• Eyebrows Go Up as HP Hands the Reins to Former SAP CEO

  October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The war between Oracle on one side and Hewlett-Packard and SAP on what increasingly is looking like the other side heated up bigtime last week as headless HP, which ousted top exec Mark Hurd on August 6, replaced him with former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker. Rather than give all three jobs to one person, HP’s board of directors decided to split up the titles, making Apotheker, who spent 20 years at SAP and helped it build up the world’s largest application software empire but who was let go back in February after some missteps at the German giant, HP’s president

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• Power 720: Same Entry Price, But More Room to Grow at Less Cost

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As is usually the case with an IBM Power Systems announcement, there is no one simple way to characterize the price/performance of the new entry Power7-based machines that made their debut in August and that started shipping on September 17. But I can tell you this much after an initial analysis of the entry Power 720 boxes that are the most likely choice of platform for IBM i shops: If you plan to grow, this box is a lot better than its predecessors. This is true for two reasons. First, with anywhere from four to six cores in a single

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• Microsoft Technologies Gaining Ground in the IBM Midrange

  September 27, 2010 Dan Burger

  The battle of the midrange continues. And Microsoft continues to put the heat on IBM. We know it best as a struggle for IBM i shops to remain i-centric when it comes to their mission critical applications as Microsoft technologies gain stronger footholds in enterprises. Last week I talked with Dee Hester, who heads up platform migration sales in North America and Latin America for Microsoft. Here’s the view from where he sits. Hester works for Microsoft’s Enterprise Partner Group (EPG), which has a goal of accelerating the adoption of Microsoft technologies at the enterprise level and supporting business

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• IBM Offers Sun, HP Shops Generous Leases–What About iSeries Shops?

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but how come IBM is always giving shops using Unix gear from rivals Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu a good deal? How come Big Blue takes a long time to get around to giving a similar deal to its own iSeries shops, if at all? Don’t they need a little financial help as encouragement to move up to more modern Power Systems machines, too? Here’s the deal, which doesn’t exactly apply to you unless you can do a whole lot of sweet-talking with your IBM sales rep or business partner.

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• As I See It: Of Better Jobs and Billy Joel

  September 27, 2010 Victor Rozek

  File this under useless proclamations: The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession officially ended in June 2009. Pardon us if no one noticed. With over 15 million unemployed and one in seven Americans living in poverty, a lot of folks were too busy surviving to join the celebration. Granted, poverty is relative. In this case it means that a family of four is subsisting on less than $22,000 a year. Good luck with that. Forty-four million people now live that way, with another 3.3 million about to join them when their unemployment benefits run out. As for

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• Oracle Gets Systems Design, and Starts Proving It

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Oracle is ratcheting up its so-called “engineered systems” to run its operating system, middleware, and application stack, and is beginning to give people the impression that it is dead serious about being in the hardware business. Oracle did not come easily to hardware, being a software vendor, but thinks it can get hardware gross margins up to 60 percent and double system revenues to around $2 billion a quarter over the next couple of years. And completely engineered systems, from chip to app, are the key. Last week at its OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco, the top brass at the

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• iManifest U.S. Looking for a New Spearhead

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s not easy doing IBM‘s marketing job for it while also trying to make a living, as many of us out there in AS/400 Land know full well. When a United States arm of the iManifest movement needed a spearhead, Jeff Olen, who is the chief operating officer at the IBM i consultancy that bears his name, Olen Business Consulting, volunteered. But Olen can no longer be the leader for iManifest U.S., and so, he needs one of you to step in and do the job. Olen posted the following message on the LinkedIn group for iManifest U.S:

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• IBM Does A Little Power Systems Marketing After All

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s been a full business week since IBM started shipping the four new entry Power Systems machines and the i Solution Edition variants of the boxes specifically tailored to IBM i customers to cut them a break, and now apparently a little marketing is going to begin in the midrange. Apropos of nothing last week, IBM put out a statement about the new entry machines with the requisite “we love the midrange” gushing. For instance, take this: “We continue to develop and deploy the powerful technologies that growing businesses need to improve efficiency, innovate and scale for future growth,” said

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• Netezza Needs IBM, But Why Does IBM Need Netezza?

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes it is easier to buy off a competitive threat and figure out how to make best use of it later than to worry about making complex justifications about an acquisition at the front end. That’s what IBM did when it shelled out $810 million to buy NUMA-based server maker Sequent Computer Systems in the summer of 1999, and that is what is going on now with Big Blue’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza last week. The Sequent deal was every bit as much about blunting a future attack of Windows-based NUMA servers that offered the kind of scalability that

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• IT Budgets at SMBs Up a Smidgen in 2H10, Survey Finds

  September 27, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Despite the continued poor economic conditions, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are growing their IT budgets, albeit slowly, according to a new survey from IT management software vendor Spiceworks. SMBs increased their IT spending plans by 4 percent over the last six months, the survey found. Much of the increase will go to upgrading existing servers and adopting promising new technologies. Few plan to hire more IT staff. According to Spiceworks’ bi-annual “Voice of IT” market research program, the budget freeze is slowly melting at SMBs, which the company defines as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The

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