• IDC Patches Punctured IT Spending Forecasts

  November 17, 2008 Dan Burger

  You can hear air leaking out of the tire, but it’s not flat yet. That’s how I view the most recent IT spending forecast by the analysts at IDC. We might be getting close to pulling over to the side of the road and putting on the spare, but, heck, we don’t even know with any certainty whether the spare has any air in it. So let’s keep driving on this one and see how far we get. We’ll just drive a little slower. Here in the IBM System i user community, there are tendencies to not spend as

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• IBM Updates Active Power Management Plug-In for Servers

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It took a little bit longer than expected, perhaps, but IBM has finally delivered its Active Energy Manager plug-in for its Systems Director system management tool. The tool can be used to monitor power consumption and thermal conditions of IBM and non-IBM systems, as well as capping the power that can be used on selected server models. I told you all about this plug-in back in December 2007 (see IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers for more on that). The AEM plug-in runs on Linux partitions on Power, X64, or mainframe iron, and it can reach out into Windows,

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• Aberdeen and IBM Team Up for Midmarket Security Assessments

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT market researcher Aberdeen Group and IBM have teamed up to offer midrange IT shops a survey-driven security assessment tool to help them figure out how secure their IT assets are. The survey does not involve submitting your systems to any kind of probing by either Aberdeen or IBM, but is rather driven by a database of survey information based on 30,000 midrange shops that Aberdeen has talked to in the past two years, and then its reckoning of what best practices in terms of server, client, and network security should be. After taking the 10-minute survey, Aberdeen tells you

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• Foreign Exchange, Biz Slowdown Hit BluePhoenix in Q3

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  BluePhoenix Solutions, a maker of legacy application modernization tools for midrange and mainframe platforms, reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2008 last week, and said that its revenues and profits were adversely impacted by whipsawing currency exchange rates between its Israeli home market and the North American and European countries where it does a lot of its business. For the quarter ended in September, BluePhoenix posted sales just a smidgen over $22 million, up 4.5 percent, but the company had an operating loss of $5.2 million, a net loss of $6.84 million, and a net loss

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• Big Sam Speaks–And That Doesn’t Happen Every Day

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just after the presidential election two weeks ago, IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And for once, he did something you do not see every day–or even every year–from the head honcho at Big Blue: He spoke his mind about the issues facing the country and the world. They say a man cannot serve two masters, but in my experience in the IT journalism racket, a man who wants to pay his bills usually has to serve two, or perhaps more, masters. So while

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• A Few More Strands in the DNA of the Midrange

  November 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Information about the midrange of the corporate computing market–the place where hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide generate tens of billions of dollars in server and storage spending a year–is a little hard to come by. I always have an eye out for statistics because it is so rare to see anything quantitative that is available to the public. I am sure there is plenty of data available on the midrange from the server makers themselves and the big IT market researchers, but that is the kind of information that costs big bucks these days. That has not, however, always

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• The Winds of Change: How Presidential Politics Informs IT Transformation

  November 10, 2008 Jake Sorofman

  For most people, the prospect of fundamental change is about as comforting as a root canal. By their state of nature, most people are change averse, preferring the quiet predictability of the status quo to the frothy tumult of a fundamental shift. That is, until change seems to be the only tenable answer. America voted for change during this election cycle because change seemed to be the only tenable answer. Putting politics aside, few will argue against the notion that this country faces some great challenges, many of which are fairly troubling. This sort of recognition tends to trigger a

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• Wholesalers Making Adjustments During Economic Storm

  November 10, 2008 Dan Burger

  To find out what companies in the wholesale and distribution business are doing to succeed in these turbulent economic times, I set up an appointment with IBM‘s wholesale industry segment executive, Roberto Sanchez, who works not only with customers, but also with independent software vendors and resellers in the sales channel. Sanchez understands the System i because many companies rely on it in this market and also because he was once a systems engineer for the AS/400. Like most executives at IBM, Sanchez would rather not talk about platform specifics. His point of view is solution specific instead. Customers

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• As I See It: Growing a (Non-Binding) Conscience

  November 10, 2008 Victor Rozek

  When the Internet was first spreading around the globe with the speed and infectiousness of an airborne virus, it soon became evident that many nations would not tolerate the unchecked proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Governments that could not abide opposition became intent on regulating what would otherwise facilitate a dangerous flow of uncensored data and subversive ideas. Toward that end, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were subjected to some economic arm twisting. What specific threats were made, or incentives offered, is unknown. What is known is that America’s technology giants capitulated to the will of foreign governments. To

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• Tight Credit Squeezes IT Equipment Leases

  November 10, 2008 Dan Burger

  IT equipment leasing, a favorite method used by hardware suppliers that garner revenue from places they never could crack otherwise, is feeling the woozy effects of the stormy economic seas. It’s not just IT equipment leases that are taking on water. All types of equipment leasing are in the same boat. The name on that boat is the S.S. Default. It’s much too early, however, to say the boat is sinking. When the living is good and the credit is easy, there seems to be no brakes on who can finance equipment or how they can pay it off. Just

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