When the economy went into recession in December 2007, and maybe even before, the top research and marketing minds at IBM were already hard at work on a new, big sales pitch that just so happens to coincide with the kinds of economic stimulus and long-term investments that the Obama Administration here in the United States and leaders in other governments want to make. What they want, of course, is a new and potentially much larger wave of automation, which has implications for our lives as well as our data centers.

IBM’s top brass, starting with president, chief executive officer,

If IT departments are not being given the green light to attack the backlog of application development and infrastructure modernization projects they have on their to-do lists, the one thing they most definitely do not do is buy new server capacity. And that is why the fourth quarter, according to the analysts at Gartner, was not a particularly good one for server makers. Thankfully for them, though, a lot of projects are already funded and there is always basic capacity requirements driving some sales.

Gartner figures that in the fourth quarter, server makers were able to push out 2.14

ERP software giant Infor is taking legal action against customers as it seeks to recoup license fees it claims it is owed. The company reached an out-of-court settlement last week with a BPCS customer, Vaughan & Bushnell, regarding a dispute over an AS/400 upgrade performed in the 1990s. While the parties avoided a trial, Infor is still pursuing similar lawsuits against two other customers for license fees it claims the companies avoided paying following server upgrades.

The terms of the settlement between Infor and Vaughan & Bushnell, a tool manufacturer based in Hebron, Illinois, that has used BPCS since 1987,

During the Great Depression, it was common that people greeted each other with a question. In shops, bars, and on the street, anxious men glanced self-consciously at one another and asked the only question that mattered: “Are you working?” Absent a social safety net, work was everything. It staved off hunger and the specter of bread lines and tent cites. It provided today’s security and tomorrow’s dignity; and made you the object of envy among the unemployed.

For women, it was different, albeit no less painful. Some found jobs for starvation wages; many weren’t expected to work outside the home;

The supply of data keeps piling up. The demand for getting a better handle on that data keeps growing. But the money to convert those mountains of information into a better business strategy is being pulled back. Some organizations may be spending now to be in better shape when the economy starts to warm, but apparently many are keeping their hands in their pockets, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, spending only what they absolutely have to.

IDC, in its most recent forecast, trimmed its worldwide IT spending estimate for 2009 to just 0.5 percent growth compared

I don’t know about you, but I keep wondering where the disconnect is between the U.S. unemployment rate and IT departments. And if there is a disconnect, as there seems to be from looking at the data, I am grateful on both your behalf and my own. The rest of the IT Jungle team is grateful, too. None of us–you, me, and them–wants to become a statistic.

Here’s what I am talking about. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did its monthly report on employment (or lack thereof) in America, and the news was not good.

The Central Florida Midrange Users Group (CFMUG) has announced that it is downshifting from monthly meetings of its users to meetings twice a year.

User groups, while still valuable and perhaps even preferable as a means to network among peers, are under pressure as IT professionals have less time to attend meetings and rely, as you might expect, on the Internet to keep in contact with their peers and vendors. CFMUG is no more immune to this as is LinuxWorld (downsized as well), Novell’s BrainShare (canceled), and COMMON, which has shifted to one big meeting a year instead of

Scandal-ridden Indian IT services company Satyam Computer Services may, or may not, have a Big Blue potential buyer sniffing around now that the Indian Securities and Exchange Commission has given its approval for Satyam to sell a 51 percent controlling stake in itself to a suitor.

Two months ago, Satyam founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted that the company had forged documents and pumped up the company’s assets by $1 billion. The high-flying application and IT services giant had a market capitalization of over $7 billion a year ago, and now is trading at something around $500 million after the

Application lifecycle management software maker MKS polished off its third quarter of fiscal 2009 on January 31, and the strengthening of the U.S. greenback against the Canadian looney, as well as plain old-fashioned growth, helped the company turn in a pretty good quarter, considering how tough the economy is.

MKS, which is a public company whose shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, reported $13.2 million in sales in the quarter (that’s in U.S. dollars using U.S. accountancy rules), up 3.2 percent. The company’s license sales in the quarter dropped by 10.1 percent to $3.7 million, but a 6

The economic meltdown has caused quite a few business practices to change in fairly short order, and office perks and various benefits that were affordable during good times are downright impossible to justify in the current economic climate.

To get a sense of what is going on out there in cubicle land, CareerBuilder.com commissioned a poll of 3,259 human resources managers (working at companies in the United States), which was performed by Harris Interactive in late November and early December last year, just as the economic crisis was ramping up to a scary pitch. Some 38 percent of managers said