tfh Archives - Page 43 of 419

SAP Says 2009 Ended Better Than Expected, Rejiggers Maintenance Fees

January 18, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Enterprise application powerhouse SAP said last week after a preliminary review of its books that it would finish off 2009 a bit better than expected. Don’t get too excited. Just because business in Q4 was better than expected doesn’t mean it was great. And that’s why SAP also said that it was rejiggering its maintenance fees to reflect the new economic realities out there in the global economy.

Based on U.S. accounting rules, SAP said its sales for software and related services in the fourth quarter ended December 31 would come in at €2.56 billion, down 4 percent from the

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Power Systems i: The Word From On High

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I have been shooting my mouth off about the issues facing the Power Systems i for the past month, and now it is time to let IBM have the stage for a bit while I catch my breath. Over the holiday, Big Blue posted a white paper outlining the strategy and roadmap for the i product line, which our intrepid reporter, Alex Woodie, spotted before IBM even let the trade press know it existed. This white paper has some tidbits of information that are new, which why I bring it up.

The 14-page white paper, which you can read here

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SkyView Taps New CEO to Ride the Compliance Wave

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Carol Woodbury, the former chief security architect of the OS/400 operating system and co-founder of SkyView Partners, and John Vanderwall, co-founder of SkyView and up until now its chief executive officer, have brought in some outside help to grow the company as it chases the burgeoning opportunity for security and compliance tools and services both inside the Power Systems i market and outside of it.

As 2009 was unwinding, SkyView announced that Tom Coccione, who has 22 years of experience in the IT racket, including with 13 years of selling midrange gear at IBM, has been tapped to

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CSI: Orlando

January 11, 2010 Dan Burger

First of all, there is no crime scene investigation. You’ve been watching too much television. In this case, CSI is an abbreviation for COMMON Session of Interest. I was poking around on the COMMON Annual Meeting Web site last Thursday and followed a trail to the preliminary online session guide. That hardly qualifies me as a special agent, but if you are the investigative type, I recommend you check out what’s being presented at the conference in early May.

For those who have never attended COMMON, the first thing you need to know is that it has the widest variety

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As I See It: Waiting on Hope

January 11, 2010 Victor Rozek

It’s the time of year when we reset the clock. No matter our failings and excesses of the prior year, January 1st brings with it a hopeful cleansing. Optimism abounds. This year I’m going to _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (fill in the blank): exercise more, lose weight, read the classics, write the great American novel, take tango lessons, run a marathon. Everything is possible again. Like Charlie Brown preparing to kick the Lucy-held football, we approach even the longest odds with great confidence. At least until March.

Hope appears to be a uniquely human attribute,

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IBM Adds Virtual Component to Executive Briefing Centers

January 11, 2010 Alex Woodie

Interested in setting up an executive-level briefing to learn more about the IBM Power Systems server? One option is to arrange a trip to IBM’s facility in Rochester, Minnesota, where last Thursday it was snowing with a wind chill of -20 degrees Fahrenheit. But if sub-Arctic travel isn’t your cup of tea, or your sled dogs are down with the flu, you now have the option to receive briefings remotely at IBM’s Virtual Briefing Center Web site, which was launched last week.

IBM’s System and Technology Group (STG) put its Web skills to work with the new Virtual Briefing Center

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Infor Hires AMR Researcher to be Chief Strategy Officer

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Consolidation doesn’t just hit IT vendors. It hits the companies that watch the IT vendors, too. In early December, IT consultancy Gartner announced that it was acquiring application software market expert AMR Research for $64 million in cash, and quickly followed that last week by snapping up IT consultancy Burton Group for $56 million. None of this will matter all that much to IBM midrange shops.

However, the fact that Bruce Richardson, who was the chief research officer at AMR and arguably the smartest person following the enterprise application space, has joined application software giant Infor probably will have an

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Cisco Taps Avnet to Peddle ‘California’ Unified Servers

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This is one that you could have seen coming a million miles away. With only two master resellers in the global server racket, it was only a matter of time before either Arrow Electronics or Avnet started distributing the “California” Unified Computing System converged blade servers from Cisco Systems.

While The Four Hundred was on holiday in December, Avnet announced that its Technology Solutions group, the part of the company that peddles servers, storage, networking gear, and such, had inked a distribution agreement with Cisco that allows Avnet and its downstream channel partners so certified to push the California

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Dataram Wants to Pump Up Sales with Channel Partners

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are a midrange server distributor looking for something to sell in a tough economic climate, then clone memory for Power5 and Power6 systems might be just the thing. That is certainly what Dataram is thinking as it pumps up its channel sales efforts.

Last April, as reported in The Four Hundred, Dataram bought its rival in the clone memory space, MMB, and in June the company started more aggressively peddling alternatives to IBM-branded memory for selected entry and midrange Power6-based servers. But as everyone in the AS/400 market knows, it is hard to get coverage because

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U.S. Economy Loses Another 85,000 Jobs in December

January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, Wall Street and the Obama Administration got a little splash of cold water on their faces last Friday as the Department of Labor said that the U.S. economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December.

While the economy is certainly in better shape in terms of monthly job losses than it was in December 2008, when the employers removed a stunning 760,000 people from their payrolls as the economic meltdown was heating up, the expectation after a pretty good jobs report for last November, when the economy only shed 11,000 jobs, was that December would be about the same, with

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