• IT Vendors Optimistic About the Second Half of 2010

  July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as I have been watching this IT racket, whenever there is a recession, there is always optimism in the second half of the year, no matter how bad things are. And despite some uncertainty in the global economy, with certain areas (like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain) still having their own baby meltdowns, the IT vendors are being chipper about how 2010 will end. According to the 306 IT vendors who participated in an online survey by CompTIA, the IT Industry Business Confidence Index is going to swing up 5.4 points in the next six

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• i/OS 7.1 Marks a Change in the JVM Guard

  July 14, 2010 Alex Woodie

  There is one piece of news from IBM‘s i/OS 7.1 roll-out that didn’t generate a lot of attention in the System i community, but is important for programmers who develop in Java as well as their customers. Starting with i/OS 7.1, IBM no longer supports the “Classic” Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that Rochester developed years ago specifically for OS/400. This leaves the platform with two JVMs: one 32-bit and the other 64-bit. IBM says that performance and cross-platform compatibility will improve with the new JVMs, although some developers may need to fiddle with their apps to make them work.

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• IBM’s Evolving Power Systems Rollout

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Shooting and hitting a moving target is never easy, but nailing a moving target when you are flying down a bumpy road trying to hit that target is another thing entirely. Which is why the server business is a bit like the chase scene in a thriller movie. The targets that vendors are aiming at are chip and system roadmaps, and the blood is red ink, but there is a certain kind of drama in it. Particularly if your company’s business, and perhaps your job, depends on the reliability, scalability, and availability of your primary server platforms. I do plenty

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• Power7 Boxes Show Good Java Oomph Versus Other Iron

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since the Power7-based machines were launched in February and March, The Four Hundred has been digging around for all of the performance information we can find on the new machines, particularly running the i 6.1 or i 7.1 operating system and filling in some gaps by making some estimates for online transaction processing on the Power7 blade servers. This week, I wanted to give you a sense of how the Power7-based machines stack up on Java application performance, in this case gauged by the SPECjbb2005 application serving test. In March, in the wake of the launch of the midrange Power

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• Infor Readies ERP Applications for i 7.1

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The announcement in late June by application software powerhouse Infor that it was building a lot of its new applications for Microsoft‘s Windows Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server, doesn’t mean the Power Systems i platform is not still important to the company, and Infor is most definitely hard at work getting its apps up to speed on IBM‘s latest Power7-based machines and the i 7.1 operating system. With around 15,000 customers worldwide running a variety of applications that were originally coded for OS/400, often in RPG but sometimes in Java or with Java extensions, privately held Infor

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• As I See It: Uproar Down Under

  July 12, 2010 Victor Rozek

  Those in favor of restricting speech often argue that the Framers of the Constitution could not have anticipated a technology such as the Internet that can be used to disseminate bomb-making instructions, invite sedition, propagate racism, and spread pornography like pollen. And, of course, they’re right. The Framers probably didn’t envision space travel either; or Lady Gaga, or a black President, for that matter. But here we are. Free speech is perhaps humankind’s most cherished and envied freedom. Yet it is always under assault. The self-righteous would restrict it for moral reasons; the closed-minded for political advantage; and the unscrupulous

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• Get Me a Vendor Who Knows My Business

  July 12, 2010 Dan Burger

  One aspect of the COMMON Europe Top Concerns survey results that were released a few weeks ago is in tune with a recent Forrester Research report. Both sources of feedback from people who buy software and services strongly suggest a desire to work with vendors that demonstrate how well they know the vertical industry of the buyer and how well a specific vendor understands a specific company’s position in its market. Call it the “to know me is to love me” company-vendor relationship. While plenty of vendors try to endear themselves to customers and prospects by offering the one-stop shopping

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• IBM Does a Try-and-Buy for the Power 520

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The idea helped Sun Microsystems have something for its top brass to talk about aside from its flagging sales for several years before it was sucked into the gaping maw (surely I meant to say loving embrace?) of Oracle, and maybe it will work better for Big Blue. Am I talking about an open source version of OS/400? Perhaps porting the platform to X64 iron? Maybe Sam Palmisano growing a ponytail and speaking like a calm guru of IT wisdom? No. I am talking about a try-and-buy program for the Power Systems line. For the Power6-based Power 520,

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• Take Power Systems Training for a Test Drive on IBM’s Nickel

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s not every day I see IBM give away anything for free, much less see it two times in the same week. As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, Big Blue has a try-and-buy program where it is letting companies and individuals tool around with a Power 520 server for two months. The company has also announced via its Web site (but not a formal announcement letter) some free Power Systems training courses. IBM is offering seven of its online, instructor-led training courses for Power Systems shops for free, and some of them actually have something to

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• Cloudy IT Is Big Business, Say Gartner and IDC

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a lot of talk about cloudy IT infrastructure these days, and it just makes me laugh. The shift from virtualized, utility-priced server and storage capacity is transformational and important, no doubt, but no more so than many of the other transitions in the systems business in the past 45 years. Cloudy infrastructure will ultimately just be infrastructure, the way it was evolving to be all along. But in the meantime, everybody is excited by change, and I can’t really blame them–the news business being based on change, after all. What people are mostly excited about are new

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