Yet another private equity firm has taken a stake in the IBM i marketplace. Last week, Boston-based Candescent Partners bought document management company Quadrant Software from the company’s founders, Peter DePierro and Gary Langton, for an undisclosed sum. Under the deal with Candescent Partners, DePierro and Langton are selling the Quadrant Software side of the business, which includes FastFax and Formtastic, to the private equity firm while retaining control of IntelliChief, the workflow management tool created by Quadrant.

According to Langton, the IntelliChief business has been a standalone company for the past two years and neither he nor DePierro

Cloud computing is confusing. It helps if you study it in bite-sized portions. For midrange shops running their core business applications on the IBM i and OS/400 platforms formerly known as AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now Power Systems, there are three considerations that should grab your eyeballs. They are skills, security, and services. You can look at them individually or in combination, but they will likely be a primary factor in whether the cloud is important to you now or in the near future.

We have cloud proliferation. Every day new clouds come puffing out of virtual smokestacks, if

There is still plenty of pent up demand out there in the data centers and data closets of the world for servers thanks to the dearth of server spending during the Great Recession. According to the box counters at Gartner, who released the market stats for the third quarter last week, companies shelled out some $12.3 billion acquiring 2.19 million servers in the 13-week period running from the beginning of June through the end of September.

Everyone wants to throw a party because that represented 15.3 percent revenue growth and 14.2 percent shipment growth compared to the third quarter

I’m writing an article about stress, under stress. I’d enjoy the irony if it was happening to someone else, but it isn’t. I had intended to write this piece all along, but I thought the deadline was a week away. And since I tend to be somewhat spacious with my writing process, enjoying it as I would a multi-course meal, being rushed stresses me out. But when my boss called and asked, “Hey, where’s the article?” the only appropriate response was to murmur a mea culpa and ask for his indulgence until the end of the business day.

It’s amazing

Maxava recently amended its false-advertising lawsuit against Vision Solutions to include more accusations, including interfering with a Maxava prospect and abusing its monopoly of the market for IBM i high availability and disaster recovery software. The New Zealand software maker, which won a temporary injunction against Vision six month ago, also listed a Vision business partner, the reseller Sirius Computer Solutions, as a defendant in its latest court filing.

A lot has transpired in this case since we first covered it in June, when Judge George Wu approved Maxava’s request for a temporary injunction and ordered Vision to

It looks like some customers are balking at the prices that IBM is trying to charge for storage chassis and a new solid state disk-PCI-Express RAID controller bundle that aims to boost the throughput of Power7-based machines.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday and just after I had already went to press with the prior issue of The Four Hundred, IBM said in announcement letter 310-295 that it was cutting the price on the feature 1135 integrated storage controller by 13.3 percent. This device is not a storage controller, but rather a 2U chassis with two dozen 300 GB disks

With the first round of the Oracle versus SAP and TomorrowNow lawsuit over and a jury awarding Oracle $1.3 billion in damages and all eyes turning to Rimini Street, which is suing and being sued by Oracle over its third-party support, it is an appropriate time, perhaps, to ask about how happy Oracle’s application software customers are with their vendor.

If a new survey by Computer Economics is any guide, the answer for some Oracle shops seems to be “not very much.”

The IT market researcher, which has just put together a report called Go-Forward Strategies for Oracle Application

Anytime is the right time to demonstrate you’re a cost-conscious employee, right? And you can also explain the return on investment that improving IT skills provides, right? Put those two things together and make a case for early registration to the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which occurs May 1 through 4.

If you get that registration accomplished by December 31, the savings is $400. That will buy a round trip airline ticket from just about anywhere in the continental United States.

The standard price (no early registration discount applied) for full conference registration is $1,695

Having done a very successful initial public offering back in July, the backers behind Qlik Technologies are going back in for a second offering to cash in their investment in the company.

Last Monday, QlikTech announced that its backers have a secondary offering of its shares on the NASDAQ market, with its owners offering 10 million shares of common stock and letting the underwriters of the stock push another 1.5 million shares if they were received with enthusiasm by investors. On Friday, the Radnor, Pennsylvania, company said it could do better than that and expected its venture capital backers to

Yikes! Our working lives are killing us. I know you’ve probably felt that way for longer than you want to admit–maybe since your first job. But it’s one thing to feel that way without statistics to back it up and another thing to have the statistics to back up your thinking. Did you know that more heart attacks happen on Monday? A coincidence that we go back to work on Mondays? I don’t think so. But going back to work on Monday isn’t really the case for a lot of workers. They’ve been working throughout the weekend anyway.

Last month,