If it has not been made clear to you yet from our coverage of i5/OS V6R1, this is a big release. While prior releases have also been big in terms of bringing database clustering, integrated high availability plumbing, logical partitioning, an AIX runtime environment, support for Linux, or the WebSphere application server and development tools, just to name some big features from the past decade’s worth of OS/400 and i5/OS versions and releases, V6R1 is important in that it involves the rejiggering and repackaging of the application development toolset for the System i platform.

As part of the announcements last

Q&A with MKS CEO Philip Deck: Automating the Automaters

As the chairman and chief executive officer of application lifecycle management software maker MKS, Philip Deck spends a lot of time thinking about how other people and his own company create and manage software. Deck joined the Canadian and publicly traded software firm in 1999 after running a company called Certicom, a maker of cryptographic hardware and software, but he is clearly at home in the ALM software space and clearly enjoys his job, as this interview shows.

MKS, of course, was founded in 1984 as Mortice Kern Systems, and

Somewhere, deep in the heart of Georgia, there is a System i sales rep whose is none too happy. And just a little further north, up in America’s capital, there is another sales rep who is also probably not feeling too chipper. Two long-time AS/400 shops–the billing operations of cellular phone service provider AT&T Wireless and the United States Mint, the division of the U.S. Treasury department that prints and sells money–are both rumored to be ditching their iSeries and System i machines for alternative platforms.

First, the smaller i5/OS shop that IBM has let get away. That the

Explanation #1: Fifteen years ago, two college kids were jogging along the beach and, as they were passing a large clump of flotsam wrapped in ropes of kelp, they noticed something glinting in the sunlight. They stopped, looked, and one of them reached into the slimy mass and pulled out what appeared to be an ancient lamp. As is the custom with ancient lamps, the young man began to rub it vigorously. No sense in taking a chance; they’d feel pretty stupid if they passed up their opportunity to awaken the Genie.

Sure enough, there was a sizeable puff of

If you are running out of power and cooling in your data center and that is limiting your ability to add servers and storage for your company to support growing workloads, or if you are just simply tired of wasting energy, then Validus DC Systems wants to talk to you. The Brookfield, Connecticut, company has created a hybrid AC-DC power system for data centers that can cut energy consumption by as much as 40 percent, basically by eliminating AC power inside the data center and by running server and storage supplies at a higher DC voltage.

That sounds easy enough,

Well, that was quick. But apparently not quick enough for the IBM online store to be updated last week when everyone was taking a gander at the new i5/OS configuration of the Power6-based JS22 blade server. What I am referring to is a price cut that IBM made on the i5/OS configuration of the JS22 blade server that went into effect on January 29, the big announcement day, but was not reflected in the Web pricing that I cited in last week’s article about the JS22 and i5.OS V6R1.

Here’s the deal. When I looked online last week–and when

The perception of the value of beginning a career in the IT industry has taken a dive. To use a technical term in the computer business, it’s in the toilet. It’s no coincidence that the number of graduates with computer science degrees is down 32 percent in 2007, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor. The source of those statistics, however, also reveals that the number of job openings for IT professionals increased 50 percent in the past two years, leading to some optimism that the IT job market is rebounding.

At a meeting in

The predictions for the IT market were a little light as 2007 came to a close, but the analysts at Gartner talked to 1,500 chief information officers and other top IT brass and as part of its promotion for its Gartner EXP executive program, where CIOs get to hobnob, the company released some of the results of the surveys. The 1,500 CIOs surveyed represented $132 billion in aggregate IT spending in 33 countries and across 23 different industries.

Right up front, 85 percent of the CIOs polled said that they expected “significant change” in their IT organizations over the next

The U.S. market might be in a recession, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing down ERP software giant SAP, which reported its financial results for fiscal year 2007 last week. What’s more, SAP sees 2008 shaping up much like 2007.

For SAP’s fiscal 2007, which ended December 31, the company’s revenues totaled €10.25 billion ($15.0 billion), a 9 percent increase from a year ago. Driving revenues was a strong showing in software and related services, where the company reported €7.43 ($10.9 billion), a 13 percent uptick. Operating income came in at €2.74 billion ($4.0 billion), which corresponded with

The emerging Web authentication standard known as OpenID, has received a high-profile boost as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and VeriSign have joined forces to bolster security (to whatever limited degree that is possible) on the Internet. The security blanket offered by OpenID is that it increases individual control of digital identities and the personal information shared with participating Web sites. The above-mentioned companies were seated as corporate board members of the OpenID Foundation.

The OpenID Foundation supports and promotes OpenIDs, which can be thought of as portable Web identities used in a single sign-on fashion.