• The X Factor: Why Maintenance Is Worth the Money–Sometimes

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of checks that IT managers and chief financing officers do not like to write when it comes to the IT budget, and hardware maintenance is one of the checks they increasingly dislike writing. There are good reasons for this–and there are also good reasons for writing that check. Equally important, IT shops have to be smart about what they put on hardware maintenance, and how they deal with break-fix issues in general as they relate to hardware. But before getting into why hardware maintenance is something of value and therefore worth a piece of the IT

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• Various System i and Power Systems i Nips and Tucks

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You can tell that Big Blue is pretty much done with thinking about–much less making or selling–Power5+ servers now that it is getting ready to support all of its key operating systems on the complete line of new Power6-based Power Systems machines. With i 6.1 and Linux support coming on the Power 595 big box in September and October, respectively, the Power6 lineup will be completely rolled out. And now it is time to start cleaning up the product catalog a little. And to that end, IBM announced last Tuesday that August 26 (the same day of the announcement) would

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• After Olympics Success, Lenovo to Go Global with Servers

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While companies in the Asia/Pacific region were familiar with the Lenovo desktop and laptop PC brand, the Chinese company did not really register on the radar of consumers and businesses in North America and Europe until Lenovo bought IBM‘s beleaguered PC business in 2004 for $1.25 billion. But the Lenovo name may get a little better known now that the company has successfully delivered the infrastructure to support the Beijing Olympics, including servers that the company is apparently getting ready to sell worldwide. Lenovo has made and sold servers in its home Chinese market for years, but is predominantly

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• IBM Partners with CloudShield for Network Security Blade Server

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is so much malware, spam, and other garbage running around the Internet these days that it is fair to say that the idea of anonymity expressed in the Internet Protocol was probably a bad choice. But, because the world runs on TCP/IP these days and we are not about to all be issued permanent IP addresses at birth, whether we are humans or servers, we are stuck trying to cope with the onslaught as best we can with various kinds of security products. IBM rolled out a new one last week. The BladeCenter PN41 is a new kind of

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• Infor Launches EMEA Channel Recruitment Drive

  September 2, 2008 Dan Burger

  Among the ERP software vendors with customers on the IBM System i hardware, no one tops Infor. The privately held company has more than 16,000 customers running its ERP LX (formerly SSA BPCS), ERP XA (formerly MAPICS), System 21 (formerly JBA), ERP A+ (formerly DP Solutions), and HCM Infinium (formerly Software 2000) software suites. Last week, the company announced plans for improving its channel partner network across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The plan calls for the recruitment of new partners and the termination of underperforming partners currently on the team. Two years ago, Infor’s channel partners

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• BluePhoenix Sets 2008 Bar at 20 Percent Growth as Q2 Numbers Come In

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application modernization tool vendor BluePhoenix Solutions, a mainframe specialist that got into the midrange when it acquired ASNA last year, reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2008 and at the same time says that it expects business to be good through the rest of 2008, now that it has sold off its stake in Mainsoft. In the quarter, BluePhoenix posted sales of just a smidgen over $23 million, up 20.1 percent over the second quarter of 2007. On a GAAP basis, the company had an operating loss in the quarter of $165,000, which was

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• IBM Ditches i and AIX in U.S. Open Systems for Linux

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time when IBM took a lot of pride in supporting the IT needs of big sporting events like the Olympic Games and the U.S. Open, and it also used to try to showcase all of its key information systems as part of the overall solutions. IBM walked away from the Olympics IT sponsorship after the Barcelona games, but it still hosts the infrastructure for the U.S. Open tennis competition. The one big change at this year’s tennis tournament is that IBM is not only consolidating servers, but has ported all the applications, which do scoring and provide

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• PowerTech Acquired by Help/Systems, Private Equity Firm

  August 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  The consolidation of the midrange continued last month when The PowerTech Group, a leading developer of i OS security software, was acquired by Help/Systems and Audax Group, the private equity group backing the i OS utility developer. Few details of the deal are being released, as the companies are privately held and therefore under no obligation to spill the nitty gritty. What is known is that PowerTech will continue to function as a completely independent entity. By all indications, PowerTech has become a powerhouse of i OS security software this decade. Whereas many of its competitors had been

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• JDA Ponies Up $346 Million to Buy i2 Technologies

  August 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is any rule in the latter stages of development in any market, it is that the big get bigger. So it has been in the market for application software for businesses of all sizes, and last week JDA Software continued to exert its gravity in the software space by acquiring sometime-rival supply chain software specialist i2 Technologies for a net cost of about $346 million. The move not only makes JDA that much more of a player in supply chain software–and for many companies, positions JDA up above SAP and Oracle–but also puts to rest years of

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• SMBs Are Sensibly More Concerned with Biz than Tech

  August 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This bit of news will come as no surprise to any IT Jungle readers who have run their own businesses or who work for small companies where money is a lot tighter than at larger enterprises, which always seem to have a lot more dough to spare for IT projects that may or may not pan out. According to research performed recently by IDC, SMB shops, which have IT budgets that are growing at least twice as fast as spending among larger companies, are more worried about the state of the economy than all the latest gadgetry or hot

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