which sells products aimed predominantly at the i and AIX platforms, last week announced it is partnering with Systems Advisory Services, a long-time IBM platform expert, to expand its reach in the Asia/Pacific region. The company, which calls itself SASIT (the “IT” part is a superscript, but we do not do non-standard ASCII characters here at IT Jungle), was founded by Doug Brooker, still the company’s managing director, in 1974 as a service bureau that offered data processing on IBM System/360 and System/370 mainframes and System/3 minicomputers. And interestingly, with the general

  …

  Read more

• New President Onboard at BluePhoenix

  August 11, 2008 Dan Burger

  BluePhoenix Solutions has hired Yaron Tchwella as president of the application migration, rehosting, and renewal company. Tchwella is a 25-year veteran of the high technology industry with experience managing global organizations. BluePhoenix, based in Herzliya, Israel, is a legacy application modernization tool maker with products to address midrange and mainframe systems. The company entered the System i market during the summer of 2007 when it acquired ASNA, a software company with more than 25 years in the AS/400, iSeries, and System i business. ASNA specializes in tools that move RPG applications to Windows and .NET. The San Antonio, Texas-based

  …

  Read more

• Q&A with IBM’s Ross Mauri: Talking Power Systems and Power7

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with IBM’s Ross Mauri: Talking Power Systems and Power7 Back in early 2006, one of the up-and-coming executives at IBM was tapped to become the general manager of the company’s fast-growing pSeries Unix server and workstation business line. Two reorganizations and two years later, and that executive, Ross Mauri, a graduate of Marist College–one of the hotbeds of academic mainframia–who aspired once to merely be an MVS systems programmer at Big Blue, found himself in charge of a very big piece of IBM. Perhaps the most important part, too. Mauri is in charge of the Power Systems division, of

  …

  Read more

• IBM’s Q2 Server Sales: Let’s Do Some Math

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I have never understood why IT suppliers do not just come out and report their sales by product categories, but I suspect that we can blame the accountants and chief financial officers at those suppliers and the nervousness of the marketeers, who want to say as little as possible about how well or poorly they are doing in any product category. Anyway, because IT vendors only talk broadly and vaguely about their sales, IT consultants, Wall Street analysts, and wiseguy journalists are left each quarter to take a stab at trying to figure out actual sales for products. Because the

  …

  Read more

• IBM Creates a New Security PTF Group for i Operating Systems

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our intrepid PTF watcher, Doug Bidwell of Power Systems reseller and systems integrator DLB Associates, says that starting with last week’s batch of PTF patches for the latest releases of the i operating system, Big Blue has done something that it probably should have done a long time ago. It has created a Security Group PTF set of patches, which roll security patches all together in one place for a specific OS/400, i5/OS, or i release. Bidwell says that the advent of the security group patches is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, instead of dodging the security issues

  …

  Read more

• Mad Dog 21/21: Newtonian Economics

  August 4, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  Isaac Newton’s contributions to science and mathematics were monumental. They elevated English technology to a state of great prominence and helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment. More than three centuries later, every teenager studying science is taught classical mechanics, and Newton’s principles provides food for thought in other disciplines, too. IBM‘s recent financial results, a sunny patch on a graying economic landscape, beg for analysis as well as praise, and Newton’s laws might offer just the metaphorical basis required to examine Big Blue’s blooming. The top stories in the business press may be dire, but as we previously

  …

  Read more

• Gartner Is Projecting a Decline in IT Hiring This Year

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remember that report out of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses I told you about a few weeks ago that said IT jobs were growing in the United States despite the wobbly economy? Maybe it is time to get a second opinion about how IT jobs are lining up this year. That’s why the analysts at Gartner did their own surveys, and the news suggests that the IT job market is weakening a bit in the States. This will come as little surprise, with the home mortgage mess and the intertwined effects on the financial services sector and consumer

  …

  Read more

• Reader Feedback on As I See It: Babes in Broadband

  August 4, 2008 Hey, Victor

  I sympathize with your wife’s plight concerning broadband. My phone carrier is AT&T. They told me my house was about 250 yards too far from the switch for them to supply me with DSL. Later, I was talking to customer service with my ISP, and she asked me if I wanted DSL service. I started on a rant similar to the one you just published, and she told me she had checked my address and they could supply me with DSL service. It seems that PeoplePC subcontracts DSL service from AT&T and supplies subscribers who live too far from the

  …

  Read more

• SAP Profits Under Pressure in Q2, Software Prices Get Jacked

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application software giant SAP reported its financial results for its second quarter of 2008, and the company is being hit pretty hard by the dollar-euro exchange rate that has been propping up multinational IT suppliers based in the United States in recent years. That has put profits under pressure, as have expenses related to the roll out of new product lines, and that has forced SAP to do what software companies do in such times: raise prices. For the second quarter ended June 30, SAP’s sales (based on generally accepted accounting principles for the United States) rose strongly at

  …

  Read more

• Manta Technologies Adds IBM Director Navigator for i5/OS Course

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This month, i platform training specialist Manta Technologies announced a new course to keep system administrators abreast of the latest software available from IBM for the System i and Power System i servers running i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1. The new course, called Using IBM Systems Director Navigator for i5/OS, which teaches system admins to use the new Web console management tool for the i platform, which is similar to but different from the System i Navigator admin client that Big Blue has peddled for the past several years. This Web console is going to eventually replace System i

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles