• Arrow ECS Launches Cloud Services, Expands in Germany

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Enterprise Computing Solutions IT distribution unit of IT and electronics master distributor Arrow Electronics has been building up its professional services portfolio since last fall and has relaunched its services unit in North America as Arrow Fusion, sporting a slew of cloud services for IT shops. Arrow’s resellers are used to peddling boxes and software licenses to make their bread every day, and in a cloudy infrastructure world, where some shops are going to put at least some of their workloads on someone else’s computers, resellers are naturally wondering where their slice of the action is going to come

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• Avnet Expands in Latin America, Promotes COO to President

  July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are chasing growth, as all companies along the IT supply and distribution chain are, then Latin America is one of the goals you are running toward. Which is why master distributor Avnet has acquired Tallard Technologies, a value-added distributor located in Miami, Florida, that has presence in all of the important Latin American countries. The Tallard business was a division of Itautec S.A.-Grupo Itautec, which at $1 billion is one of the largest private companies in Brazil. Itautec is a supplier of computers and software aimed at the banking and financial services industry, as well as its

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• Top Concerns Survey Is Ready for IBM Eyes

  June 28, 2010 Dan Burger

  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

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• Infor Commits Itself to Microsoft and Windows Technologies

  June 28, 2010 Alex Woodie

  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

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• Developing for IBM i: Why Does It Need To Be So Hard?

  June 28, 2010 Garry Taylor

  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

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Microclients: Thin Enough? Rich Enough?

  June 28, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  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

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• IBM Tweaks More Rebate Deals to Cut Power7 Prices

  June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• IT Salaries Stop Falling, Hiring Picking Up, Says Janco

  June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• A Possible AS/400 Emulation and Runtime Environment

  June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• Azul Readies X64-Based Java Virtual Appliance

  June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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