• Agilysys Back To Profitability; Sells Retail Division, Buys New Product Line

  June 17, 2013 Dan Burger

  A two-week flurry of activity, including a financial report that showed a return to profitability, the sale of one business unit and the acquisition of another, has Agilysys popping up on the BusinessWire like thunderstorms on a Florida summer afternoon. Agilysys is best known in the IBM midrange community for its hospitality and gaming software that is dominant in those markets. However, the company has more than that on its plate. Two weeks ago, Agilysys announced it was selling its Retail Solutions Group to an affiliate of Clearlake Capital Group for $34.55 million in cash. An estimated 200 customers buy

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• Dell Goes After SMBs With Data Center In A Box

  June 17, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the ever-increasing miniaturization of electronic components, it should be easy to cram a baby data center into a box that does not make a lot of noise and is therefore suitable for small and midrange businesses to park in their offices or for larger companies to plunk in their remote offices. Six years ago, Hewlett-Packard jumped in with its variant on the theme with the “Shorty” BladeSystem c3000 system and a few weeks later IBM countered with its BladeCenter S baby blade server. Now Dell is taking a run at SMBs with a new system it is calling

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• As I See It: Looking Through the PRISM

  June 17, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Christoph Meili was a security guard who worked the night shift at the Union Bank of Switzerland. One night while making his rounds, he discovered that the management of UBS was doing naughty, naughty things in the dark. There’s no pretty way to put this: they were working overtime to cheat the families of dead people. But not just people who died in the normal scheme of things. Oh, no. These people happened to be Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. UBS probably didn’t want to disturb their descendants by digging up all those painful memories, so

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• IBM Improves Private Cloud Control With SmartCloud 3.1

  June 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops and managed service providers that adopt the latest release of IBM‘s SmartCloud Entry for Power software will gain several new points of control over their private cloud environments, including the capability to start and stop workloads at any time, and the capability to deploy multiple copies of an image simultaneously. IBM also divulged pricing details with the SmartCloud Entry for Power version 3.1 announcements, and made a statement of direction regarding “adopting a common technology base” rooted in open standards for SmartCloud Entry. SmartCloud Entry for Power is a lightweight (for IBM anyway), AIX-based software product

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• Abacus Wants You To Run In Its Cloud–And For Your Health

  June 17, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When something works in a small venue, you try to take it to a big venue in the big cities and see if it will play even bigger there. And so it is with a promotion that Abacus Solutions tested out at the COMMON midrange user group and expo back in early April. And now, it is open to all of you members of the IBM i community. The theme is running on the cloud, and there’s some double, and maybe triple, entendre in there, since athletic footwear maker Brooks Sports, a $425 million company that runs on IBM

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• Industry-Driven Training Aims At Skills Gap

  June 17, 2013 Dan Burger

  The skilled workforce is a big concern for all companies. In the IBM midrange community, you won’t find many people who believe it isn’t a problem. Potential entry-level employees with IBM i skills are scarce. And companies that are hiring tend to be particular about that. In most instances, organizations are not looking for one-dimensional individuals. Broad-based skills, including multiple languages and operating systems, are more the norm. What’s being done to address this? Some companies have found success when the IT and HR departments work together on a recruitment strategy that has close ties to colleges where IBM i

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• Microsoft Readies R2 Update For Windows Server 2012

  June 17, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Version changes between operating systems have been getting stretched out across all platforms for the past several years because most of the major OSes have reach a certain level of maturity and customers are loathe to go through qualification processors at a rapid pace for very little change in functionality. And so the industry has split the difference, doing more frequent updates that add functionality without messing with runtimes and therefore application compatibility. And so it is with Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2012, which had a Release 2 (R2) preview down in New Orleans in early June, showing off some

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• IT Jobs Market Goes Flat

  June 17, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  There’s no sugar coating this one. The IT jobs market has hit the skids. At least that is what the latest report from Janco Associates, whose analysts keep an eye on IT market trends, is saying. “Based on our interviews with over 90 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff,” said Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco. “In addition, a number of CIOs do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.” This comes on the heels of the latest jobs report

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• It Could Be Worse: OpenVMS Users Aren’t Getting Latest Itanium Iron

  June 17, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After all of these years and so many battles in the Minicomputer Wars and the Midrange Wars, the OpenVMS operating system is more a friend of the IBM i platform than a foe, particularly with common enemies swarming the data center landscape from the warring tribes of Windows and Linux. So it is important not to gloat as we get what is very likely the final roadmap out of Hewlett-Packard for the venerable OpenVMS. On June 6, Ric Lewis, general manager of HP’s Enterprise Servers division, which is in charge of its Itanium-based systems, sent a letter to OpenVMS shops

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• IBM Rolls Out PureFlex-IBM i Bundle With Decent Discounts

  June 10, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Edge 2013 conference for IBM customers and partners with a bend toward big data and cloud is under way in Las Vegas this week, but the Power Systems platform running the IBM i is getting some action with a special discounted bundle of hardware, software, and services that will make it less costly and easier for IBM i shops to move to PureFlex modular systems. I caught wind two weeks ago that there was a special deal coming for IBM i customers running their workloads on Flex System iron, and this turns out to be the case. This deal

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