It’s another year, and now there is another executive who has taken charge of the Power Systems lineup and there is an updated IBM i Strategy and Roadmap. As The Four Hundred reported last year in the wake of the consolidation of Software Group and Systems and Technology Group under Steve Mills, Tom Rosamilia was tapped to run a converged System z and Power Systems server unit. But IBM still wants an executive that is responsible for the Power Systems line, and that is Colin Parris, vice president and business line manager for that unit.

Parris was formerly in

Like a lot of Americans, the only time I ever watch the Jeopardy! game show is if I happen to be exhausted on a Friday night, I happen to have my work done early, and I happen to feel like spending a little cash to go down to the local beer and burger joint with the wife and kids. And when we do go, we inevitably fight over who gets to sit in the benches that face the TV so we can watch the game clues and try to come up with the questions and play along.

But last week,

In the highly amplified world of information technology, the chatter about what’s next almost always drowns out the talk about what the majority of companies are capable of doing to help their businesses today. Innovation makes the news, but in the real world innovation isn’t the extreme sport that it’s often portrayed. Real innovation is results oriented. If you want to know the reality of IT departments running Lotus software on the IBM i platform, talk with some average companies.

There’s a great deal of innovation going on if you are willing to put innovation in perspective with where a

These days it’s getting harder to find a restaurant that doesn’t play music loud enough to wilt your lettuce. And if you find one without music, chances are you’ll be eating surrounded by a flock of wall-mounted televisions. Not to be outdone, some eateries feature both: music, as an incongruous accompaniment to muted TVs. Most of the time I just tune it all out, but the other day the combination of violent images and soothing music made for a surreal experience.

There was Harry Connick, Jr., with a voice like melted caramel, singing the classic Irving Berlin ballad What’ll I

There has been some confusion in the marketplace regarding Zend Technologies and its IBM i offerings. To summarize, Zend is moving away from Zend Core and Zend Platform offerings, and encouraging all IBM i customers to start using the new Zend Server, or at least begin planning the migration, because Zend will stop supporting the Core and Platform runtimes this July.

Zend announced Zend Server 5.0 for Linux and Windows in October 2009, and launched the IBM i version of that product in April 2010. At some point, the Cupertino, California, company announced the end of life for Zend

You wrote: “I would love to see a Windows and SQL Server skin for IBM i that would let Windows applications run on the i box, in fact. I am going to think about what that might mean and how one might build such a thing. IBM is using the PowerVM Lx86 emulator to run Linux apps compiled for x86 on Power processors, and perhaps it can use the same QuickTransit tools to emulate Windows apps on IBM i. To do so would merely require IBM to want to try to crush Windows with its own platforms, and IBM doesn’t

Frank Soltis, retired chief scientist of the IBM i and currently an activist for IBM i Manifest Americas, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the RPG & DB2 Summit next month in Orlando, Florida. It’s expected he will announce a new IBM i Manifest Americas initiative specifically geared toward IBM i developers and IT management during his discussion of the current dynamics within IBM i shops.

“Few people have any idea just how big the i is to IBM,” Soltis said in a statement released to the press. “I hope to shed some light on why the

You don’t need radar to see the clouds are coming. We’re only two months into the new year and already 2011 can be summed up in a few buzzwords that seem to be on everyone’s lips: social media, Beiber fever, and, of course, cloud computing.

You can’t turn on a TV or surf the Web without a barrage of advertising and speculation on the cloud phenomena. As further proof, IBM recently conducted a developerWorks survey of more than 2,000 IT professionals worldwide, and 91 percent of those surveyed believe cloud computing will overtake on-premise computing as the primary way organizations

If you have IBM‘s BladeCenter blade servers running either your Power or X64 workloads, or you are looking to move to blades, then Big Blue has a deal for you.

Last week, in announcement letter 311-021, IBM said that if you buy the latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for your BladeCenter box, instead of holding back with only Gigabit Ethernet devices, and if you buy them online, and therefore save IBM the trouble of making a sales call, then it will give you a 40 percent discount off list price on selected switches that plug into the back

Host access, application modernization, and security software maker Attachmate is that much closer to closing its $2.2 billion acquisition of systems software maker Novell.

Last week, in an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Novell said that a sufficient number of its shares were pledged to the Attachmate deal for it to get done–provided government regulators in the United States and Germany give it the go ahead. Either by showing up to a special meeting in the company’s Waltham, Massachusetts, headquarters or sending in proxies, people and companies with an aggregate of 66.4 percent of the company’s