• PowerVM, IBM i Enhancements Mean Better Power Systems Clouds

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re still chewing through the October 3 Power Systems announcements from IBM, and this week we will drill down into some of the cloud-related tweaks that Big Blue made to the IBM i operating system with the Technology Refresh 5 update as well as in the PowerVM hypervisor and System Director VMControl tools that comprise the server virtualization underpinnings of a Power-based cloud–whether or not you use IBM’s SmartCloud Entry control freak to orchestrate that cloud. We told you all about the update to SmartCloud Entry V2.4, which finally supports the IBM i operating system, in last week’s issue

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• Tough Slogging In Q3 For IBM, Like Everyone Else

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is always bragging about how good it is to have annuity-like businesses that pay out, month after month, and in discussing the company’s results for the third quarter last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, reminded everyone that more than half of IBM’s sales and about 60 percent of its profits come from these areas, which include mainframe software licenses and services contracts. That other half of the revenue stream can be tough, and that other 40 percent of the profits is not a given, as the financial results for the quarter in September showed. As happened

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• Help/Systems Buys CCSS For Systems Management Expertise

  October 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Help/Systems last week bought CCSS, the developer of systems monitoring and performance management tools for the IBM i server. Minnesota-based Help/Systems plans to keep all CCSS employees and its offices in North Carolina, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and run the company as a completely separate entity, representatives with CCSS and Help/Systems say. Ray Wright founded CCSS and built it into a successful business developing, selling, and supporting IBM i systems monitoring and management tools. The company’s three products–QSystem Monitor, QMessage Monitor, and QRemote Control–help companies and cloud service firms run their IBM i servers in a more efficient

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• As I See It: Sub-Atomic Dreams

  October 22, 2012 Victor Rozek

  Theoretical physicist Brian Greene once observed: “No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you’re going to fail.” God knows I’ve tried, but my cat is just not interested in relativity. That’s so yesterday. She wants to learn quantum mechanics. But the thing about quantum mechanics is that only a handful of people on the planet can truly claim to understand it. And that’s probably an exaggeration. Even Einstein called it “spooky.” Not only is the math beyond the capabilities of the average smartphone, but concepts like “superposition,” “entanglement,” and “decoherence” have about as much in

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• Single Sign-On: Then and Now

  October 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  When single sign-on was integrated into the IBM OS/400 operating system in 2002, it was one of the highlighted technologies in the V5R2 release. In the right hands, it allowed system administrators in IBM midrange shops to set up user authentication beyond the boundaries of the i5 system to include multiple servers and applications–Microsoft Windows, Unix, Linux, and others–but primarily the target was Windows, where PC5250 emulators were the bull’s eye. There was widespread use of green-screen applications with emulators running those applications from a menu. Ten years later, why is single sign-on so rarely used? The benefit of

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• Dell Hires Former STG CTO As It Launches Active System 800 Integrated Iron

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few months ago, I got a tip that Jai Menon, the chief technology officer for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, had left Big Blue and was preparing to take a high-level job at Dell. People at the enterprise groups at both IBM and Dell refused to comment on it, and so did Menon when I tried to contact him over the Intertubes, and so I waited for the inevitable announcement. It came last week as Dell launched an integrated, converged system called the Active System 800. Yes, the AS 800. Dell has put together a

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• IBM Offers PureFlex Power-X86 Deal Down Under

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rack is the new blade server chassis, in case you haven’t noticed. Big Blue launched the PureFlex systems in April, and it wants these machines to do battle against the converged systems stacks that Cisco Systems, Dell, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have put into the field. Some companies are so used to having multiple vendors providing servers, storage, and networking that the idea of buying them all from one vendor, and making such a commitment to a single platform, is a little bit scary. (Not so much for System/36, System/38, AS/400, and Power Systems shops, of course.)

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• Manhattan Associates Posts Revenue Gains For Three Quarters

  October 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  An increase in licensing revenue is a pretty good indicator of how well a software company is performing. So when you see that Manhattan Associates has jumped that number from $37.7 million in the first nine months of 2011 to $47.1 million in the same period here in 2012, the supply chain management experts in Atlanta, Georgia, should be pretty happy with the veritable economic feast. A 20 percent bump is a worthy achievement, especially in an era where it is not uncommon to see software companies relying on services to be the sole bread winner. In the third quarter

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• SAP And JD Edwards Support Floats Spinnaker’s Boat

  October 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  The third-party maintenance business continues to be a rose garden for the likes of Spinnaker Support, where Oracle‘s JD Edwards software customers and SAP software customers are happy to have maintenance alternatives. Last week, Spinnaker indicated revenues at the company increased 80 percent and sales bookings were up 154 percent during the first three quarters of 2012. Because Spinnaker is a private company, it releases financial reports as it wants rather than according to the financial reporting guidelines that public companies adhere to (more or less). Two weeks ago, Rimini Street, another private company enjoying success primarily

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• Manta’s IBM i COBOL Training Trifecta

  October 22, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Earlier this year, Bill Hansen, president of Manta Technologies realized a long-time goal: the introduction of a COBOL training series. According to Hansen, COBOL was the one training course customers consistently asked for over the years, so he is pleased to announce the rollout of Manta’s third COBOL course in the curriculum: COBOL Input Programming. “The pleasant surprise is the people who were asking for COBOL training have turned out to be customers already,” said Hansen. “As courses are coming out, I am seeing them being gobbled up by the COBOL shops.” Manta has already introduced two COBOL training

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