A private equity firm is rumored to be eyeing Micro Focus International as an acquisition target. The British software company, which is suffering from flat sales and a rash of executive departures, last week confirmed speculation in the press that it has been approached about selling the company, but declined to provide specifics. Micro Focus owns the popular RUMBA emulator, but most of its revenue comes from COBOL tools for mainframes.

Micro Focus was the subject of takeover speculation in early March, when IBM and SAP were rumored to be looking at the company. Micro Focus denied the rumors, even

It has been more than a year since IBM got its first Power7-based machines out the door, and about six months since the chips were fully ramped across the Power Systems lineup. The server processor racket waits for no one, and a slow poke will quickly get left behind in the volume and midrange space. And so Big Blue has to continue to advance the Power chips if it wants to get all of those systems, software, and services revenues these chips drive.

IBM has not been exactly forthcoming about the future Power7+ and Power8 processors, but the company is

All of those shareholders of Lawson Software who had been hoping that perpetually hungry software giant Oracle might take a run at its much smaller software rival are no doubt sorely disappointed–and perhaps have lost a bit of money–now that Lawson last week accepted the original and unsolicited offer that Golden Gate Capital and its ERP software brand, Infor, made back in March.

Golden Gate offered $11.25 per share to take over Lawson. The reason for disappointment, if there is any, is that Lawson shares were trading as high as $13.06 a pop when people thought that someone might

It had been a long, difficult day for Tarzan. He was pleased to finally make that last swing into his tree house, where Jane was waiting. “Honey,” he said, securing the vine so it would be ready in the morning, “it’s a jungle out there.” The fictional jungle in which Tarzan lived had its share of two- and four-legged miscreants, but it was a safe haven compared to that digital sewer, the Internet, where IBM is trying to build a trade in security.

IBM dove into the deep end of the security business about five year ago when it bought

There are 95 counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And based on a few phone calls I made last week, it seems fair to estimate about 75 of those local governments run their core business applications on what most people there would call the IBM AS/400. That includes some just-out-of-the-box iron as well as some machines that are getting a little long in the tooth. Clarke County has a six-year-old IBM iSeries 520. And that’s where this story begins.

A week ago, Clarke County’s Joint Administrative Services (JAS) committee met to contemplate, cogitate, and deliberate whether an upgrade of county’s

I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your insightful, thought-provoking articles. Today’s article, As I See It: ‘He Kindly Stopped for Me’, is another great one. I am very much like Richard in that I don’t think about death. But I know I need to in order to appreciate life and prioritize. Thanks.

–Doug

Thank you for that article. Insightful and meaningful. We all need a reminder for us to evaluate what is important in life. Thank you.

–Paula

Victor, your columns are always moving and thought-provoking.

Today’s column put things in perspective for me

Two weeks ago, I told you about how IBM was replacing the Hardware Management Console (HMC) for rack and tower Power-based servers with a new console called the Systems Director Management Console (SDMC) that would add BladeCenter chassis and Power-based blades to the mix with converged Systems Director-HMC functionality.

I received an interesting comment on the SDMC from a reader of The Four Hundred and also stumbled on a roadmap for the HMC-to-SDMC transition that spreads a little more light on Big Blue’s plans that its announcement April 12 did.

First, the reader comment:

Is it just me or is

The IBM money machine continues to perform as it has been engineered to do, and predictably at Big Blue’s annual shareholder meeting last week in St. Louis, Missouri, the company announced that the board of directors had bumped up the company’s quarterly dividend as well as authorized the company to spend another $8 billion buying up its own shares down on the New York Stock Exchange.

The dividend was bumped up to 75 cents per share per quarter, a 15 percent rise since the dividend was increased almost exactly a year ago to 60 cents. IBM was bragging that this

All signs continue to point to a bullish 2011, which has already brought news of rising spending and increased hiring within the IT industry. Server and storage sales were up as 2010 came to a close, and the latest prediction from the analysts at Gartner indicates the application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) market is also on an upward trend.

Gartner recently reported the worldwide AIM software revenue market totaled $17.6 billion in 2010, which is a 7.3 percent increase over 2009, when AIM revenue grew 3.4 percent and reached $16.4 billion.

According to Gartner, the AIM market has a dozen

The recovery in IT spending seems to be coming along if the sales at ERP software juggernaut SAP are any indication. But the company is spending more money to make more money, and that means its profits are not keeping pace, much less growing faster than revenues as investors like to see. The profit pressure might mean, however, that SAP is giving customers some good deals to make deals, and that is good for customers.

In the first quarter of 2011 ended in March, SAP’s software license revenues rose by 26 percent, to €583m; software and related services revenues increased