• CIOs Say There’s Work Piling Up and They’re Ready to Hire

  January 11, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Robert Half Technology, an IT compensation and headhunting consultancy, says that chief information officers are seeing IT work pile up and they are gearing up to do some hiring this year. RHT did a survey of 1,400 CIOs in December at companies located in the United States with 100 employees or more, and 10 percent of them said they were very understaffed and another 33 percent said they were somewhat understaffed. Some 53 percent said they had the right number of IT employees, and only 3 percent said they had too many people. “Many companies have cut technology staff

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• Power Systems i: The Windows Conundrum

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We all live with Windows, and I don’t mean the ones in our walls that let us see outside. By capitalizing the word, and not the Word (which should mean Logos, not a word processor, but that is a different story. . . . ), you all knew I meant Microsoft Windows, a desktop and server operating system, and not the glass panes. Windows is a fact of life in data centers of the 2010s when it was but a dream of Microsoft’s in the 1990s. But running Windows applications does not necessarily mean having to put up with

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• Maintenance Contract Reduction a Good Resolution for 2010

  January 4, 2010 Dan Burger

  Are the handcuffs on your IT budget cutting off your circulation? When the bulk of your expenditures are tied up in maintenance-related costs and day-to-day operations, and one more “do more with less” speech from the boss makes you punch a hole in the wall, you need a fresh idea with a workable, realistic opportunity for success. Renegotiating your hardware maintenance and software subscription contracts could be your new money tree. How this works can take several paths. Let’s begin with the money tree. The way this most often works is that savings from maintenance costs are moved into new

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• CCSS Offers Flexible Pricing for Service Providers

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In tough economic times, like those we have lived through for nearly two years now, companies look to outsourcing and other managed services as a way of maintaining and improving their IT operations while cutting costs at the same time. While this is great for IT shops and their companies’ chief financial officer, monitoring and managing complex i setups takes the right tools, and it can be expensive to acquire them under perpetual licenses. Not any longer, at least for the service providers who choose Power Systems i monitoring tools from CCSS. After The Four Hundred went on holiday

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• Mad Dog 21/21: If Trees Were Free, Would the Press Be?

  January 4, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  Cities that once had several newspapers now have just one, if any. Even the strongest of those remaining seem to be in grave danger. Their plight was a key theme of The Press a 1961 collection of A. J. Liebling’s essays from the New Yorker. Liebling’s love of newspapers was recalled by his widow, Jean Stafford, in 1975 as she introduced a third edition of the classic. Stafford is long gone, too, but Liebling’s “wayward concubine” is still with us amid its lingering death. For the press, the future, if any, depends on American Internet policy. Liebling’s The Press

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• Ten Practices for 2010 Your CFO Will Love

  January 4, 2010 Irwin Teodoro

  I have nothing against a chief financial officer. Being CFO is a tough position with a lot of pressures that can easily be misunderstood. That being said, it is the money people who generally stand in the way of engineers and technologists and the spending required to accomplish great things with IT. It is a common problem we all have–dealing with accounting, the CFO, or other non-IT management. Of course, our running joke is the CFO thinks of technology as a $499 PC they can pick up at Staples or OfficeMax. CFOs don’t understand why $29 billion is collectively used

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• Reader Feedback on Sundry

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Four Hundred Stories As the year was ending, we had a few stories in The Four Hundred that caused readers to crack their fingers and hit that Contact button at the top of the page. Here’s what they had to say about what we had to say. Reader Feedback on Power Systems i: Thinking Inside the Box and Abacus Offers i 6.1 Upgrade Virtual Test Drive Service Hey, TPM: From your article: “I was grousing in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred that the program conversion process that IBM is forcing customers to go through to move to the

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• Companies Look to Add Jobs in 2010, Inside IT and Out

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As The Four Hundred reported a month ago, the U.S. economy stopped hemorrhaging jobs in November and the unemployment rate actually went down a smidgen and could do it again when the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out its jobs report for December. And it looks like business in general and their IT departments in particular are getting ready to add some jobs. Let’s start generally and work our way into the IT part of the jobs market. If you take a gander at the latest quarterly economic survey from the Business Roundtable, which is comprised of

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• Disk Array Sales Continue to Recover in Q3, Storage Software Struggles

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you the rundown on Gartner‘s casing of sales of external, controller-based disk array sales in the third quarter of 2009, and in this issue, we present IDC‘s take on disk arrays for the quarter. The way IDC dices and slices the data, you can get a feel for how external arrays (which attach to servers through Fibre Channel, iSCSI, converged storage-server Ethernet or InfiniBand, or other means) are doing as well as internal arrays, which are generally based on PCI-Express RAID disk adapters tucked into the servers.

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• Security Advice for 2010: Trust No One

  January 4, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Not everything is at it appears. While this should be a no-brainer for anybody venturing onto the Web, this little piece of advice will pay higher dividends in the new year, according to security experts, who say cybercriminals are increasingly preying on people’s misplaced trust in each other and popular Web sites. This advice applies especially to hot technologies, such as social networking and smart phone users, but also anybody who uses search engines, clicks on Internet ads, or sits in front a Mac they thought was safe. Social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Wave,

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