• State of the System i: How 2007 Went for Tool Vendors, and How 2008 Is Looking

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, I did two stories that gauged the pulse of the System i business among resellers of new equipment and then dealers of second-hand servers. In this third installment of the State of the System i series, I want to look at how one of the bedrocks of the IBM midrange–application development tool providers–are faring in 2007 and how they expect to do in the coming year. (This story, by necessity, offers the viewpoints of several of the dozens of dominant application development tool providers, which are but a subset of the hundreds of companies that provide some

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• Lawson Partners for Expansion in the Hot Brazilian Market

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Brazilian economy runs hot and sometimes cold, and right now, it is hot, hot, hot. Whenever IT vendors talk about where they are growing at double digits, Brazil is in the list, right along with Russia, India, and China. And that is why ERP software vendor Lawson Software is fired up to be working with a new distribution partner for its M3 suite in Brazil. That partner, Consultix Consultoria Assessoria, has been hired to provide sales, implementation, training, maintenance, and other consulting services for Lawson M3 customers in Brazil. Initially, Consultix will focus on peddling the M3 suite,

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• Climate Savers Launches ‘Green’ Computer Catalog

  December 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Having trouble finding a new server or desktop PC that takes it easy on the juice and minimizes the impact on global warming? Then you might want to check out a new online product catalog launched this week by Climate Savers Computing Initiative that provides a list of IT equipment that meets the group’s efficiency guidelines. Climate Savers was created this summer by a consortium of vendors, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, with the goal of reducing computers’ electricity consumption by 50 percent by 2010. It also hopes to encourage computer and component manufacturers to build products that meet new

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• Former Microsoft COO Joins the Vision Solutions Board

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability and disaster recovery software maker Vision Solutions has built itself into the dominant position in the System i market through acquisitions in the past year, thanks to private equity from Thoma Cressey Bravo. And having done that, the company’s owners and managers are trying to get the best minds to chart the company’s future. To that end, Vision Solutions was obviously quite pleased to announce last week that it has landed a well-known, top former executive from Microsoft, Bob Herbold, to its board of directors. Herbold is the perfect executive for just about any board of

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• IBM Virtualizes I/O in BladeCenter Servers

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The problem with most physical objects, like the gear in a data center, is that it is not malleable. Over time, successive pieces of this infrastructure has been virtualized to make it easier and faster to reconfigure it for different uses, starting with main memory four decades ago and culminating in the wholesale virtualization of entire server stacks over the last decade using virtual machine hypervisors. The problem is, even in a virtualized server environment, those pesky links to networks and storage in the outside world remain physical. Which is why Hewlett-Packard announced a virtual switch and storage area networking

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• The CDW IT Holiday Wish List, Budget Forecasts

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT products distributor CDW hosted its Partner Summit in Las Vegas in early November, and at the summit the company did a straw poll of the IT executives in attendance to get a sense of what kinds of products or services they had on their wish lists for 2008; it also did an online straw poll among CDW customers, and in both cases also asked IT personnel about their budgetary expectations for the coming year. Last week, CDW released a report on the findings of the two straw polls. First and foremost, let’s talk about budgets. In the poll at

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• Computer Economics Study Predicts ‘Anemic Growth’ for IT in 2008

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again. All of the pundits, pollsters, and analysts are trying to pick the brains of IT managers to try to figure out where their budgets are going–up, down, or the same–in 2008. Computer Economics has been tracking systems and storage equipment pricing and IT budget trends since 1990, and has just put out a report that suggests IT budget growth will not be spectacular in the coming year. The recently released IT budget report is a subset of a larger study from Computer Economics called 2007/2008 IT Spending, Staffing, and Technology Trends, and

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• Bleak Outlook for Information Security, According to Researchers

  December 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Hackers, thieves, and malware writers continued to circumvent security measures and compromise the world’s computers in creative new ways during 2007, according to security researchers at the SANS Institute, which released its seventh-annual SANS Top 20 list of the most pressing security vulnerabilities yesterday. And next year doesn’t look a whole lot better, with an expected increase in parasitic crimeware, botnets, and targeted attacks on virtualization products, VoIP, and Vista, according to McAfee‘s Avert Labs, which released its Top 10 Threat Predictions for 2008. For the last seven years, the highly respected SANS Institute has published a list

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• IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It used to be called PowerExecutive, but the power consumption monitoring and management software that IBM created for X64, Power, and at some point in the future System z mainframes is now called Systems Director Active Energy Manager. Starting on December 14, AEM for Power V3.1, is an update to the March PowerExecutive V2.0 release, which was the first to support Power-based systems. The V3.1 update includes new features, many of them in particular to exploit power saving and power management features in the Power6 processors that will be spread across the System i and System p server lines in

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• Emerging Markets and Virtualization Drive Q3 Server Sales

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server lines, perhaps with the exception of IBM‘s System z and System i servers, did pretty well in the third quarter, according to the latest market share statistics from Gartner. The upgrade cycle in data centers and departments for 64-bit, energy-efficient, and virtualization-capable servers, coupled with raw growth in processing capacity in emerging markets like China, India, and Russia, boosted both server shipments and revenues in the third quarter on a global basis. As previously reported in their financial filings, Hewlett-Packard had a very good quarter for server sales in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 30, Dell

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