The word on the street is that IBM is gearing up for some new Power Systems announcements. The exact nature of the announcements is not clear, but I am hearing a little bit of this and a little bit of that about what Big Blue has cooking for its IBM i, AIX, and Linux customers who use Power-based systems. What I can tell you for sure that whatever Big Blue is up to, and contrary to what some of its own roadmaps have been pointing to, it is not calling it the Power7+ server refresh.

I don’t yet know if

A lot of people wouldn’t pay attention to innovation if it walked into the room and sat down next to them. Some recognize it and cross to the opposite side of the street if they see it coming their way. A few treat it like it’s their best friend. Who are these people and do you ever find them running an IT department in an IBM i shop?

Yes, you do. And the best known (kind of like being the best known mountain climber in Florida) is Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, the CIO at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM)

One of the side benefits of Oracle‘s acquisition of Sun Microsystems was it gained control over Java, and therefore gained a wedge against its Java-loving rival IBM. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared victory over IBM Power Systems in the Java performance category at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week, while at the same time, Oracle and IBM teamed up at the nearby JavaOne 2011 conference to discuss the future of the world’s most popular programming environment.

Java doesn’t command the level of respect and acceptance that RPG does on the IBM i platform, and it

In its 123 years of existence, National Geographic magazine has explored some inhospitable landscapes. Intrepid adventurers have hacked across the Amazon jungle, inched their way through underwater cave systems on the Yucatan Peninsula, and pulled sleds in sub-zero temperatures through ice and snow until they ran out of North. But in this month’s issue they tackle what may be the most impregnable and unfathomable landscape of all: The teenage brain.

Teenagers have been the source of parental discontent since Ayla roamed the Neanderthal frontier looking for a split-level cave. Neanderkinders no doubt lost their spears, failed to tidy up the

I just spent a week off and on with Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer at Oracle. I wasn’t playing against him and tennis buddy and former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Mark Hurd, at the Pacific Athletic club, laughing about how the rest of the world lives. No, I was attending Oracle’s OpenWorld customer conference, which besieged San Francisco last week with 45,000 attendees, and a bunch of announcements that preceded it. Luckily, I was attending these events through YouTube, from the comfort of my very own office.

For the past several weeks ahead of the OpenWorld extravaganza, the top

Making good on its promise earlier this year, enterprise software supplier and midrange specialist Infor is ramping up its effort to recruit channel partners and build its business as well as theirs.

Infor announced the Infor Partner Network back in June as a keystone in its plan to double its sales through the channel. Having gotten its existing partners up to speed on IPN and rebranded its myriad applications, including the recently acquired Lawson suites, under the common Infor10 brand, Infor has now put out the call to all channel partners around the world to join up.

“Our commitment

If the security of your company’s data isn’t a top item on your priority list, it’s becoming clear that IBM thinks it should be. Big Blue’s recent announcement of its acquisition of Q1 Labs, a provider of security intelligence software, is another in a string of clues that IBM is going to be putting a lot of emphasis on security.

Another clue is that with the Q1 acquisition, IBM also revealed a new Security Systems division that aims to blend security and analytics. According to IBM estimates, the Security Systems division will target a $94 billion opportunity in security

IBM is a relative re-newcomer to the switch market, and it is trying to pump up sales of its Blade Network Technologies top-of-rack switches.

Back in July, in announcement letter 311-101, IBM gave a 38.5 percent discount on the RackSwitch G8052, a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (commonly used for uplinks but also available for 10GE connectivity). IBM cut the tags on this switch from $8,949 to $5,500, a 38.5 percent slash, if customers bought them from the IBM web store. (You would think this would annoy the heck out of IBM’s channel partners,

Password management and the security issues (mostly human) that surround it continue to be a bone in the throat of IT departments. Having established standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID to control how users access applications within the network and behind the firewall, now app-crazed employees want to roam outside the firewall and use the same single sign-on (SSO) tools that they have for enterprise apps to get them access to the cloudy apps. The good news is this is exactly what IT departments want to have happen, too.

So IBM is starting to tell customers about

IBM‘s Global Services unit down in Australia and New Zealand is trying to coax customers who have been off maintenance to come back in to the Big Blue fold.

In announcement letter ZA11-1049, IBM is offering customers who have been off Enhanced Technology Support contracts since October 2010 a chance to come back, and is willing to give them three-months of service under a try-and-buy program if they sign up between October 6 and December 31. The tech support contract is administered through tier 1 and tier 2 channel partners and can be canceled at any time during