IBM seems to be more or less done with Power Systems announcements for the summer, and is not expected to make any major system changes before the end of the year. However, there are a bunch of I/O and storage products that will become available this month as well as other announcements that Big Blue made back in June that you need to be aware of.

A batch of I/P and storage tweaks were bunched up in announcement letter 113-087. The first is the fulfillment of a prior statement of direction from Big Blue to get its EXP30 Ultra

Marisol Guzman wasn’t like most teenagers. Growing up in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, she preferred working odd programming jobs over attending high school. And instead of going to college, the budding entrepreneur instead founded her own software company, Timesoft, which continues to sell and develop time and attendance software for IBM i and Windows 20 years later.

You could say that time seemed in short supply for young Guzman, who stopped going to high school after her first semester of senior year (she did eventually graduate). While her classmates were more interested in typical teenager-type stuff–you know,

The third quarter is now under way, and Big Blue’s marketeers are tweaking a few deals here and there to try to grease the skids, and the palms, a bit to get some business done before the end of September comes around and new CEO Ginni Rometty has to explain why the numbers were not so great.

Based on the relatively modest deals that IBM is doing, you would perhaps be given the mistaken impression that everything is going swimmingly out there in the Systems and Technology Group, and frankly, I would have expected for the company to get a

Singularity is so passé. At least the variety that proposed to meld a single individual with a machine. How small, how private, how self-absorbed. Dare to dream big. Why join with a single system when you can meld with the entire Silicon Valley?

Co-opting the Valley appears to be the latest not-so-secret strategy of the National Security Agency, whose interests and methodologies increasingly overlap with those of technology firms. By definition, a surveillance state plans to live forever. And, for the NSA, eternal life requires uninterrupted access to galactic flows of data. But why go through the trouble of stealing

High maintenance is not what you want your IBM midrange applications to be. Unfortunately, that’s what happens in many instances. The neediness of the application is directly proportional to the age of the application. Neediness also grows alongside the size of the application. Big ol’ applications with hundreds of thousands and even millions of lines of code are very needy. It often takes a team of people just to keep them contented and predictable. And that sometimes makes other platforms look more attractive than they actually are.

Software maintenance, which occupies way more babysitting than it should, is really a

Timothy, great article! As always you nailed the message! Thank you!

–Anne Lucas

AS/400: Is it 25th or 35th Anniversary?

Sirs hello. How are you?

I am a steady follower of The Four Hundred. And as an IBM retiree, I really like it. I worked in IBM in many functions such as a systems engineer and as a manager. I joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1980 and was assigned to the System/38. You know it was announced in 1978. As far as I remember it was first sold in 1979 but for me the announcement date is

Sometimes the best way to deliver bad news is to try to say it so it seems like good news. That’s the approach the analysts at the information technology research and advisory company Gartner are taking with their latest projections on worldwide IT spending for 2013.

The Gartner analysts put on a brave face and released their latest estimate that worldwide IT spending will hit $3.7 trillion in 2013. Sounds great! And it is when you consider that this is a 2 percent gain over 2012, which Gartner also recently revised up from its original guesstimate to a final total

Time is still on your side, but it won’t be for long. IT departments need to stay current on skills and technology. Those that don’t will become a drag on their companies’ growth and competitiveness. IBM midrange shops aren’t any different in that regard. But there is a difference–the opportunities for training and education are not as prevalent as with other platforms. This is particularly true on the West Coast, where the annual OCEAN User Group one-day tech conference is the only event of its kind. The conference is scheduled for Friday, July 19.

IT continues to be one of

We live in a modern social world, and sometimes you find more things out about executives at IT suppliers through sites like LinkedIn than you do through proper press relations channels. And so it is with Andy Monshaw, who was general manager of IBM‘s PureSystems modular systems until last week it looks like.

Monshaw, who has been in the IT business for 28 years based on his biography on the PureSystems sub-site on the IBM web site, has had his official biography taken off the IBM executive bios section. And he has updated his LinkedIn account as thus:

Magic Software Enterprises turned in its best year ever in 2012, and the momentum is continuing in the first quarter of this year. In the quarter ended in March, Magic Software amassed $33.4 million in revenues, an 11 percent increase over the year-ago period.

Non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter increased 12 percent to $5.2 million, compared to $4.7 million in the same period last year. Operating income increased 10 percent to $4.6 million, compared to $4.2 million in the same period last year.

Magic’s use of non-GAAP numbers goes against generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Non-GAAP numbers generally