• Midrange Shops Shift Priorities This Year

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With a sharply declining server market this year and relative stagnation expected for the next four years, at least according to forecasts released by IDC and reported on in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, you can bet that midrange resellers are trying to get a bead on what things midrange shops want and, more importantly, need to spend money on. Which is the main reason why the Enterprise Computing Solutions division of master IT distributor Arrow Electronics has just done its second annual mid-market end user survey. Even though IT Jungle is not a midrange business partner

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• The Best of Times for IBM to Support All Its i Customers

  June 29, 2009 Dan Burger

  The AS/400 customer base needs to hear from IBM. They want to be reassured–not with words, but with deeds–that they are not being left behind. Loyal as they are, these devotees are not immune to feeling disregarded. Maybe not so much among large enterprises, where approximately 20 percent of the users provide IBM with 80 percent of its revenue, but in the SMB space where 80 percent of its customer base dwells, there is a feeling that IBM’s investments in the platform are not sufficient. For its part, IBM can point to a reinvestment and a research and development

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• What We Can Learn from iManifest

  June 29, 2009 Gordon Davies

  There is a lot we can learn here in the States from Japan’s IBM i partner community. A group of over 70 IBM partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) has joined forces there, the world’s second largest information technology market, to launch the IBM i Manifest initiative for the Japanese market. The partner community project has three main objectives: To revitalize the IBM i market in Japan, and increase the customer installed base To assure IBM i customer organizations, resellers, and ISVs selling IBM i solutions that IBM i will not only survive, but more importantly continue to prosper To

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• As I See It: Oh the Jobs They Are a-Changin’

  June 29, 2009 Victor Rozek

  Remember those tests we took as kids that required us to pick the item that did not belong in a sequence: A) bicycle, B) wheel, C) chain, D) handlebars, E) botox. Well, here’s one, courtesy of Time magazine. Going forward, the workplace will be: A) more flexible, B) more freelance, C) far less secure, D) run by a generation with new values, E) increasingly controlled by women. In fairness, I should have added F) all of the above, because Time believes all five conclusions to be true. But given these choices, one item on the list doesn’t fit. At least

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• Storage Hardware and Software Take Their Lumps in Q1

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even with the need for storage capacity and the software to manage it quite high, no sub-sector of the IT market can fight off the economic downturn all by its lonesome. And in the first quarter, according to statistics coming out of Gartner and IDC, disk array and storage software sales saw even bigger declines than in the fourth quarter of last year. By Gartner’s box counting, external controller-based disk array revenue sales came to $3.8 billion in the first quarter, declining 11.1 percent. (These numbers do not include the substantial revenues that server makers get selling internal disk

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• Reader Feedback on AS/400: Still Kicking After 21 Years

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I wasn’t alone in my gratitude and slight melancholy as the summer solstice came around on the guitar again, reminding me of the AS/400’s 21st birthday. A bunch of you had some thoughts about this and my suggestion that we need an official AS/400 Advocate to argue the case for the Power Systems i platform. I thought I would share some of the emails I got from readers. –TPM I, too, am an oldster, having started on a System/36 and upgrading to the B40 AS/400 as it was called then. As an amateur photographer, may I respectfully suggest you get

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• IBM to Resurrect Just-Killed Power Systems Rebate Deal?

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s back. . . . Well, I think it is, anyway. A long-running rebate deal that IBM has offered in one shape or form or another for the past zillion years, and which was withdrawn from the Power Systems catalog in May, is apparently being reintroduced. Stephanie Carmel, worldwide vice president for ISV solutions at IBM, was speaking on a Webcast hosted by Power Systems i disaster recovery and high availability software maker Vision Solutions, and she said that IBM would be announcing in June a new Power Systems rebate offer that will give customers rebates on Power Systems

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• PHP Application Vendors Gearing Up for Smart Cube Appliances

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine. The question now is this: Are the PHP application vendors going to jump through the hoops and get their applications certified to play nice with the automation embodied in the Smart

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• The Economy Gives Oracle a Slight Haircut

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The continuing lethargy in the global economy put pressure on revenues and profits at software giant and perhaps soon hardware vendor Oracle in its latest quarter, but the numbers are not as bad as some IT vendors have shown. That is for sure, and a testament to the mini-monopolies that Oracle has been able to build for itself over the years. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 ended May 31, Oracle’s revenues were $6.86 billion, down 5 percent from the year-ago period. Not surprisingly, new software license sales in the quarter fell by 13 percent to $2.74 billion, but

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• Dumb Behavior Spreads as Smart Devices Proliferate

  June 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Do you think it’s appropriate to use your Blackberry in a toilet stall? Or to send a tweet from your mobile phone while attending a funeral service? Your mother probably never taught you that these specific activities were naughty because they didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Unfortunately, common sense apparently hasn’t stopped Americans from practicing poor etiquette with their new-fangled smart devices. And according to a new Harris Interactive survey, most of us are tired of it already. Harris Interactive conducted a “Mobile Etiquette” survey in April to see where people stand on their acceptance of public use of

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