• Raz-Lee Gets Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Certification

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security‘s IBM i security suite is now certified to work with another IBM operations management suite, this time Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus. Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus provides real-time service management for data centers, network operations centers, and IT domains. The software is particularly attuned to working in large and complex networks that involve tens of millions of events per day, where it gives users the capability to ignore the non-critical problems, isolate the faults that could lead to downtime, and begin the problem escalation process. With iSecurity, Raz-Lee will handle the identification of important messages and logs originating in the IBM i

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• Citizen Finds Cyber Monday Success with Quadrant

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  In the cutthroat retail business, one company’s IT challenge is another’s opportunity. So when clothing retailer Kohl’s presented Citizen Watch Company with new document requirements to be used when drop-shipping timepieces purchased at Kohl’s website, the 93-year-old watch company responded to the challenge with an IBM i development effort utilizing the Formtastic package from Quadrant Software. Kohl’s hoped to have many of its suppliers up to speed with its new drop-shipment program in time for Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, which officially kicks off the western world’s annual end-of-the-year consumption binge. Citizen was asked to create customized

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• SAP to Buy Cloud HCM Vendor for $3.4 Billion

  December 6, 2011 Alex Woodie

  SAP last week announced plans to buy SuccessFactors, a cloud-based provider of human capital management (HCM) software. The $3.4 billion deal is expected to close in early 2012, and provide a long-term boost to SAP’s cloud strategy. SuccessFactors is a major player in the cloud services arena, with a reported 15 million subscribers to its HCM services across 3,500 customers in 168 countries. The publicly traded company, which has more than 1,450 employees, recorded $206 million in revenue last year, and has recently seen quarterly revenues jump 77 percent. The San Mateo, California, company has not yet been profitable,

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• Blade Servers Barely Nick IBM i Market

  December 6, 2011 Dan Burger

  After nearly four years of sales, IBM finds itself with a blade server for the IBM i-based Power Systems midmarket that is unwanted and as yet unable to build a following. Adjustments have been made, incentives have been provided, but this product still seems destined to be ignored by a large majority of users. Why? The answer is complex. This product is too complex compared to the servers the community is familiar with and has come to count on. I don’t believe this is simply a case of not enough IBM i shops with a forward-thinking approach to IT. There

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• TSM and IBM i: Not What It Could Be

  December 5, 2011 Alex Woodie

  It is not unusual in the IBM i world to discover that IBM as a whole pays more attention and spends more time developing solutions and utilities that run on and support third-party operating systems rather than its own IBM i OS. Call it the nature of i beast. But when it comes to IBM’s strategic backup and recovery product, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), at least one IBM business partner wonders whether it’s time that IBM i becomes a fully supported TSM client. For years, STORServer has been in the business of packaging, selling, and supporting backup appliances based on

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• Small Biz To Boost IT Spending In 2012, Says Computer Economics

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Small businesses are like birch trees: they are the first to wander out into a new field and turn it into a forest. And as such, small business spending can be thought of as a leading indicator for economic recovery, and perhaps more importantly, create new jobs and, even more importantly for IT vendors, they also tend to invest in computers, software, and other gadgets at a faster pace than larger organizations during economic downturns. The prognosticators and pulse takers at Computer Economics just completed a survey of 157 organizations, most of them in the United States and Canada, to

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• As I See It: The Artist And The Pragmatist

  December 5, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Gather around, boys and girls, Uncle Victor is going to tell you a story. And what a story it is, full of greed and generosity, cooperation and betrayal, respect and disdain, and even death. Scheherazade would be envious. OK, maybe not, but the stakes were higher for her. In any event, once upon a time, there were two little boys, and for a long time that’s about all they had in common. One was abandoned at birth and became a college dropout who collected Coke bottles for food money. The other was very much wanted, went to exclusive schools (which,

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• Cooling Server Sales Reach Pre-Recession Levels

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like the data centers and data closets of the world, which have been eating servers like crazy in the second half of 2010 through now, are starting to get full. The appetite for system buying was starting to slow in the third quarter, according to statistics from Gartner, but was still pretty healthy nonetheless. The question now is whether the market can have a bumper fourth quarter and beat last year’s high, and while this is possible, it seems unlikely. Gartner reckons that server makers sold $12.97 billion worth of machines in the third quarter ended in

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems-IBM i Licensing Deal

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping to get a cheaper IBM i license for old Power6+ blade servers you have in your shop, you just missed the boat. On November 22, while The Four Hundred was on hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, in announcement letter 311-171 IBM cut out the old JS23 and JS43 blade servers from the IBM i Licensing by User promotion. This deal has been running since August 2010. It gives customers that have user-based pricing for the IBM i operating system–meaning Power 520-class systems, Power-based blade servers (old and new), and the new Power 710 and 720 machines–a

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• Big Blue Sneaks Out Power Systems Price Changes

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we keep pretty religious track of IBM‘s weekly announcements, which historically have come out on Tuesday mornings around 9 a.m. Eastern. But over the years, Big Blue has been wandering from its traditional announcement days, launching things any old day and often not in conjunction with the actual announcement to the press for a new product. And, this year, IBM has put a new front end on its customer resource system that seems to have a mind of its own. That’s the excuse we are using for why we didn’t see some Power

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