Patrick Thibodeau

The rush to consolidate servers and the data centre is on. Many companies appear to be squeezing...

A mainframe skills shortage is emerging as subtly as grey hair. It's bumping up training costs and raising concerns among data centre managers who wonder how they will replace retiring green-screen wizards with workers weaned on Windows and open systems.

Dell Computer Corp. CEO Michael Dell and Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison shared a stage Wednesday to detail a growing alliance built around selling clustered server systems to enterprises, while predicting that their systems and open-standards approach would relegate proprietary systems to niche status.

State IT spending will rise this year, boosted by increases in federal homeland security and homeland defense funding. But new IT projects will be few, and even funding for critical homeland security projects will be hard to come by.

Cardinal Health Inc.'s warehouse automation project was big, but then, so is the company.

The big winter storm that shut down many federal government operations in the District of Columbia didn't hurt Mattress Giant Corp. That's because of a company decision to make teleworking an essential part of its IT strategy.

Red Hat Inc. is hardly alone in wanting more federal business to offset weakened private-sector demand, and the Raleigh, N.C., vendor believes it will be helped by having received the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency's Common Operating Environment (COE) certification for its advanced server products. COE certification means that Red Hat's server operating system meets government security and interoperability standards.

A U.S. District Court judge's plan to force Microsoft Corp. to ship the most recent version of Java software with Windows desktop operating systems may revive Java development and help rival Sun Microsystems Inc. battle .Net.