• IBM Chases HP and Sun Unix Shops with Power Rewards

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Seeking to capitalize on the sunsetting of Hewlett-Packard‘s PA-RISC Superdome and HP 9000 machines and to convert the vast base of UltraSparc-II and UltraSparc-III machinery with the Sun Microsystems brand on it, IBM has launched a frequent buyers club marketing program called Power Rewards to try to convert the HP-UX and Solaris bases to Power6-based gear running AIX and/or Linux. The deal offers customers migrations services of a specified cash value based on a point scoring system that is tied to the Sun and HP iron being replaced. Why can’t IBM just say it is giving away migration services

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• Zend Puts 5250 Bridge Into Zend Platform for PHP

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While you might be interested in creating new PHP applications and running them on a System i or Power Systems machine with OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, or i 6.1, the odds are that as an IBM midrange shop, you have lots of green screen applications sitting around that need to be enabled to run on the Web. There are plenty of ways to take 5250 applications to deploy them on the Web, from IBM as well as third-party tool suppliers, and now there is one more being supplied by Zend Technologies, the creator of the open source PHP programming

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• COMMON Creates Scholarship Honoring Al Barsa

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Al Barsa, the recently deceased advocate of the AS/400 platform who passed away at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month, is being honored by the user group through the establishment of a scholarship that bears his name. COMMON’s Education Foundation, a working group within the organization focused on educational issues, has created the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship to “honor of Al’s hard work and community service.” The annual award will consist of a conference registration and plaque, and will go to a person “who exemplifies Al’s commitment and dedication to the i community.” The

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• System i Resellers Stalled by Power Systems Transition

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Under the best of circumstances, when hardware and software technology changes are modest, server product transitions can still be problematic. But sometimes, the changes are quite large, and this causes issues. Such was the case in the transition IBM did in 1993 and 1994 to the CISC-based AS/400 3XX, in 1995 with the jump to PowerPC chips with the AS/400 5XX boxes, in 2002 and 2003 with the Power4 iSeries 8XX machines, and now in 2007 and 2008 as IBM converges the System i and System p lines into the single Power Systems line. Resellers like to have transitions over

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• SMB Is Going Global, and Collaboration Plays Big Role

  April 28, 2008 Dan Burger

  A global economy brings with it a great opportunity to sell collaboration software, particularly to the small to mid size businesses in the United States. If you don’t believe it, just ask the collaboration software folks at IBM. They will help you connect the dots. Last week at the at the U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Small Business Week conference in Washington, D.C., Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM online collaboration services, outlined the challenges and opportunities for growth that small and mid size businesses (SMBs) will be facing in the next decade. “Some of the little known facts

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• Gartner Says CRM and Security Software Markets Will Grow

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is an economic slowdown, not every sector of the IT space sees decreased spending. Some areas seem to be immune to calls from the boardroom to cut spending because these technologies help the company retain customers, provide better or cheaper products or services, or even boost sales. And so it seems to be with both customer relationship management (CRM) and security software sales, according to the analysts at Gartner. CRM is, of course, a decade-old extension of ERP systems that aims to keep better track of customers and allow companies to up-sell and cross-sell products and services

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• IBM Expands VIP to All Systems for Precision Sales

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of the merger of the System i and System p Power-based server lines over the past several months, IBM is taking its Vertical Industry Program, or VIP, marketing approach from the former System i division and applying it as a strategy to peddle the entire portfolio of servers and storage through its newly constituted Business Systems division. Business Systems, you will remember, was created in January 2007 as the marketing machine aimed at small and medium businesses. The System i adopted the VIP approach to sales, which has very precise application providers working very precise geographies to

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• Power Systems Adds New Choices for IBM’s Academic Initiative

  April 21, 2008 Dan Burger

  If you want to recruit fresh young talent to careers in information technology, you have to show them where the jobs are. No jobs. No students. It might sound like fun to be a blacksmith, but there just hasn’t been much of a calling for those skills in the past 100 years or so. The idea of a high-demand career is very much colored by the local business community. And IBM is well aware of this, being both a global and local IT supplier. The reality is that a lot of students want to stay in the communities where they

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• IBM’s Q1 Driven by Mainframes, Unix, Services, and the Weak Dollar

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  That good ole annuity-style revenue stream, which accounts for a little more than half of IBM‘s sales in any given quarter, was gurgling and burbling along in the first quarter of 2008, helping to float the company’s product sales and delivering pretty hefty overall revenue and profit increases considering the shaky nature of the economy in the United States. And lucky for Big Blue, three-quarters of its revenues come from outside the United States, which means the weak dollar amplifies overseas sales when they are brought back to IBM HQ. Look at how much the weak dollar helps. Sales

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• The X Factor: Everybody Wants Citrix Systems?

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the economy bumping along, sometimes up and sometimes down, depending on the metrics you want to use, and big IT suppliers looking for rich, new markets to mine, every time someone gets bored and the news gets a little slow, out comes another merger and acquisition rumor. In recent weeks, the chatter out on there on the Internet and at the water coolers of IT suppliers looking for a deal and Wall Street banks looking for some good news (and visa versa) is that Citrix Systems, which itself just last year spent a fortune to acquire server and

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