March, 2009

SunGard Looks for Growth with New Reseller Program

I like what SunGard brings to the table. I like the idea that they are doing well right now too.

“SunGard’s Availability Services business unit last week launched a new reseller partner program to augment its direct-sales approach and expand its offerings to small and mid size businesses. The new program covers all of the company’s offerings–everything from traditional tape-based backup to hot site recovery and full high availability (HA) replication–and is aimed at generating referrals from resellers and “white box” versions of SunGard’s services that partners can resell themselves.

SunGard has always sold its disaster recovery (DR) and HA services using a direct-sales model. Considering that a good percentage of SunGard’s customers are big, Fortune 500-size companies, it’s always made a lot of sense to develop and maintain a close relationship with this upscale clientele, instead of relying on partners to do it.”

LINK :: ITJungle - SunGard Looks for Growth with New Reseller Program

LINK :: SunGard

Want to learn Lotus Notes 8 for FREE?

I am going to try my hand at teaching on EduFire.com. I want to give back and spread the word about Lotus Notes 8. I encourage you to show up and learn more about Lotus Notes 8

Link:: Edufire.com Lotus Notes 8 Class

Open Ended Question - What are you going to do?

The owners of this site hate it when I put up open ended questions hoping for some feedback. And to make them happy I am going to keep doing it. It’s just that I hope to get some answers and I do from time to time.

1. How large an IBM i do you have now?
2. Does your company or customer seem happy with the IBM i System?
3. How many IBM i Systems do you have now?
4. How many partitions?
5. Do you run LInux on the POWER Platform?
6. Do you run AiX on the POWER Platform?
7. Do you run Windows on your POWER Platform?
8. Are there plans to move away from the IBM i?
9. If you are moving away from the IBM i what platform are you moving too?
10. When your current lease is up do you plan on getting a new IBM i?

I know these are the kinds of questions IBM is looking at, but in order to keep the blog freash along with my writting it essential to know where the IBM i is going and what you use it for. You don’t have to tell anyone where you work or what you use it for.

Novell strengthens commitment to Mono

LINK :: Novell strengthens commitment to Mono

Good news all around the Linux Community today.

“As part of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Ca. today, Novell announced the availability of MonoDevelop 2.0 and Mono 2.4. MonoDevelop 2.0 is an open source integrated development environment for programming with C# and other languages. Mono 2.4 is the latest release of the open source, cross-platform .NET application framework that powers the SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.”

IBM should really think about buying Novell. They are in bed with them right now and it would make the most sense.

The F1 Season starts tonight

Having nothing to do with System i or IBM, the F1 Series starts tonight in Australia. I will be up all night watching it. I know there is DVR, but I don’t care. I want to watch it on TV in the middle of the night like any good US F1 fan does……

Some people live for Football, or Baseball, not me I can’t wait for race season to start. I love F1, and I love LeMans racing too. Those are the things that make David tick. I don’t know what it is about F1 but I love watching it. Sadly they will not be in North America this year, but maybe in 2010. It should be a great season, and I want to see more Jenson Button and Makajima san near the top. I know I am wanting a lot.

Good luck to all of them and stay safe!

Al Barsa Scholarship

I didn’t know Al as well as others at COMMON, but in Nashville I was able to spend a few more moments with him than in the past. Always opinionated and always willing to share. Little did I know it would be the last time any of us would get to talk to him. 2008 was not a good year, it started with my Father-in-law passing away, the Al, then my to young to die Brother-in-Law in Utah. I guess we are all too young to die, but I digress.

Common has announced the Al Barsa Scholarship, which I think is a great idea. Hats off to them and I am sure somewhere along the way Al would have told them they were doing it al wrong, Anyway I think it’s a super idea and he would have approved.

Where is the SUN buyout?

I really thought SUN was going to get purchased by IBM and then come to find out IBM may be laying off 5000 employees? Come on IBM, you know you didn’t have to do that? Seems like the past 20 years of IT have been very up and down. I wish it would level out for just a bit.

Want List :: Lenovo releases new Linux Laptop

LINK :: Lenovo X41 Laptop with Linux

The X41 is small and light, weighing around 2.7 lbs with the 4-cell battery it came with. It uses a 1.50 GHz Pentium M processor with the Intel 915GM chipset. Other specs include: Intel PRO wifi chipset (fully supported by Linux out of the box), Intel graphics card, a 12.1″ XGA TFT screen, 512 MB RAM (Geeks sent us a 1 GB RAM upgrade too, reaching the overall RAM of 1.5 GB), fingerprint reader, a 1.8″ 60GB drive at 4200RPM. It features a modem port, an ethernet port, headphone/line-out, external microphone, infrared, expansion bus for IBM laptops, VGA-out, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 SD slot, two generic USB 2.0 ports, and 1 IBM “USB” port (not compatible with most gadgets).

REVIEW :: Survival Guide for Lotus Notes and Domino Administrators

LINK :: Survival Guide for Lotus Notes and Domino Administrators (Hardcover)

I received my copy of the book this week in the mail. Full disclosure, I paid for this book with my money and have not been given it to review and don’t know anyone who wrote it. I know of the people, but have never met any of them. So with that out of the way lets get going.

First I expect the package to be larger than it was. I pulled the book out of the envelope, and to tell you the truth on first look I felt ripped off. The size of the book was a problem for me. I expected a much thicker book with more “stuff” in it. As it is called a SURVIVAL GUIDE it should thick and over 600 pages. I have many older Lotus books and they are thick and I love them.

I started reading the book, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect the heavy Lotus Notes section. It was a nice start and I will be using it to help me build some training for new Lotus 8 Users.I congratulate the team for taking on Lotus Notes 8, it’s not many times you get a good book that cover the Notes client like this. With so many new changes in 8 right now it’s hard to manage them all. The book covers it all very well. Hats off to that part of the book, the content here is super.

The Domino Admin side is nice covering some of the new features of Domino 8. The Domino Admin part is nice and beefy, but still is just a bit of a bounce all over the place with what I thought the title was trying to describe the book. Now don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of good info here in what is the last 2/3s of the book. While there is some great info, I don’t think the title was a good title for such a short and concise book.

I was expecting a bigger book and for the money it was way over priced. That book should be priced at $29 to be considered reasonable. It would have been easier to understand the size of the book vs. the price if it was priced a bit more in line with the size and content of the book. I could have also done without the hard cover. A softcover would have been better and would transport better in my bag. Please don’t get me wrong, if I had written a book and put my heart and soul into it I would want top dollar for it, but compared to other books about technology that are out today, it’s really not priced properly. I will expect this book to get down into the price range it should be but right now it’s still over priced vs. the size of the book. Have you understood that the size is bothering me?

On a scale from 1 to 10 I would give it a 6, mainly because of the size vs. price. There is nothing wrong with the content. I just expect more for $50 Retail.

I am a Domino Admin, I have over 20K Users and Hundreds of servers.I have been an Admin since R5 was released and have managed many environments and love running Domino on the IBM i. I just wanted to let you all know where I was coming from.

For all those in the Lotus Blog community who like to kick me for “NOT BEING AN ADMIN” can go ahead and get bent. I am of course tired of the holier than thou attitude that some people in the Lotus Blogger Community, it’s sad they like to marginalize me because I disagree with them at times. Anyone can review a book and they don’t have to like the books all the time.

Is IBM about to buy SUN for $7 billion?

LINK :: NYT - IBM said to be in talks to buy Sun for $7 Billion

I think this is long over due. Sun has been twisting in the wind for way to long with way to many decent products (Solaris, StarOffice, SSO, EIM, Java, OpenSolaris,MySQL), that they like IBM can’t figure out how to sell any of it.

IBM has, in recent years, done a better job than SUN but not by much. Part of the problem SUN has is Jonathan Schwart. He is has said nothing innovative in the past 7 years to spur on anything but declining sales and even less innovation from SUNs staff.

SUN also has a bad habit of brain washing executives and releasing them into the wild so that they can convert IT, all the while these brain washed zombies who think SUN is going to save the world end up destroying companies, ruining IT departments and in the end are nothing more then SUNs evil puppets. Sadly all to often they end up in decent hard working IBM shops trying to find chinks in the armor and can’t so they just start ripping the walls down like gorrilas who is unhappy with the decorations in thier painted white cages. They should have stayed at SUN where they belonged, in the fold, on the mother ship.

OK, to be fair, IBM has zealots too, and I know that, but you don’t rip and replace when something has been working well for over a decade. I have been in more than one place where some past executive from one of the big three has shown up and decided his former company could come in and do it all for less. Well if that was the case then why didn’t we do that 10 years ago smarty pants, oh I know because SUN has been on the edge of DEAD now for so long no one trust the investment.

You don’t buy a car you want a warranty on from a car company that is going out of business, why the heck to you think GM is not selling cars right now? No one will know if they are going to be there in 6 months.

You can have the best widget in the world with the best colors, but if you are not going to be around to support it in 6 months or a year then no one will want it, except the stupid, and that is what you end up with when you hire a former IT Exec from SUN or Microsoft who wants to rip and replace everything  for no decent reason. You also have to question everyone sanity who hired he or she.

SUN is the expensive IT choice, nothing they make is cheap or even FREE unless you pick thier OPEN lines. Even those can be supported for a cost. A big cost but a cost none the less.

SUN has failed to do anything with SPARC and also has failed to really break open the server market with it’s pathetic little pizza box servers that are so sad looking when you open them up that you wonder which laptop company sold them the bits to barley fill the case?

Apple and Sun would have made the most sense, but Apple has a problem thinking about big IT, and IBM seems to have a pretty good hold on big IT, while strugguling with small IT.

So I did use this post to rant a bit about the demise, thank goodness, of SUN and the rise of IBM. I think if IBM were smart they would take everything SUN has in house, close up shop on SUN. Retain the decent people. I do know a few, and take that technology I mentioned before, port it to POWER and offer it up. IBM at that point in time will have a killer offering. Please don’t kill the OPEN projects, we need them for the sake of innovation. IBMs next move, NOVELL!

Well in the long term if IBM does take in SUN I hope to have OpenOffice in every Lotus product soon, and move to what I consider a better office suit than the “other guy”

Good Luck IBM.