• Yankee Group Says Server Virtualization Adoption Is Accelerating

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Market researcher Yankee Group, like every other IT consultancy, is trying to figure out a new angle on this whole server virtualization phenomenon so it can make a little noise and a little money, too. To that end, Yankee released some of the results of surveys it has done in recent months to help spur demand for two new virtualization reports it has issued, just to give us all a little taste of the data. The two reports that Yankee put out–2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Survey and Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Bighorn–are based on

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• IBM Shells Out $340 Million for ILOG’s Business Rules and Supply Chain Tools

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we all know, IBM likes to spend big bucks on a sure thing, like over $100 billion in stock buybacks since the mid-1990s, and does not like to shell out what against its scale is a lot of dough for doing acquisitions. That said, IBM is perfectly willing to spend money on fast-rising companies in what it perceives to be hot markets that it can leverage its global scale with to turn them into profit engines. Last week’s $340 million acquisition of ILOG, a maker of business rules management, supply chain management, and related applications. ILOG, in case

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• IBM Reaches Out to Midmarket Business Partners

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I explained in last week’s issue when I tried to suss out how the midrange market continues to evolve, all the big IT players and plenty of small ones have set their sights on the small and medium business (SMB) market as a means of trying to grow their own businesses. And the reason is simple: the S and M portions of the economy are growing their IT spending at a substantially higher pace than the E, or enterprise, portion of the economy. But to succeed in the midrange, you can’t just concentrate on customers. You also have to

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• Sundry July Power Systems Announcements

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One quarter has ended, and another has begun, and it being summer and all, now is the traditional time when IBM has done some nipping and tucking in its System i and System p product catalogs. Just because we are all one big, happy Power Systems family doesn’t mean that such traditions are now done for. In fact, last week, Big Blue made a few tweaks to the products in the Power Systems lineup. None of these announcements are huge issues, but if you are in the middle of a Power Systems acquisition, these changes are still significant. First of

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• IBM Updates DB2 Web Query Business Intelligence Tool

  July 28, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced two additions to DB2 Web Query, the graphical business intelligence tool for generating and viewing reports and queries on the i operating system (formerly i5/OS). In September, IBM will deliver a new tool called Report Broker, which automatically distributes reports, and a new software development kit (SDK), which will enable customers and ISVs to integrate DB2 Web Query with existing applications. DB2 Web Query is a special version of Information Builder‘s WebFOCUS software that IBM announced in March 2007 and delivered that September. The software, which enables users to write queries for the DB2

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• As I See It: Babes in Broadband

  July 28, 2008 Victor Rozek

  A couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done–preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department. Now, marketing is not a reality-based profession. It is most assuredly faith-based, complete with promises of eternal satisfaction. Just sign here and accept Qwest as your provider, and you will be granted eternal access at heavenly speeds. Well, as

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• SAP Shuts Down TomorrowNow Support Biz

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After a protracted, painful, and ultimately successful bid to acquire rival PeopleSoft by Oracle that resulted in the contentious deal being done in January 2005, Oracle’s key enterprise application software rival, SAP, made a wiseguy move–and what looked like a clever move– only a few weeks later in acquiring TomorrowNow, a company that provided support to the application suites under control of the greatly expanded Oracle. But the grins at SAP all turned to chagrins in March 2007 when TomorrowNow and SAP were slapped with lawsuits for illegally downloading Oracle’s support materials. Last summer, SAP’s chief executive officer,

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• Reader Feedback on What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  My dicing and slicing of the demographics of the midrange server market last week elicited an interesting response from a reader, suggesting a much cleaner way of thinking about how to separate small, medium, and large enterprises and their IT departments from each other. Check it out. Hey, TPM: Here’s an even simpler distinction, call it B and C. There are companies where the decision to buy a server or an application is made by a hired manager and those where the decision is made by the owners. To the former, the money comes from their Budget. To the latter,

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• Gartner Predicts Half of Users Dissatisfied with IT Pace by 2013

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, so I laughed out loud when I saw this recent report from Gartner. Not because the idea is wrong, but because I thought that all end users were pretty much unhappy with their IT departments. The report, which will be presented in the coming months at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit and its Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit, had this very simple premise: More than 50 percent of end users will be dissatisfied with the slow rate of IT change in their enterprises by 2013. That projection is weighed against the current dissatisfaction with the gung-ho rate of IT

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• IBM Ultrium Media Pricing: Told You This Story Wasn’t Done

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  My journalistic spidey sense is still pretty good, it looks like. Two weeks ago, I told you that IBM lowered prices on Ultrium tape cartridges by a pretty big percentage and then raised them right back up again a week later. I also said that I couldn’t wait to see what IBM did on July 15 or July 22, because this story wasn’t over. Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t over. Let’s recap, just so we don’t cause as much confusion on this as IBM has. Here are the price changes on Ultrium media announced on July 1, in

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