How busy does your IT department have to get before it makes the one-armed paper hanger look like a slacker? That’s the kind of pandemonium that makes it to the highest rung on the COMMON Top Concerns ladder. For the second consecutive year, keeping up internal demands is what has the IBM i platform crew awake at night and keeps the sweat on their brows all week long.

The pressure is on and the gauge is rising.

Top Concerns number two and number three are related to this high pressure zone. Number two is a concern that skills for the

Infor made a surprising move last week when it announced an alliance with Microsoft that makes Windows and SQL Server the preferred stack for running Infor applications. While BPCS, MAPICS, and the rest of Infor’s RPG-based applications will stay put on IBM‘s “i” and DB2/400 platform, Infor will be pushing to surround these products with Windows-based interfaces, portals, BI tools, and a new business performance management (BPM) application called ION, which was also unveiled last week. It’s a gamble that could pay off for Infor.

As far as partnerships go, the one between Infor and IBM appears to remain

There is something wonderful about being a computer programmer. Maybe it’s the ability to see a problem with our computing experience and be able to fix it, in the same way a mechanic can see a problem with his car and repair it. We can be dissatisfied with our computers and do something about it.

Growing up with computers as I did, programming them just seemed to be part of the experience, not a bolt on, not an addition. It was just what you did with a computer. At least it was for me and many of my friends. Computer

Is corporate computing better off when end users have powerful Windows machines or relatively powerless thin clients? The answer is Yes. For the past couple years, computer makers have offered technology that lets users choose what kind of client they see when they boot up, but the vendors did a terrible job of selling this versatile concept. Now, however, things are starting to change. Microclient technology, which turns wide-open PCs into locked-down terminals, works well. One more thing: It is nearly free.

So just what is a microclient? It is a mix of hardware and software that turns any computer

Ask and ye shall receive. It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes it does–maybe just enough to make you believe there’s something in the universe that is listening for a good idea. In this case, that something is a somebody who works at IBM, which has finally gotten around to adding its new Power7-based blade servers announced in April to some existing (and too complicated in my opinion) trade-in deals. Last week, when going over how the Power 750, 770, and 780 servers that were launched in February were added to two existing trade-in deals, I complained that

IT salary watcher Janco Associates has just finished up its mid-year 2010 IT salary survey and it looks like the IT jobs situation is improving a bit.

According to the latest survey, which was collected in June at over 300 companies that participate in the company’s data gathering, in the United States, hiring at IT shops is picking up in some sectors of the economy, average salaries have stopped falling, and in some positions in the data center salaries have actually gone up.

Victor Janulaitis, who is the chief number cruncher at Janco as well as the owner of the

I was poking around on the news wires on Friday, trying to find something interesting to write about on a pretty boring news day and stumbled across an announcement from a small software company in Geneva, Switzerland, called Stromasys that might be able to bring some alternatives to customers using vintage AS/400 iron if we can con talk them into it.

Here’s the deal. In the wake of the formerly independent Compaq’s acquisition in 1998 of the equally formerly independent Digital Equipment Corp (both of which were borged into Hewlett-Packard nearly a decade ago), a bunch of executives who ran

It took Azul Systems three years to design and build its first Java acceleration appliance servers and bring them to market in 2005, and over those five years since, the company had had its ups and downs legally and presumably financially as it tried to get server makers to endorse a custom Java application offload engine that basically took food off their plates.

Now, Azul is ditching the hardware-based appliance approach and going more fluid with an virtual Java acceleration appliance that runs atop a server virtualization hypervisor on an X64 server. (Yes, I know that is many layers of

There’s little argument that supply chain and operations management has been a focal point in cost-cutting measures at companies in the past several years. Process efficiency is tied to supply chain visibility. Again, little argument can be made. So why has the worldwide supply chain management (SCM) software market slipped when comparing revenue from 2008 with 2009?

Oh, yeah, that economic crisis thing. Company budgets were tighter than the handcuffs that should have been on some of the financial industry’s best and brightest.

Overall, SCM software revenue (including services and support) was $6.2 billion in 2009, a drop of 0.7

There are always a lot of ifs in life. Like, for instance, if the top brass of Sun Microsystems had made some of the changes that Oracle has done in the four months since acquiring Sun–but done them several years ago–then Sun would be positioned to ride up a recovery but would be still trying to figure out how to be a systems company. Oracle, as its most recent financial results show, may not succeed in the long run with its systems aspirations, but it has certainly made the most of Sun in a short time.

In Oracle’s fourth quarter