TFH Volume: 21 Archives - Page 32 of 43

IBM’s Next Generation Platform Prepped For Launch

April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

What IBM has been calling its “Next Generation Platform” internally and when talking to business partners that have been briefed in the past several weeks, and what it is calling “expert integrated systems” in its promotions appear to be a warm up for the launch event set for April 11. And it looks very similar in concept to the Flex Platform I caught wind of and told you about back in February.

There will be some bigwigs at IBM handling the NGP launch, which will take place in a webcast at 2 p.m. Eastern on April 11:

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Making A Case For IBM i

April 2, 2012 Dan Burger

The IBM i community has never suffered from a lack of advocates. Those who know it best know it to be a highly capable platform with many attributes that make it superior in many ways to other platforms. The Smarter Computing message that IBM has built its marketing message around is IBM i computing. There are innovative businesses around the world proving this. And there are companies that have resisted change riding the old AS/400 horse for far too long with little or no attempt to move with the system into the modern world.

The overall perception of the platform

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IBM i Versus Oracle JDE Throwdown Redux

April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When looking at a complex problem on deadline, you rarely get everything right the first time, or do as thorough a job as you would like. My price/performance analysis of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne “Day In The Life” benchmark test on various Oracle Sparc T and IBM Power Systems and System x iron is no exception. A reader with very intimate knowledge shared a little insight, and I added some more vectors to the comparison.

Hi, Timothy:

I just read your newsletter article today. It was very thorough as expected from you. I just had a comment to make.

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As I See It: You’ve Got Interviews

April 2, 2012 Victor Rozek

High traffic websites require a daily supply of new material to entertain the surfing masses. But curing the ills of the terminally jaded requires taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic approach: provide a wide variety of postings as remedy for a wide variety of tastes, from the serious to the vacuous.

On Yahoo!, for example, you can find everything from video of the Annual Wife-Carrying Obstacle Race (my wife and my back decided to abstain this year), to Rick Santorum insisting that he doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Sometimes it’s hard to know where vacuous ends and serious begins.

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Progress Being Made In IT Security War, IBM Says

April 2, 2012 Alex Woodie

IBM saw a reduction in application security vulnerabilities, exploit code, and spam last year as system makers and software developers tightened up their code, the vendor says in its latest X-Force report. When that attack surface got smaller, cybercriminals were forced to work their black magic in emerging areas, like social networking and mobile devices.

IBM’s semi-annual tally of the state of security identified some promising trends. On the spam front, it found a 50 percent decline in unsolicited commercial email compared to 2010. On the vulnerability front, it found that only 36 percent of previously identified vulnerabilities were still

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Better Collaboration And Integration Needed From Doc Management

April 2, 2012 Dan Burger

For as long as I’ve been alive, paper has always been called paper. There’s never been Paper 2.0 and to the best of my knowledge no one ever talks about enterprise-level paper or makes claims that it seamlessly integrates with filing cabinets. Compared to stone tablets, it’s an innovation award winner. But has its value diminished in the digital age? No doubt about it. Document management software would love to be Paper 2.0, but paper won’t go away without a fight.

I’m not here to defend paper. In fact, just the opposite. So if you’re in love with paper–forms and

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IBM Canada Jacks Up Maintenance Prices

April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Raising maintenance on older equipment is the time-tested way to help encourage customers to shell out some dough on new gear and at the same time compensate IT equipment and software makers for the increased costs of servicing hardware or applications. Last week, IBM‘s Canada unit raised maintenance on thousands of pieces of equipment.

In announcement letter 312-040, IBM said that it was raising both monthly and annual maintenance fees in the Great White North on specialized banking gear, all kinds of Power-based systems (both with the i and the p labels), xSeries and System x machinery, and

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Cloudy SaaS Apps To Puff Up To $14.5 Billion

April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While there is a lot of talk about companies moving their applications to the cloud, the actual money that is being spent on clouds is more for software-as-a-service, or SaaS, applications that a company or its hosting partner runs in a cloud on behalf of customers.

According to the market watchers at Gartner, companies spent $12.3 billion on SaaS software in 2011, and this slice of the software racket is expected to rise by 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion this year and continue growing at enough of a clip to reach $22.1 billion by 2015.

“After more than a

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Smart IBM i Shops Get Connected. . . Devices, That Is

April 2, 2012 Jenny Thomas

Smart connected devices, which includes PCs, media tablets, and smartphones, are taking over the world. At least, that’s what I decided when I saw IDC reported more than 916 million units shipped and revenues surpassing $489 billion dollars in 2011 for these three classes of devices.

By now, most of us get it. You can’t escape smart devices, which are no longer a personal luxury, but becoming a common tool in schools and in the workplace. But let’s put things into perspective by looking at the numbers.

IDC combined the totals from its worldwide quarterly PC tracker, mobile phone tracker,

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New Power Systems Redbooks, And A Call For Residency Volunteers

April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are looking for the latest technical dope on the Power7-based Power Systems servers, then you will be happy to know that IBM has just updated its Redbook and Redpaper technical library to include new technologies announced last fall.

Here’s a list of the latest Power Systems Redpapers, which came out on March 22: