• Software AG Buys Jacada’s Legacy App Modernization Biz

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German database and SOA tool maker Software AG is paying $26 million to take a portfolio of application modernization tools off the hands of Jacada, which has been trying to boost its presence in the System i market for the past decade against some pretty tough competitors. Software AG, which is best known for its Adabas database for IBM mainframes, its Tamino XML database and middleware for SOA-style applications, and its Natural development language for Web applications, has been gradually transforming itself into a contender in SOA development and integration. In April last year, Software AG shelled out $546

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• Chip Makers Gang Up for Advanced Processes

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Progressively shrinking the circuitry on chips has provided the world with an enormous improvement in computing power every year, but silicon-based circuits seem to be coming up against the limits of physics. That means no single vendor–with the current exception of Intel with its X64 monopoly–can rely on its own financial position to keep investing in ever-more-clever technologies to make faster chips. So most of the major players are ganging up to collaboratively come up with new chip-making processes. In December, Japanese electronics maker Toshiba said that it would join an alliance of chip and electronic equipment suppliers put together

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• Bsafe and Satyam Partner for System i and z Security

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Israeli System i security software maker Bsafe Solutions is teaming up Indian information technology services company Satyam Computer Services that will see the latter company peddle security services to its growing customer base. Under the deal announced in December, Satyam, which is based in the tech center of Hyderabad, India, and has 45,700 IT staffers doing engineering and application development work, will create a services offering that will deploy Bsafe’s Enterprise Security suite to System i and System z customers who not only want to manage security on these boxes, but on the Windows and Linux servers that are attached

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• IT Action Heroes Replace Chaos With Calm

  January 7, 2008 Dan Burger

  Not everyone finds their action heroes on the big screen. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme take a seat. You guys are pretty tough when it comes to fiction and fantasy, but could you come up big in a real-life data center where fighting chaos requires a budget and a schedule to save the day? It’s time for the IT Action Heroes to bask in some glory. Meet Iain Williamson, senior IT manager with Scotiabank. He was instrumental in establishing and executing Scotiabank’s change management strategy that brought automation, structure, and repeatability to a geographically distributed team of application developers.

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• Database Tool Maker Joins the System i Market

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  They say you learn something new every day. But when you have been in the AS/400, iSeries, and System i market for 6,732 days, as I have been, you don’t necessarily learn big new things every day. But when a vendor called Resolution Software, which makes database design and maintenance tools for other platforms, said last week that it was coming to the System i space, the company’s tools made me aware of database issues I had not really known existed before. The brilliance of the design of the System/38 and its progeny–the AS/400, the iSeries, and now the

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• State of the System i: Other Software Makers Weigh In

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we wind down 2007 and get ready to take on 2008, now is a good time to take stock of the state of the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem. So for the past several months I have been talking to companies large and small in the ecosystem who peddle hardware, software, or a mix of the two to see how business has been in 2007, what they are hearing from i5/OS and OS/400 shops in terms of products and budgets, and what they expect their own businesses to do in 2008. The good news, at least as far as the

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• IDC Says Server Buyers Weigh Economy and Power in Q3

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Everybody, with the possible exception of the head bean counter at the company, likes shiny, new servers. New servers have more bandwidth to support larger workloads, which makes transaction volumes go up and response time go down; they also tend to be more energy efficient these days, which is a good thing. But whenever the economy is not roaring along, people get concerned and they do not want to shell out money for new iron. Right now, the economy is doing OK and the desire to have more powerful and efficient machines is offsetting the jitters among server buyers. Market

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• As I See It: What’s Past Is Prologue

  December 10, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Just beyond the holiday season lurks 2008, carrying the prospects of a fresh start and the baggage of past performance. New years are like that; full of hope and promise, but tempered by what went on the year before. For IT professionals, 2008 will be shaped by the confluence of powerful forces themselves molded by the recent past. The most critical of those forces, as always, is the economy, and how it will fare depends on who you believe. I’ve consulted the psychic hot line, and reshuffled the Tarot cards, but the future is still a bit murky. So to

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• Robert Half Says IT Hiring to Be Solid in Q1 2008

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are going to be looking for a new IT job in the new year, then your prospects would seem to be pretty good if the recent surveys by Robert Half Technology are any indication. As was the case in the fourth quarter of 2007, IT managers are still pretty optimistic about hiring in the early part of 2008. RHT is a subsidiary of Robert Half International, the $4 billion Menlo Park, California, staffing and consulting company that was founded in 1948, that is a publicly traded company, and that is the largest employee staffing and consulting company

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• VAI Partners with Mid-Range for Canadian Sales

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having just rolled out version 3.7.6 of its RPG-based S2K Enterprise ERP suite for manufacturers and distributors, Vormittag Associates is looking northward from its Ronkonkoma, New York, headquarters to the Great White North to try to stir up a little more business. And to that end, VAI has just announced a partnership with Mid-Range Computer Group, which has been the largest reseller of i5/OS and OS/400 platforms in Canada for the past decade. These days, Mid-Range Computer is more than a reseller of IBM‘s complete system and storage portfolio; it also operates two data centers of its own

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