• Mad Dog 21/21: Newtonian Economics

  August 4, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  Isaac Newton’s contributions to science and mathematics were monumental. They elevated English technology to a state of great prominence and helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment. More than three centuries later, every teenager studying science is taught classical mechanics, and Newton’s principles provides food for thought in other disciplines, too. IBM‘s recent financial results, a sunny patch on a graying economic landscape, beg for analysis as well as praise, and Newton’s laws might offer just the metaphorical basis required to examine Big Blue’s blooming. The top stories in the business press may be dire, but as we previously

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• Gartner Is Projecting a Decline in IT Hiring This Year

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remember that report out of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses I told you about a few weeks ago that said IT jobs were growing in the United States despite the wobbly economy? Maybe it is time to get a second opinion about how IT jobs are lining up this year. That’s why the analysts at Gartner did their own surveys, and the news suggests that the IT job market is weakening a bit in the States. This will come as little surprise, with the home mortgage mess and the intertwined effects on the financial services sector and consumer

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• Reader Feedback on As I See It: Babes in Broadband

  August 4, 2008 Hey, Victor

  I sympathize with your wife’s plight concerning broadband. My phone carrier is AT&T. They told me my house was about 250 yards too far from the switch for them to supply me with DSL. Later, I was talking to customer service with my ISP, and she asked me if I wanted DSL service. I started on a rant similar to the one you just published, and she told me she had checked my address and they could supply me with DSL service. It seems that PeoplePC subcontracts DSL service from AT&T and supplies subscribers who live too far from the

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• SAP Profits Under Pressure in Q2, Software Prices Get Jacked

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application software giant SAP reported its financial results for its second quarter of 2008, and the company is being hit pretty hard by the dollar-euro exchange rate that has been propping up multinational IT suppliers based in the United States in recent years. That has put profits under pressure, as have expenses related to the roll out of new product lines, and that has forced SAP to do what software companies do in such times: raise prices. For the second quarter ended June 30, SAP’s sales (based on generally accepted accounting principles for the United States) rose strongly at

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• Manta Technologies Adds IBM Director Navigator for i5/OS Course

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This month, i platform training specialist Manta Technologies announced a new course to keep system administrators abreast of the latest software available from IBM for the System i and Power System i servers running i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1. The new course, called Using IBM Systems Director Navigator for i5/OS, which teaches system admins to use the new Web console management tool for the i platform, which is similar to but different from the System i Navigator admin client that Big Blue has peddled for the past several years. This Web console is going to eventually replace System i

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• Yankee Group Says Server Virtualization Adoption Is Accelerating

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Market researcher Yankee Group, like every other IT consultancy, is trying to figure out a new angle on this whole server virtualization phenomenon so it can make a little noise and a little money, too. To that end, Yankee released some of the results of surveys it has done in recent months to help spur demand for two new virtualization reports it has issued, just to give us all a little taste of the data. The two reports that Yankee put out–2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Survey and Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Bighorn–are based on

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• IBM Shells Out $340 Million for ILOG’s Business Rules and Supply Chain Tools

  August 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we all know, IBM likes to spend big bucks on a sure thing, like over $100 billion in stock buybacks since the mid-1990s, and does not like to shell out what against its scale is a lot of dough for doing acquisitions. That said, IBM is perfectly willing to spend money on fast-rising companies in what it perceives to be hot markets that it can leverage its global scale with to turn them into profit engines. Last week’s $340 million acquisition of ILOG, a maker of business rules management, supply chain management, and related applications. ILOG, in case

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• IBM Reaches Out to Midmarket Business Partners

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I explained in last week’s issue when I tried to suss out how the midrange market continues to evolve, all the big IT players and plenty of small ones have set their sights on the small and medium business (SMB) market as a means of trying to grow their own businesses. And the reason is simple: the S and M portions of the economy are growing their IT spending at a substantially higher pace than the E, or enterprise, portion of the economy. But to succeed in the midrange, you can’t just concentrate on customers. You also have to

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• Sundry July Power Systems Announcements

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One quarter has ended, and another has begun, and it being summer and all, now is the traditional time when IBM has done some nipping and tucking in its System i and System p product catalogs. Just because we are all one big, happy Power Systems family doesn’t mean that such traditions are now done for. In fact, last week, Big Blue made a few tweaks to the products in the Power Systems lineup. None of these announcements are huge issues, but if you are in the middle of a Power Systems acquisition, these changes are still significant. First of

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• IBM Updates DB2 Web Query Business Intelligence Tool

  July 28, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced two additions to DB2 Web Query, the graphical business intelligence tool for generating and viewing reports and queries on the i operating system (formerly i5/OS). In September, IBM will deliver a new tool called Report Broker, which automatically distributes reports, and a new software development kit (SDK), which will enable customers and ISVs to integrate DB2 Web Query with existing applications. DB2 Web Query is a special version of Information Builder‘s WebFOCUS software that IBM announced in March 2007 and delivered that September. The software, which enables users to write queries for the DB2

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