Websphere News Desk

Is IBM XIV Still Relevant?

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST

Given the time, money as well as effort IBM has poured into promoting and generating awareness around XIV, it must be relevant to someone. IBM recently released another round of momentum news, customer testimonials and product enhancements while making a point that there are now over 1,000 XIV systems installed around the world. 1,000 systems installed (regardless of if revenue or trial) in the just under 2 years since IBM bought XIV would be a triumph for most startups. However for a major player with the resources of IBM, I would have expected the number of installed systems to be more in the 5,000 to perhaps 10,000 systems when looking at the progress of Dell (EqualLogic), HP (LeftHand) or others.

IBM To Build E-Government Cloud for Ho Chi Minh City

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST

IBM says it’s been hired to build an e-government cloud for Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of South Vietnam. As a first step it’s supposed to consolidate all of the city government’s e-mail systems and web sites. The work will apparently be done in collaboration with something called Quang Trung Software City (QTSC), which let IBM the contract. QTSC will evidently run the new data center.

What's Under the Hood of Cloud Computing?

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:03:00 EST

This coming Tuesday, December 8, at 2:00PM EST, SYS-CON.TV will be broadcasting live from its 4th-floor studio overlooking Times Square in New York City a very special "Power Panel" in which Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan and three top industry guests will be looking “under the hood” of the fastest-growing new trend in all of Enterprise IT – Cloud Computing.

IBM Acquires Cisco-Backed Database Protector

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:15:00 EST

IBM has acquired Guardium, a seven-year-old subsidiary of Israel’s Log-On Software transplanted to Massachusetts, for its real-time enterprise database security. It’s supposed to protect data against hacking and fraud by continuously monitoring database access and activity and reduce operational costs by automating regulatory compliance.

Virtualization Expo Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST

Delegates will leave Virtualization Expo with a full understanding of the interaction between virtual servers and the rest of the data center infrastructure. Indeed our overall aim is to ensure that all attendees leave the Jacob Javits Convention Center with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging Virtualization in their own corporate datacenter, on the desktop, and elsewhere. If you wish to submit a speaking proposal for the 8th Virtualization Expo, April 19–21, 2010, then you can do so right here

Forrester: Security Concerns Hinder Cloud Computing Adoption

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:15:00 EST

Concerns about the security of cloud computing environments top the list of reasons for firms not being interested in the pay-per-use hosting model of virtual servers, according to the latest Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009, by Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Forty-nine percent of survey respondents from enterprises and 51 percent from small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not using cloud computing. The survey of more than 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US is Forrester’s largest annual survey of emerging hardware trends for both enterprises and SMBs. The survey is part of Forrester’s Business Data Services (BDS) series, which provides an extensive data set for B2B Market Research professionals’ go-to-market strategy assessments.

IBM Could "Reinvent" Java: Mills

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:30:00 EST

Interarbor Solution principal analyst Dana Gardner had a drink with IBM Software chief Steve Mills last week. He said Mills thinks that the Oracle-Sun deal will go through but that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is buying Sun because he doesn’t “understand the hardware business” and won’t get his money’s worth at the $9.50 a share Oracle is proposing to pay for it. Well, what else is Mills going to say; IBM supposedly walked on the deal.

Insider Trading’s Poster Boy Seeks To Suppress Wire Taps

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Lawyers for Raj Rajaratnam, the alleged billionaire kingpin behind the insider trading scandal that brought down ex-AMD CEO and Globalfoundries chairman Hector Ruiz and IBM server chief Robert Moffat, filed papers with the US District Court in New York Tuesday denying that he got insider information or that he traded AMD, IBM, Sun and Intel stock among others based on it.

Third World Meets the Mainframe

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

IBM has sold its very first mainframes in Namibia to the First National Bank of Namibia, two z10s Business Class machines. The bank was under government instructions to get its systems out of neighboring South Africa. Big Blue says the mainframe’s next frontier is emerging markets. It sold its first System z in India in April to the Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited Bank and it’s been pushing the beasts into China, Russia and Korea.

The Next Sea Change Is Cloud Computing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST

I've been at this 35 years and I've seen sea changes come and go. If you step back for a moment and look from a broad perspective, we've lived through the mainframeclient/server world and the Internet world. And now, the next sea change is cloud computing. The reality is that visionaries talk about sea changes before things change at the enterprise or SMB level. The way we look at the cloud is there's potential for sea change there, centralizing the capacity to lower costs and improved efficiencies. Yes, there will be change there. Is it going to happen overnight; that today we're in a world of data center solutions and tomorrow we're in the cloud? It's not going to work that way.

IBM Offers a Little Blue Insight

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:15:00 EST

In the interest of selling more widgetry to more people, IBM has transformed one of its mainframes into what it calls Blue Insight, a private cloud packed initially with a petabyte of structured and unstructured data that 200,000 of its sales, product development and manufacturing people can access to make a sale.

IBM Turns the Screws on zPrime

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

IBM System z CTO and resident spook Mark Anzani recently sent an IBM mainframe customer a letter meant to scare it into seeing the boogeyman under its bed and make sure it doesn’t use Neon Enterprise Software’s zPrime technology to reduce its mainframe costs. The customer wants to buy IBM’s Specialty Engines for its mainframes, the so-called zIIP and zAAP processors that IBM created to accelerate and run DB2 and Java on. IBM doesn’t want to fill the order unless the customer promises in writing not to use the chips to run the workloads that the zPrime software can offload to the things. It will save the customer millions of dollars in CP cycles and IBM doesn’t like that.

Brown, IBM Unveil Multimillion-Dollar Supercomputer

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST

Brown University and IBM today announced the opening of a multimillion-dollar supercomputer at Brown's Center for Computation and Visualization. The supercomputer is the most powerful computational system in Rhode Island and will be used by researchers statewide to tackle "grand challenges" affecting Ocean State residents in climate change, education, energy and health.

CA Simplifies Mainframe Ownership

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

CA announced the integration of CA Endevor Software Change Manager (CA Endevor SCM), CA's change management solution, and IBM's Rational Developer for System z (RDz) V7.6, the IBM Rational mainframe development environment. This new integration is designed to significantly simplify the development and management of mainframe software by streamlining application updates, reducing change-related programming errors, and facilitating compliance audits. Many mainframe developers already use both RDz as their integrated development environment (IDE) and CA Endevor SCM for automating software lifecycle management tasks such as code merging, versioning, and change tracking. This integration gives customers the ability to seamlessly link related development and software lifecycle management tasks.

IBM Sitting Pretty on Oracle-Sun Debacle

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

It's my contention that we're only now entering the true data-driven decade. And all that data needs to run somewhere. And it's not going to be in MySQL, no matter who ends up owning it.

IBM Introduces New Cloud Offerings

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing include a set of ready-to-use application lifecycle management tools for developing and testing in the IBM Cloud, and use infrastructure management capabilities, to help organizations build software applications in the cloud. With these new services, clients can lower costs and respond quicker to organizational demands. For example, organizations can reduce the time it takes to provision a test environment from weeks to hours, and in some cases even minutes.

IBM Builds Business Analytics Cloud

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Internally called Blue Insight, IBM's cloud environment democratizes information, providing access to a variety of client and market data regardless of where an employee sits in the company. It gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. By turning that data into insight for IBM's sales force and development communities, IBM will be able to deliver more value in the solutions and services it offers to its clients. More than 200,000 IBMers will have access to the new system.

MontaVista Sells Out Cheap

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

In a move reminiscent of Intel and Wind River, Cavium Networks, maker of specialty ARM and Mips processors, is buying MontaVista Software, the embedded Linux shop, for $50 million and it’s only paying $16 million in cash. The rest is stock. MontaVista, however, took in at least $93 million since it started 10 years ago from folks like Siemens, US Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures, NEC, IBM, Sony, WR Hambrecht, Samsung, Infineon, China Development Industrial Bank, Intel, Panasonic, Toshiba, Yamaha and RRE Ventures. A lot of those guys were MontaVista customers along with major accounts like Cisco, Dell, HP, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent and NTT DoCoMo.

Novell Makes Aboutface in SCO Case

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Back when the SCO litigation was under Utah district court judge Dale Kimball, whose decision that Novell owns Unix was overturned by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Novell thought it was simply ducky that SCO’s case against Novell should go ahead of SCO’s case against IBM, which is how we wound up with the summary judgment that got trashed. If memory serves right, it was Novell’s idea that it go first and block and tackle for IBM.

Evaluating Performance Management Solutions for Java and .NET Applications

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

Traditional application management tools are often inefficient and unhelpful when it comes to managing next-generation cross-application and cross-enterprise business processes and services. To manage these new types of dynamic applications successfully, application owners and administrators must deploy management tools and solutions that provides real-time visibility, context, and control from the application and data level through the dynamic service and business process levels; while adding minimal overheads to mission-critical applications in production environments.

The Four Dimensions of Application Performance Monitoring

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

Gartner analyst Will Cappelli talks about how applications have become central to enterprise IT operations, and how complex architectures have led to significant challenges in monitoring and managing the performance of applications. As enterprise application architectures become more modular, distributed, volatile, and interdependent; applications have become much more difficult to manage, and the need to proactively monitor and manage applications proactively has become stronger. Cappelli outlines the four dimensions of Application Performance Management including application dependency mapping, component health monitoring, business process tracing, and end-user experience monitoring, and summarizes the technologies that address these different dimensions.

Cloud Expo and the End of Tech Recession

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Cloud Expo is the new PC Expo, Comdex or InternetWorld, and will be the next global IT event for the decade starting with 2010. This year's West Coast conference had 1,700 pre-registered delegates on the Friday before the conference opened. More than 500 additional registrations came in over the weekend and on-site registrations, which brought the number of delegates who registered and attended for the conference to roughly 2,250, more than double a year ago. As far as the expo floor goes, out of 50 sponsors and exhibitors, 46 companies confirmed during the conference that they will participate in the 2010 Cloud Computing Expo at the same or higher level. Most exhibitors on the expo floor highlighted the quality of the leads they got from the conference, which is due to the fact that we had no free expo option on the registration page. I personally believe Cloud Computing Expo had the most qualified audience of any technology event in recent years.

The Case for Market Based Patent Reform

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

In the wake of the financial crisis and its attendant repercussions across the global economy, the U.S. Congress stands poised to address the issue of patent reform. Much debated and long anticipated, patent reform legislation is back under consideration with the bill possibly coming up for vote, prior to the end of 2009. Under the stewardship of a set of legislators well sensitized to the salient issues and with the thoughtful counsel of David Kappos, President Obama’s business savvy head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the stars are aligning to usher in legislation that promises to offer significant advances in an arena that has been overdue for reform.

IBM Betas Test & Dev Cloud

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

It’s called plainly enough IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud and will provide compute and storage as a service with Rational Software Delivery Services, WebSphere middleware and Information Management database thrown in.

14 More Charged in Insider Trading Scandal

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

An SEC lawyer told a federal court yesterday that more people could be charged in the insider trading scandal that has so far brought down senior IBM executive Robert Moffat and former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz and as good as her word 14 more were charged Thursday morning with conspiracy to defraud, engaging in fraudulent activities and making untrue statements. Those arrested include an analyst for Moody’s and an M&A attorney with Ropes & Gray, the law firm that advised 3Com and Avaya when they were acquired by private equity houses. Those stocks have now been added to the expanding list of tech stocks that were allegedly traded based on insider information. That list now includes AMD, Sun, Intel, IBM, Google, Akamai, Atheros and Kronos. Zvi Goffer, one of the former Galleon employees picked up on Thursday reportedly supplied tipsters with pre-paid cell phones to avoid detection by investigators and paid them in cash. Galleon CEO Raj Rajaratnam is supposed to be the kingpin behind mischief. Besides Moffat, an executive at Intel and another at McKinsey were among the six people previously charged. The government claims the latest round of charges represents illegal gains of $20 million on top of the $20 million allegedly in the first set of indictments. Out of the 20 people charged so far, five have pleaded guilty.

Cisco, EMC, VMware & Intel Form Acadia JV

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:15:00 EST

Cisco and EMC Tuesday kicked off a cloud-chasing joint venture called Acadia that includes VMware and Intel as minority investors. Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow's magnificent tear-jerker "Evangeline," although Cisco's new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

IBM Fires Exec Implicated in Insider Trading Scandal

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:15:00 EDT

IBM has cut its ties with Robert Moffat, the senior VP who ran its server, storage and chips businesses and was arrested two weeks ago for allegedly whispering insider information on IBM and Sun financial results as well as AMD's reorganization plans to hedge funds that traded on the material information. IBM isn't saying much, not even that Moffat was fired, merely that he is no longer an IBM employee.

IBM Fails to Stop Its M&A Chief from Working at Dell

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

A New York appeals court said the other day that David Johnson, the ex-IBM M&A chief poached by Dell in May and sued by IBM to make him honor his non-compete – which he intentionally signed in the wrong place to get out from under – can work for Dell. The courts weren’t happy with IBM. The district court that was asked for an injunction called IBM’s tactics “vexatious” and “a great disservice to the interests of Mr. Johnson and of the court in the orderly conduct of this litigation.”

HL7 Interface Engines

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

So what do you really look for in an interface engine? There is more to an IE than just being a pass-through of messages.

Novell Denied Stay in SCO Trial

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

SCO may yet get to drag Novell kicking, screaming and clutching at the doorpost in front of a jury to decide who really owns Unix. In the first and only head-snapping legal decision in all the years SCO has been in court, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver denied the bid Novell made Tuesday for a 90-day stay in going to trial back in Utah so it can appeal to the Supreme Court.

IBM Makes It Easier for Businesses to Create, Deliver & Manage Services

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

IBM today announced a more effective way for organizations to quickly build, deliver and manage high quality services. Through new software integrations, organizations can manage and automate processes across their development, test and operations teams. These new integrations give clients better control over the services they provide to customers while lowering the overall cost of delivery and shortening the time to market for new services.

New IBM Mashup Capabilities Bring Business Analytics to the Desktop

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EDT

As part of its commitment to business analytics, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an expansion of its industry leading enterprise mashup portfolio, including the latest version of IBM Mashup Center and a new offering called IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service. IBM is also announcing a set of new clients that are using IBM Mashup technology to help transform their organizations by using information as a strategic asset. Every day, more than 15 petabytes of data are created. Mashups are critical in helping people make sense of this overwhelming amount of available data. Organizations from a variety of industries are using IBM mashup technology to empower not only business users but also decision-makers at the employee level to gain new insights from previously hard to access data found in a variety of sources, such as the Cloud, enterprise applications, and personal software and programs.

‘Tipper A’ Had Her Fingers in the Intel Cookie Jar Before

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Turns out one of the government's key witnesses in its insider trading case against the Galleon Group hedge fund - the one that's brought down a senior IBM executive a heartbeat or two away from IBM's CEO - used to be employed by Intel and was charged in 2001 in a sealed criminal complaint with wire fraud for sending material information about Intel's financials to Galleon according to a story by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the San Joe Mercury News. Roomy Khan has been identified by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as the "confidential" informant the SEC calls "Tipper A" in its current suit against billionaire Galleon CEO Raj Rajaratnam and his five confederates, including Robert Moffat, the guy who ran IBM's $19-billion-a-year server and storage unit until last week. It's supposed to be the largest case of insider trading involving a hedge fund ever brought to light.

IBM’s Mainframe Monopoly Threatened by BMC Founder’s Shop

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

There’s another burr under IBM’s mainframe saddle besides the Justice Department’s investigation into its practices with the European Commission passing the DOJ notes – a Neon burr. Neon Enterprise Software is a Sugar Land, Texas, mainframe tools company 100% owned by John Moores, the “M” in BMC, who has reportedly poured a pretty penny into the place.

The Cloud Has Cross-Border Ambitions

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

There is now a thing called EuroCloud, for the moment a French-based SaaS and cloud community whose 70-odd members include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, France Telecom and SAP and whose 30 supporters include Amazon. The object of the name is to share best practices and expand their business across the continent.

IBM Exec Out on Bail as Galleon Sinks Below the Waves

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:15:00 EDT

Galleon Group, the $3.7 billion hedge fund at the center of the insider trading ring that the government, its wire taps and a reportedly secret SEC data-mining project exposed last Friday, is liquidating its funds and shutting down following what amounts to a run on the bank, according to a letter sent to its investors Wednesday. Buyers are reportedly at the ready. Galleon has big positions in Google among others and was one of the three biggest technology hedge funds. If it dumps its stock, it could bring prices down.

IBM and Canonical Launch Cloud-Based Linux

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:00:00 EDT

Since the IBM Client for Smart Work is based on Eclipse, Linux and open Web standards, it can integrate with any third-party software. This gives companies the freedom to use technologies of their choice, extend their functions and preserve existing investments. "Canonical is proud to partner with IBM to help open up the American corporate desktop through Ubuntu," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and CEO of Canonical. "IBM's smart client package running on Ubuntu will allow U.S. organizations the financial freedom to redistribute the costs of expensive software licenses into IT projects that will innovate and drive critical growth." IBM developed this package based on client feedback and surveys, including a study conducted by the IT analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, commissioned by IBM, which showed that Linux desktops were easier to implement than IT staff expected if they targeted the right groups of users.

Fired SCO CEO Fires Back

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:15:00 EDT

The real trustee, McBride says, is a Blank Rome lawyer called Bonnie Fatell who couldn't be bothered calling Cerberus - you know, Cerberus, as in Chrysler Financial and General Motors Financial (GMAC) - which was willing to put $25 million into SCO and get it out of hock because Cerberus has backed McBride before. It gave McBride $50 million back in 1997 to roll up a bunch if Internet companies like, oh, Razorfish (nee Avenue A | Razorfish), MarchFirst (nee US Web) and Scient and that was then sold to, oh, aQuantive, which was then sold to, oh, Microsoft for, oh, $6 billion, Redmond's biggest acquisition to date.

IBM Puts Systems Chief on Leave of Absence

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EDT

Robert Moffat ain’t running IBM’s systems business, its chips or its supply chain and he ain’t serving as an officer of the company following his arrest Friday on criminal charges that he disclosed confidential inside information on AMD, Sun and IBM itself to a hedge fund ring that was trading on the secrets. He has been temporarily placed on a leave of absence while he sorts his life out.

IBM Extends Notes, Domino Reach

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EDT

IBM says it’s putting Notes and Domino collaboration software on mobile and web-connected devices such as the iPhone, Nokia smartphones, thin clients, laptops and desktops used to access corporate applications and business processes. In search of market share it will make Domino Designer tools available for free. Domino’s automatic synching for e-mail, contacts and calendar data now reaches the iPhone.