• IT Managers Do Really Well in Europe, Fair in North America

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mercer, the international consulting, outsourcing, and investment services arm of March & MacLennan Companies, a giant in IT and investment consulting with nearly $12 billion in sales and over 55,000 employees worldwide, does an annual global survey of IT manager pay around the globe each year. Based on the results of the Mercer study, it is clearly a good thing to be from Western Europe if you are an IT manager these days. According to Mercer’s 2007 IT Pay Around the World report, which was released last week, the salary and bonus compensation for IT managers in the

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• Oracle Planning Reorganization in Application Group?

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IT trade press is a-buzz about an impending reorganization at Oracle application group that may, in the wake of the company’s unsolicited $6.7 billion bid for middleware software maker BEA Systems two weeks ago, portend even bigger changes coming at the software giant. Although reports in the Wall Street Journal last week said sources had confirmed the actions by Oracle, the rumors have not been confirmed by Oracle. Apparently, John Wookey, who is the senior vice president in charge of application development at Oracle, is going to leave the company. Wookey came to Oracle in 1995 from ERP software

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• Hitachi Predicts 4 TB Disk Drives by 2011

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The clever engineers at the former IBM disk drive business that is now known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies are pushing the technology barriers again, and said last week they have shrunk the read/write heads on a prototype disk drive enough that the company is predicting it can ship 4 TB disk drives by 2011 for the desktop market, and presumably for the server market soon thereafter. To boost the recording density of its disk designs, Hitachi’s San Jose Research Center in California and Central Research Laboratory in Japan figured out a way to reduce the size of the disk

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• Aldon Says SOA, Web 2.0 Apps and Compliance Drive ALM Sales

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, executives from application lifecycle management software maker Aldon met with me to chat about what’s going on in the wake of the company’s acquisition by private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners. At the time, Matt Scholl, Aldon’s president and chief operating officer said that the company was talking to users about how they make use of ALM products, and last week the company released some interesting statistics describing how and why companies are using these tools. To get a better handle on why its existing customers buy its ALM products and therefore help Aldon sell

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• Green Computing Tops Gartner’s List of 10 Hottest Technologies

  October 22, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Even before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize two weeks for his work on global warming, it should have come as no surprise to you that “green computing” is a very important issue for IT managers today. And it will continue to be the hottest trend in IT going into next year, Gartner said last week. At its semi-annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, last week, the IT analyst group laid out what it believes will be the 10 most strategic technologies for 2008. While there are no real surprises on the list, it’s worthwhile to hear what the

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• IT Managers Do Really Well in Europe, Fair in North America

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mercer, the international consulting, outsourcing, and investment services arm of March & MacLennan Companies, a giant in IT and investment consulting with nearly $12 billion in sales and over 55,000 employees worldwide, does an annual global survey of IT manager pay around the globe each year. Based on the results of the Mercer study, it is clearly a good thing to be from Western Europe if you are an IT manager these days. According to Mercer’s 2007 IT Pay Around the World report, which was released last week, the salary and bonus compensation for IT managers in the

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• Reader Feedback on AS/400s Are From Rochester, RS/6000s Are From Austin

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Doug Mewmaw’s article about his experiences while visiting a System p technical conference while being a hard-core System i guy not only shows what two different worlds the AIX and i5/OS platforms inhabit, but how the differing cultures behind the platforms and the expectations of programmers and administrators in these two environments link to each other in their respective AIX and i5/OS stacks to create radically different operating system platforms that now share a single hardware platform. It is a bit like having one brain, but two minds. Which, if you ask me, explains some of the crazy things IBM

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Symphony for the Devil

  October 22, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  Symphony is what IBM calls its collection of free (as in free beer) productivity applications based on free (as in free speech) OpenOffice code. IBM has given its OpenOffice distro a recycled brand name and put it to work as a printer’s devil for its Lotus Notes client and Domino collaboration and publishing server. But IBM is giving away ice in the winter. You don’t need IBM to get OpenOffice, and, besides, productivity applications are headed for the Web or, as Sun Microsystems said before the Dot Com Crash wiped the smile off its overbite, the network is the computer.

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• IBM Hit by Financial Services Slowdown in Q3

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Financial services companies, particularly among large enterprises based in the United States, slammed the brakes on IT spending in the third quarter and nearly gave IBM a financial haircut. Thanks to very strong bookings in past quarters for services that were delivered between July and September and to the continually weakening U.S. dollar, IBM’s financial cookies were saved despite the weakness in the financial services sector. IBM’s sales were up 6.6 percent to $24.1 billion and net income rose by 6.3 percent to $2.4 billion; earnings per share, thanks to an accelerated share repurchasing funded by debt earlier this year,

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• System i Sales Drop Again in Q3, IBM Says Little

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another financial quarter’s results have been reported by IBM, and it is yet again another quarter of revenue declines for the i5/OS platform. With a Power6 refresh of the System i and System p lines not in the works until early next year–the latest rumor is that the high-end System p boxes have now slipped into 2008–it is hard to imagine that the fourth quarter will be any better for the System i than the third quarter was. Which is probably why IBM’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, didn’t say too much about the System i in his conference

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