• Enterprise Software Spending to Rise 4.5 Percent This Year

  September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The global enterprise software market is on the rebound this year after taking it on the chin thanks to the Great Recession last year. According to the analysts at Gartner, worldwide software sales across all categories will come to $232 billion in 2010, up 4.5 percent from last year’s spending levels. Gartner is projecting that software spending will rise even faster in 2011, up 6.3 percent to $246.6 billion, and is projecting for sales to hit $297 billion by 2014. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent over the six years running from 2009 through 2014.

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• The More Things Change

  September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Do you sometimes think that the part of IBM‘s brain related to the AS/400 and its successor platforms has been put in stasis so it is still, in some way, in 1988? That perhaps the people who do marketing for the IBM i platform are not located in Somers, New York, but rather in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Day just keeps looping and looping, like in that fabulous 1993 film by the same name? Maybe it is just me, but despite all of the technology changes and name changes, the Power Systems-IBM i combo does not seem to

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• Big Sam Is Worried About Oracle–And For Good Reason

  September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rivalry between IBM and Oracle, which could define the way enterprise computing gets done at a lot of IT shops, is shaping up nicely. Last week, at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal, IBM’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, spoke for more than an hour, ranging over a number of topics, including its rivalries with Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle also posted its financials for its first quarter of fiscal 2011 and laid out its goals for creating “engineered systems.” The entire interview that Palmisano gave at the WSJ event was not

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• Focus Melds Crowdsourced IT Analysis with Social Media

  September 20, 2010 Alex Woodie

  A new online venture called Focus is looking to shake up the status quo in the market for B2B and IT analysis with a business plan that combines social media mechanisms with mostly “crowdsourced” content. If all goes as founder and CEO Scott Albro plans–and it seems to be so far, considering www.focus.com is attracting 12 million people per month, according to Albro–the big players in IT analysis, such as Gartner, will be forced to change how they produce and distribute content. Focus, which officially launched its Website in May, bills itself as a source of business and technology

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Seismically Active Storage

  September 20, 2010 Hesh Weiner

  During the early 1970s, the iconic large computer was the System/370-158 mainframe from IBM. It ran at and defined 1 MIPS. Its magnetic core memory technology was boosted by virtualization. But during the lifecycle of the 158, IBM fell behind. Intel and others made solid-state memory that eclipsed core memory. Several companies made IBM-compatible disks, among them StorageTek, now part of Oracle. StorageTek, for awhile at least, became so good that IBM had to enlist it as a supplier. Now another earthquake is coming. This could be the big one. It could wipe out IBM’s remaining significance

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• IBM Gives Schools Discounts on Power Systems Iron

  September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When any server maker gets its systems installed at educational institutions to run their back office operations, there are secondary and potentially huge effects that come from that school using those machines. For one thing, if the school partitions some of the machine to have it be used as a resource for students who are taking computer science or engineering courses, as was the case at my alma mater, Penn State, then a new breed of potential customers learns on your box. And that helps grease a sale down the road. This was one of the reasons why the Penn

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• Reader Feedback on IBM Adds New SSD and Fat SFF Disk to Power Systems

  September 20, 2010 Hey, TPM

  We are in the process of configuring a Power 720 to replace an aging Power 520, and need to increase both CPW and I/O. It turns out that two mirrored 2054/1996 features will give us about 20K IOPS, versus about 3K IOPS for a traditional disk setup. And both end up costing about the same amount. The disk setup requires a feature code 5615 GX++ card, 30 feature 3677 139 GB hard disk drives, one feature 5796 12X expansion drawer with a feature 6446 interface, three feature 5886 12S disk drawers drawers, and a feature 5908 1.5 GB caching RAID

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• Central Florida User Group to Disband in December

  September 20, 2010 Dan Burger

  Tony Morelli has been a member of the Central Florida Midrange User Group since the mid-1990s. He’s served on the local user group’s board of directors for years and has seen the highs and the lows. At the end of this year, he’ll watch CFMUG fade away. At its meeting last month, the board set December 31, 2010, as the final day of business for organization. “We haven’t had people responding to and attending our meetings,” Morelli. “I believe it is just a lack of interest. We were willing to do whatever people let us know they want. But nobody

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• Former IBM Server Chief and Potential Heir Gets Six Months in Prison

  September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week in U.S. District Court in New York, Judge Deborah Batts sentenced Robert Moffat, formerly the senior vice president in charge of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group and once in the line to succeed Sam Palmisano to run Big Blue, to six months in prison for his part in the Galleon-New Castle insider trading scam that erupted last October. The scam centered around Raj Rajaratnam, the (formerly) billionaire founder of the $7 billion Galleon Group hedge fund, and Danielle Chiesi, an employee of hedge fund New Castle Partners, and the information they allegedly gathered on high-tech companies and

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• An IT Jungle Reader Appreciation Offer from iSeries DevCon

  September 20, 2010 Dan Burger

  I don’t mean to boast, but as a reader of IT Jungle newsletters you are already understand the importance of keeping current with the IBM i community’s array of hardware, software, and services. You get it. You’re connected. And we’re glad you’re with us. For many of you IBM i enthusiasts (even those who refer to the system by one of its former, more familiar brand names), education and training is a priority. And even as such, ongoing education may not always translate into a reality. So IT Jungle has an incentive to maybe make it your reality this year.

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