• DevCon Delivers iSeries Education; IT Jungle Offers a Deal

  October 11, 2010 Dan Burger

  Your budget for IBM i training and education probably doesn’t have “The sky’s the limit” penciled into the first line. But it’s a fact modern skills go a long way toward making the IBM i a modern platform. Here’s your chance to bump up your skills, become a more productive and valuable programmer or system admin, and go easy on the budget. As a reader of IT Jungle newsletters you can save yourself or your company some money. That’s never been discouraged to the best of my knowledge. Your opportunity comes next month at the 12th Annual iSeries DevCon,

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• The Little Power7 Engines That Could–And Those That Won’t

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The System/38 languished as an exotic and expensive box through most of the 1980s and the System/36 entry systems sold like hot cakes a few years later, and that experience taught IBM two lessons that were embodied in the first AS/400s from 1988 and continue to be the hallmark of Big Blue’s midrange systems today, regardless of their processor architecture. The first is that it is necessary to have as broad a selection of systems as can be affordably designed and manufactured, and the second is that you can always charge a premium for more performance and greater scalability. In

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• DB2 on i: The Time, Money, and Risk of Modernization

  October 4, 2010 Dan Burger

  You are sitting on a gold mine of database technology and probably don’t even know it. You have many of the essential pieces undiscovered in your existing system. Untapped capabilities in DB2 for i, the integrated relational database at the heart of IBM i 6.1 and 7.1, can be put to use meeting business requirements that have executives nervously searching for answers. Your first discovery is that a database does far more than store information. Take a closer look at what you have here. This is an information management system, not a container. It’s not just a barn, a

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• IBM Buys Blade Network to Control Ethernet Switches

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The buying spree at IBM continued again last week, as the company spun the acquisition wheel of fortune and landed on blade and rack Ethernet switch maker Blade Network Technologies for what is rumored to be $400 million in cash. The deal marks the re-entry of Big Blue to the networking business–if you don’t count the OEM agreements with Blade Network, Juniper Networks, and Brocade Communications and the reseller agreement with Cisco Systems. I don’t count these as being in the networking business, but before last year and the Dynamic Infrastructure blitz, IBM didn’t even try to look

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Built Like a BRIC’s IT House

  October 4, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  When a country spends more on computing, its economic growth is likely to be healthier–so Gartner says in its most recent discussion of IT spending in the BRIC countries. Gartner made this declaration at its most recent dog-and-pony show in Sao Paolo during mid-September. Brazil leads the BRIC countries and possibly the world in the portion of gross domestic product (GDP) it pumps into computing and its pace of spending on IT will grow during the next few years. The laggard BRIC, it turns out, is Russia. Last year, end user companies in Brazil spent $88 billion, or 8.6

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• The CIO’s Conundrum

  October 4, 2010 Ernest von Simson

  The CIO’s job is not an easy one: One part salesman on IT innovation, one part global project manager, charged with knitting together the wares of multiple suppliers into a coherent, reliable and cost-effective application. And one part prognosticator on the success or failure of major vendors in an industry where repeated waves of change regularly swamp unwary incumbents. Just consider the fates of former leaders including Amdahl, Burroughs, Compaq, Cullinet, Data General, Digital Equipment, Exodus, and Wang, among others. Every decade or so, a new crowd of entrepreneurs overwhelm the incumbents, leaving the IT department to sweep up the

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• IBM Updates IBM i 7.1 with PTFs for New Power7 Machines

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was a busy month for IBM and its team of PTF programmers, according to Doug Bidwell, who puts together the System i PTF Guide for you to keep track of Big Blue’s PTF patches for i5/OS and IBM i operating systems. In the latest PTF Guide, which you can see here, if you drill down into the Technology Refresh, you will see that Big Blue has delivered the patches to i 7.1 that allow the operating system and its database to run on the new Power7-based Power 710, 720, 730, 740, and 795 machines. The patches are also

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• Lawson Says S3 Selling Nicely, and M3 Is Recovering

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Uncle Sam helped out Lawson Software in its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended August 31 in a big way by charging the company less taxes than it did in the year ago quarter. So even though Lawson’s overall sales were up only 3 percent, to $174.7 million, in the quarter and operating expenses rose by 5 percent, the company was nonetheless able to boost net income by 61 percent, to $9.6 million. In the quarter, Lawson’s software license fee revenues were $24.5 million, down 6 percent, but in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Harry Debes, president and

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• Time to Get Serious About IT Risk, IBM Says

  October 4, 2010 Alex Woodie

  IT is good. IT is beneficial. It’s a truism that information technology helps organizations become more efficient and more competitive. After all, people don’t adopt computers so they can waste their time and fall further behind. But according to a recent risk management study by IBM, organizations should devote more time to understanding the potential downsides and harm that result from the use of IT, and should adopt more formal IT risk management practices. To get a better idea of how companies deal with risk, IBM Global Business Services interviewed more than 500 IT managers and CIOs for companies

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• IT Managers Tell Gartner Their Budgets Are Up 1.1 Percent in 2010

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The prognosticators at Gartner have lowered their IT spending projections for 2010 based on surveys of C-level executives at some 1,600 companies. But only a smidgen. When the executives were polled back at the end of 2009, the weighted average rise expected in 2010 across all of the companies was an increase in IT spending of 1.3 percent. This came on the heels of an average 8.1 percent decline in spending in 2008 across these same companies. In a survey that ran from June through August, Gartner talked to the same execs and found that, on average, spending growth is

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