• Surprise, Surprise: Java Coders Don’t Know Jack About “Real” Programming

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This one reminds me of the conversation I had with my father over standard versus automatic transmissions in cars when I was a lazy teenager and there was a cranky clutch that took way too much of a delicate touch to work correctly. Two professors of computer science at New York University who are also the top brass at a company specializing in the Ada programming language, have written a paper that explains why Java is a terrible first language for newbie coders to learn. In a paper entitled Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?,

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• Redefining Security the New Goal of Former i5/OS Security Architect

  January 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  There’s a serious problem with the state of security in the IT industry, according to Pat Botz, former i5/OS security architect with IBM. The problem isn’t a lack of tools and technologies for implementing security. Instead, the root of the problem stems from a lack of leadership from business people, who have given too much responsibility to the technical experts. Botz recently left IBM to work on this problem with his new consulting company Group8 Security, which formally launches next week. To hear Botz talk about the state of computer security is a little bewildering. One goes into

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• Redefining Security the New Goal of Former i5/OS Security Architect

  January 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  There’s a serious problem with the state of security in the IT industry, according to Pat Botz, former i5/OS security architect with IBM. The problem isn’t a lack of tools and technologies for implementing security. Instead, the root of the problem stems from a lack of leadership from business people, who have given too much responsibility to the technical experts. Botz recently left IBM to work on this problem with his new consulting company Group8 Security, which formally launches next week. To hear Botz talk about the state of computer security is a little bewildering. One goes into

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• Redefining Security the New Goal of Former i5/OS Security Architect

  January 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  There’s a serious problem with the state of security in the IT industry, according to Pat Botz, former i5/OS security architect with IBM. The problem isn’t a lack of tools and technologies for implementing security. Instead, the root of the problem stems from a lack of leadership from business people, who have given too much responsibility to the technical experts. Botz recently left IBM to work on this problem with his new consulting company Group8 Security, which formally launches next week. To hear Botz talk about the state of computer security is a little bewildering. One goes into

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• A New Year, A New IBM Systems and Technology Group

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s desire to get a much larger share of IT sales to small and medium business (SMBs) and the company’s heavy reliance on the financial sector for core software and system sales has compelled the company’s top brass to reorganize its Systems and Technology Group. Bill Zeitler has managed IBM’s server and systems unit for so long that no one can remember his predecessor–hint: there wasn’t one–and last Thursday he told STG employees about the final phase of a year-long transformation that has been underway in the group. A year ago, IBM carved out a new SMB-focused division called

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• Rocket Software Buys NetManage for $69 Million

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Rocket Software, a privately held maker of mainframe and System i tools based in Newton, Massachusetts, has made the shareholders of NetManage an offer they probably will not refuse. After IT Jungle went on holiday in December, Rocket Software said that it was willing to pay $7.20 a share, or $69 million, to acquire publicly held NetManage, which makes host connectivity and legacy application modernization software for mainframe and System i gear and which is based in Cupertino, California. The acquisition puts to rest any chatter in the past two years about how NetManage would compete against larger and

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• Servers Get Their First Power and Performance Benchmark

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the first 40 years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers. You can expect many more such power-sensitive

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Motherboarding

  January 7, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  In 1995, IBM shifted its proprietary midrange systems from CISC to RISC processor technology. Today, the System i is to a considerable extent a variation of the System p–or visa versa, depending on how you want to look at it. Last year, IBM sent a processor guru out to talk about a chip called z6, a sibling of the new Power6 chip that executes mainframe instructions. IBM will soon announce z6 mainframes that share a lot more than just some processor technology with the System p. They could easily be more than 50 percent System p, by weight. The z6

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• IDC 2008: It’s Post Disruption, the Aftermath of Webification

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Art had post modern. Politics and economics had post history. Naturalist Euell Gibbons had Post Grape Nuts, at least until he died in 1975, when he became, like all of us, compost. And now information technology in 2008 appears to have something that the propellerheads at IDC are labeling post disruption. This seems to be another way of saying cleaning up the loose ends in Web-style computing, which is what IDC expects for IT vendors and IT buyers to worry about this year. Usually, the key IT industry analysts make bold proclamations about the coming year as another spending binge

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• Q&A with Marc Dupaquier, Former GM of IBM Business Systems

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with Marc Dupaquier, Former GM of IBM Business Systems Just about a year ago, in an effort to more purposefully and efficiently provide hardware, software, and services for small and medium businesses around the globe, IBM created a new division called Business Systems. Marc Dupaquier, a long-time executive in Big Blue’s Software Group and a one-time AS/400 sales rep from the days of the AS/400 launch two decades ago, was tapped to be general manager of this new division. And last week, IBM reshuffled the GM chairs in the Systems and Technology Group, moving Dupaquier out of that role,

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