Q&A With Power Systems Top Brass, Part One

The editorial team from The Four Hundred had a pow-wow with the top brass in the Power and z Systems division within IBM‘s converged Systems and Software Group. Tom Rosamilia, who was tapped to run both the Power and mainframe lines at IBM last August, had been running the mainframe line before that July 2010 reorganization and was in charge of the WebSphere line of middleware within Software Group before that.

Rosamilia brought along his lieutenants, Ian Jarman, Colin Parris, and Linda Grigoleit, and I brought along Alex Woodie and Dan

Here’s an acquisition deal you probably didn’t see coming, that might seem a bit odd at first, but then makes perfect sense once you think about it for a few seconds. Computer-aided design (CAD) software maker Parametric Technology, which has expanded through a slew of acquisitions since 1998, has added one more: application lifecycle management (ALM) software maker MKS.

Last month, PTC said it would pay $292.5 million (that’s in Loonies, or Canadian dollars) to take over MKS, which is a publicly held company that is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. PTC is traded on the NASDAQ

The weather was a barometer of sorts for last week’s COMMON conference in Minneapolis. Just as snow flurries and gusty winds drove people to find cover, and embarrassed natives of the Minnesota city swore that it was warm and sunny just a week earlier, officials with the largest IBM i user group struggled (and mostly succeeded) in finding success with the annual gathering, which recorded a slight uptick in attendance but ho-hum reviews from vendors.

Light snow fell during the first and second days of last week’s Spring COMMON conference, which could rightly have been called the Winter Summit. But

Outside my window, the robins are working the morning shift, bouncing around in no apparent direction, searching for the unsuspecting worm. When they find one, they grab an end, lean back, and pull. The worm visibly stretches, like a glistening rubber band, and finally snaps into the waiting beak. After a couple of gulps, the bird hops off in search of fresh meat.

Exhausted from the excitement, I turn my attention to human nourishment: coffee. OK, not as yummy as a fresh worm, but at least I get to drink it sitting down. With all that bouncing around, and flying,

Shaking off the effects of losing its most effective recruiter and marketing savant just one month ago, IBM i Manifest Americas has found a new volunteer to lead the organization’s efforts to increase awareness and build membership. Last week, during the COMMON 2011 Annual Conference and Expo, it was announced that Jennifer Phillips had volunteered to move into the marketing director position at i Manifest, which includes multiple responsibilities.

Phillips is a veteran of the IBM midrange community and currently has the marketing director position at Quadrant Software, a document management company with its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.

Because text messaging is the communications lifeline for college students, this communication technique is a natural for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. It only makes sense for FIDM to reach its students via text. Not only is it smart communications, it’s smart marketing. And as it turned out, it was a very good way to win an award for innovation, which is annually presented by IBM and COMMON.

“We needed a way to get in touch with students via the medium they use to communicate,” Roxanne Reynolds-Lair told me on the phone Friday. “They don’t answer emails

Companies in the United States ended 2010 with $1.9 trillion in cash on their books, I just heard on the PBS Newshour as I sit here working overtime–as if a salaried employee or business owner, of which I am both, actually gets overtime in the 21st century–so I can get my work done. And guess what almost none of those companies are doing? Hiring people in sufficient quantifies to make a dent in the unemployment rate.

While I was initially happy about the fact that the private sector in America added 268,000 net new jobs in April, according to the

It’s that time of the year again, when IBM‘s top brass bestows the virtual knighthood of IBM Fellow on its best and brightest geeks, techies, and nerds.

I have actually been to IBM Research this year, and while everyone was looking at demos and waiting for the meeting to begin, I walked along the wall of fame and looked at all of the IBM Research directors and the Fellows they have helped foster. A lot of very interesting technologies have come out of IBM’s labs, but the number of Fellows is relatively small. Since IBM Tom Watson, Jr., started

It doesn’t take any insight at all to figure out who is the largest operating system supplier in the world. It is Microsoft, of course. But who is number two, three, and four? And who is the fastest growing maker of operating systems? The answers might surprise you.

Through the magic of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle was able to grow its operating system revenues by 7,683 percent, to $780 million, making it the fastest grower. Of course, Oracle had only a tiny OS business, selling a clone of Red Hat‘s Enterprise Linux. Gartner said

Calling Red Hat a commercial Linux distributor, as I commonly do, is no longer a sufficient title for the Linux operating system giant. With the acquisition of JBoss and Qumranet, Red Hat has really become a systems software supplier, giving companies everything they need to build a software stack on X64, Power, or mainframe systems excepting a database. Starting later this year, that will also include cloud management tools as well as features to manage the deployment of applications.

At its Red Hat Summit last week, the company announced two new products: CloudForms and OpenShift. The former is a set