I don’t pull the intuition card very often, but in this case, I can feel it in my skinny little bones. Something is up at IBM, and I think we can expect to see some big changes in its systems business in the coming months. This is not just a hunch, but the reading of the executive tea leaves combined with a hunch and observations of IBM for over three decades now. You get a feel for when Big Blue is ripe for change if you have been doing this long enough, and we have a new CEO who

A recent survey performed by Infor‘s EMEA group found a very high degree of satisfaction with the IBM i server platform. The survey, released on the 25th anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, finds a strong belief among users that the system is “future proof.” However, more than half of the users considered a lack of IBM i skills as a looming problem for themselves.

Infor’s EMEA System i Survey 2013 puts into numbers the feelings toward the box expressed by more than 100 managers and high-level decision makers at organizations that use the IBM i server to

Stoked by Power7 and Power7+ server sales and growing interest in PureFlex pre-integrated infrastructure, storage developments, and the emergence of managed systems, Stan Staszak of Sirius Computer Solutions is a happy guy. Staszak, the director of Power Systems solutions at Sirius, describes 2013 at the halfway point as “one of the best years we’ve seen in a while.” He gives partial credit to the rebounding economy, but most of it to the price/performance of the Power7 and Power7+ product lines and an IBM Power Systems lineup on the rise.

That’s not surprising for an executive in the IBM sales channel,

Cisco TelePresence is a software system that gives functionality and character to a robotic rolling plastic column dubbed Ava 500. Ava, ambulatory hardware from iRobot, is five and a half feet tall. It is packed with media transponders and features a display showing a remote operator’s head. Ava has plenty of company these days. Some roving devices bring doctors to distant patients.

And back in computing country, both IBM and EMC are testing machines that patrol data centers. If this catches on, you might get a glass house robot yourself, or be replaced by one.

Cisco-iRobot Ava 500:

The successes of companies that are pioneers in the adoption of managed services–what some call hosting and others call cloud computing–will encourage others to follow. There just haven’t been all that many successes so far. At least not in the IBM midrange community, and especially if you separate the disaster recovery and high availability business from companies who would put their production server in the cloud.

I think the successes in the DR and HA environments are terrific, and they do encourage others to follow that lead. But that is still a long way from loading day-to-day, mission critical enterprise

Big Blue is getting out of selling education and training services to customers for its Software Group and Systems and Technology Group, and shifting to an indirect sales model through a new training channel that it has set up.

Steve Mills, who is in charge of the converged Software and Systems Group (which even IBM doesn’t talk about as a single entity for the most part), snuck out a blog post on the new education and training channel program on June 27, but the effort was not formally announced until July 12.

“This is an important initiative, one which we

My intuition keeps telling me that IBM should be doing something dramatic in terms of packaging or pricing or promotions to try to boost sales of Power Systems, but Big Blue keeps on keeping on, as if there is nothing it can do to stop the slide in sales of Power-based servers it has experienced in the past several months.

Instead, IBM keeps doing little itty bitty deals that save a few pennies on the dollar for customers who are upgrading their systems. The dealing seems to be most intense outside of the United States and Canada, and the most

Summer is here, temperatures are rising, and jobs are in the air. That’s right, jobs. The analysts at Janco Associates have released their monthly report on IT job market trends, and the news is, dare I say it, encouraging.

The June numbers showed 9,900 IT jobs were added in the United States in June, finally surpassing January’s 9,800 jobs, which had been the best month for IT job creating in the country so far this year.

The numbers for IT jobs created in the United States for IT professionals in 2013 have been all over the place. January got us

While writing the article about the current scene in the IBM i market as told to me by Stan Staszak, the director of Power Systems solutions at Sirius Computer Solutions, which appears elsewhere in today’s edition of The Four Hundred, I was reminded of something that Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i, told me when we talked about his view of the IBM i back in April at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition in Austin, Texas.

His comment was that he often works with companies doing the newest implementations and that “in development, it almost

An expected and sweeping reorganization at Microsoft last week probably has more than a few IBMers and IBM watchers having not only flashbacks, but also getting a good chuckle as CEO Steve Ballmer is facing his own John Akers moment.

So many incumbents in the IT racket have missed the boat on hyperscale web technology to drive search and other application services as well as the transition from PCs to smartphones and tablets as endpoint devices that it is laughable to single Microsoft out for scorn. But the fact remains that Microsoft has spent untold billions trying to build a