• The i5 515 and 525 Versus the Windows Competition

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that the user-priced System i5 515 and 525 servers have been in the market for a while, the time has come to see how they stack up to the competition and to prior generations of System i5 machines. While the user-priced machines are capable of supporting legacy RPG and COBOL applications using the 5250 green-screen protocol, IBM is trying to position these machines for new workloads, like Java and PHP, as well as old ones, and is therefore trying to gauge their performance on the basis of those new workloads. To help make the case for the i5 515,

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• IBM Buys Watchfire to Bolster Security and Compliance Testing

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue likes Watchfire‘s AppScan security and compliance testing software so much that last week, rather than buy a lot more of its software, it went out an bought the whole company. Increasingly, IBM thinks of itself less as a systems company and more as a provider of software and services, and it seems to like nothing better than a product or a strategy, like services oriented architecture (SOA) tools, that seems to do a little of both. IBM also likes security products that fill in gaps in IBM’s software product line, and the AppScan products not only fill

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• Spam Lives On Following Arrest of ‘Spam King’

  June 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Spam was supposed to decrease in the wake of the arrest of the so-called “spam king,” Robert Soloway, last week. Instead, unsolicited e-mail continues to fill people’s inboxes at pretty much the same rate as before, highlighting the difficulty in fighting the scourge of the Internet in a massively distributed world. Soloway was arrested by U.S. Attorneys based in Seattle, Washington, two weeks ago following his indictment by a federal grand jury. The arrest of the 27-year-old was a long time in coming, as he had been identified several years ago as the source of e-mails baring fraudulent headers that

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• Mainsoft Updates .NET-Java Tool with 2.0 Release

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software development tool maker Mainsoft last week updated its Mainsoft for Java EE product with a 2.0 release. This tool, formerly known as Visual MainWin for J2EE, allows programmers using the Microsoft development stack to deploy their applications, written in C# 2.0 or Visual Basic, on Java Virtual machines running on a variety of platforms. The “Grasshopper” free development version of the Mainsoft tool was updated with a 2.0 release in January, and included enhancements such as supporting the Mono 1.2 open source implementation of the key .NET components, the C# programming language, and the Common Language Runtime environment.

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• Open Source Software Sales Pegged at $5.8 Billion by 2011

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With open source operating systems, Web servers, databases, middleware, and development tools widely and freely available, it is hard to quantify the impact that these products have on the IT market at large. Most of the big open source software projects these days have commercial-grade support that is equivalent to that offered by the vendors of closed-source software, and it is here that open source projects get the money to pay at least some of the programmers who work on key pieces of the product that they sell support contracts for. According to a study just released by IDC,

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• MKS Sees Software Licensing Downturn in Q4, Gears Up for Rebound

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange application lifecycle management software provider MKS closed out is fiscal 2007 on April 30, and while the company had what it called sluggish license sales for its biggest accounts in the fiscal year, MKS is expecting that customers will embrace its newest products and buy services as they roll out application lifecycle management tools in the coming fiscal year, getting it back on track again. While MKS is based in the Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario, and is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, it reports its financial results in U.S. dollars. For the fourth quarter, total sales at

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• Agilysys Buys Hospitality POS Partner InfoGenesis for $90 Million

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  System i reseller Agilysys, which also sells application software for hotel, lodging, and other hospitality businesses, has shelled out $90 million in cash to buy InfoGenesis, a partner of its own and other ERP software suppliers that creates point-of-sale software. InfoGenesis is based in Santa Barbara, California, and had about $42 million in the prior 12 months, which means Agilysys is paying a very respectable premium for the company based on a deal-to-revenue ratio. InfoGenesis is a private company, so its full financials are not available, but given that Agilysys is a public company traded on the Nasdaq

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• As I See It: The Ne’er-Do-Well’s Guide to Enlightenment

  June 11, 2007 Victor Rozek

  The Catholic Church counts it as a grievous sin. Kierkegaard thought it was the only true good. Agatha Christie believed it was the mother of invention. Gandhi found it to be a delightful but distressing state. Granni Nazzano called it the hobby that naturally rules out all others. And Mortimer Caplan thought it was the habit of resting before you get tired. The “it” that inspired so many unique and contradictory assessments has almost as many names as it has descriptions. In more formal times it was known as sloth, idleness, or indolence. But as the world lightened up, so

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• One More Time: There Is No Gender Pay Gap

  June 11, 2007 Nate Viall

  During April 2007, several national news organizations once again highlighted the much ballyhooed gender pay gap. Women appear to make only 81 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. In addition, the April Behind the Pay Gap report from the American Association of University Women highlighted a purported disparity between salaries earned by men and women. One year after graduation, women appear to be paid only 80 percent of what men are paid, the report found. After 10 years, their pay dropped to 69 percent. That would be terrible, if it were true. Instead, the gender pay gap

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• CIOs Get Ready to Hire in the Summer

  June 11, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IT business took it on the chin seven years ago after spending like a drunken sailor on dot-com businesses and application modernization efforts, and in the wake of the global recession after the September 11 terrorist attacks, companies not only stopped hiring IT staff, they put projects on hold and, in some cases, they let go of employees they could no longer afford to keep. What a difference six years makes. According to Robert Half Technology, which has been monitoring IT hiring practices since 1995, the increase in expected hiring in the third quarter is the highest since

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