• The X Factor: The IT Department Matters as Much as the CIO

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it–or a mix, if they use a mixed model–because these are the people who either cut

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• IT Jobs Grow in the U.S. Despite Economic Woes

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good. In fact, in terms of the increase in IT jobs in the United States, the news has been good for a while. The

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• BluePhoenix Says Business Is Steady, Sells Mainsoft Stake

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions is getting ready to report its financial results for the second quarter of 2008, and as is the tradition for public companies, BluePhoenix put out a statement going over preliminary results in conjunction with a big announcement that it was looking to sell its stake in Mainsoft, a maker of .NET and Java tools. The preliminary report was designed to calm down a jittery Wall Street. BluePhoenix, which is based in Herzliya, Israel, did most of its business in the mainframe market until last summer when it acquired ASNA, which has

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• IBM Opens Up the EGL Cafe, But Will People Stop By?

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I know, I know. The last thing in the world you want to hear about is the need to learn a new programming language. Or, if you are an IT manager, to pay in terms of time and money to get your programming staff trained on a new language. But this is what IBM is asking customers to do with Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), the heart of Web application development in its recently upgraded set of Rational tools. Half the battle of getting companies to even look at a programming language, much less using it, is to convince programmers that

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• IBM and New York State Kick in $1.64 Billion for Chips

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM‘s chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM’s birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable. For its part, IBM is going to spend $1.5 billion over the

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• Gartner Pegs BI Software Sales at $5.1 Billion

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The business intelligence software space may not be the T-Rex of enterprise software like ERP systems have been, but it definitely qualifies as Brontosaurus, chewing cud to make a living rather than attacking competitors for the right to live. The BI software market has grown nicely over the past decade, but like other software markets, it has undergone a lot of consolidation and, in recent months, the U.S. market has been problematic. According to the latest statistics from Gartner, the global business intelligence software market (including maintenance and various support revenues for vendors) accounted for $5.1 billion in 2007,

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• Sun and IBM Deliver 1 TB Tape Drives, Argue About Speed

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The engineers and marketeers at Sun Microsystems worked hard to try to beat IBM to market with a new 1 TB tape drive, and they succeeded in the task last Monday by getting the T10000B tape drive out the door. But IBM was only one day behind Sun, and was so happy to point out that its TS1130 tape drive, also delivering cartridges with 1 TB of capacity, was faster. Sun’s T10000B comes, of course, from its StorageTek unit, which makes mainframe-class tape drives and libraries as well as disk arrays. And like the IBM unit, it offers 1 TB

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• The i Upgrade Cycle Seems Par for the Course

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we go to press, IBM has moved into its third quarter and has sold whatever System i and Power Systems with i5/OS or i 6.1 machinery that it could in the second quarter. Hopefully, the news will be good when IBM reports its financial results this week on July 17. We’ll see. The thing to keep in mind, of course, is that you have to know what par is for the i course. If you don’t, you can draw some wrong conclusions about the market and have expectations that can’t be met. In early June, COMMON Europe released some

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• The Power Systems JS12 and JS22 Blades Versus Other i Boxes

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past several weeks, I have given you the detailed feeds and speeds of the new Power6-based Power Systems machines running i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 and shown you how the new entry and midrange machines compared to the Power5 and Power5+ generations of System i gear. This week, I will bring it all back together and throw the JS12 and JS22 blade servers into the mix–the first blades from IBM that can support an i operating system–inside the new BladeCenter S chassis for small businesses. Big Blue may have brought blade servers to the OS/400 and i5/OS platform

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• Gartner Revises HP’s Server Sales Downward for Q1

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in May, the analysts at Gartner put out statistics for the first quarter of 2008 for sales and shipments of servers of all kinds on a global basis. And there was much jubilation over at Hewlett-Packard, which Gartner said knocked out IBM as the top server seller globally in the quarter; HP has long-since been the top shipper. But beating Big Blue on its home systems turf is a big deal. Pity then–and particularly for those HP executives who have bonuses pegged to market share gains–that it apparently did not happen. And hooray, I suppose, for those IBMers

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