IBM‘s desire to get a much larger share of IT sales to small and medium business (SMBs) and the company’s heavy reliance on the financial sector for core software and system sales has compelled the company’s top brass to reorganize its Systems and Technology Group. Bill Zeitler has managed IBM’s server and systems unit for so long that no one can remember his predecessor–hint: there wasn’t one–and last Thursday he told STG employees about the final phase of a year-long transformation that has been underway in the group.

A year ago, IBM carved out a new SMB-focused division called

Rocket Software, a privately held maker of mainframe and System i tools based in Newton, Massachusetts, has made the shareholders of NetManage an offer they probably will not refuse. After IT Jungle went on holiday in December, Rocket Software said that it was willing to pay $7.20 a share, or $69 million, to acquire publicly held NetManage, which makes host connectivity and legacy application modernization software for mainframe and System i gear and which is based in Cupertino, California.

The acquisition puts to rest any chatter in the past two years about how NetManage would compete against larger and

For the first 40 years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers.

You can expect many more such power-sensitive

In 1995, IBM shifted its proprietary midrange systems from CISC to RISC processor technology. Today, the System i is to a considerable extent a variation of the System p–or visa versa, depending on how you want to look at it. Last year, IBM sent a processor guru out to talk about a chip called z6, a sibling of the new Power6 chip that executes mainframe instructions. IBM will soon announce z6 mainframes that share a lot more than just some processor technology with the System p. They could easily be more than 50 percent System p, by weight.

The z6

Art had post modern. Politics and economics had post history. Naturalist Euell Gibbons had Post Grape Nuts, at least until he died in 1975, when he became, like all of us, compost. And now information technology in 2008 appears to have something that the propellerheads at IDC are labeling post disruption. This seems to be another way of saying cleaning up the loose ends in Web-style computing, which is what IDC expects for IT vendors and IT buyers to worry about this year.

Usually, the key IT industry analysts make bold proclamations about the coming year as another spending binge

Q&A with Marc Dupaquier, Former GM of IBM Business Systems

Just about a year ago, in an effort to more purposefully and efficiently provide hardware, software, and services for small and medium businesses around the globe, IBM created a new division called Business Systems. Marc Dupaquier, a long-time executive in Big Blue’s Software Group and a one-time AS/400 sales rep from the days of the AS/400 launch two decades ago, was tapped to be general manager of this new division. And last week, IBM reshuffled the GM chairs in the Systems and Technology Group, moving Dupaquier out of that role,

German database and SOA tool maker Software AG is paying $26 million to take a portfolio of application modernization tools off the hands of Jacada, which has been trying to boost its presence in the System i market for the past decade against some pretty tough competitors.

Software AG, which is best known for its Adabas database for IBM mainframes, its Tamino XML database and middleware for SOA-style applications, and its Natural development language for Web applications, has been gradually transforming itself into a contender in SOA development and integration. In April last year, Software AG shelled out $546

Progressively shrinking the circuitry on chips has provided the world with an enormous improvement in computing power every year, but silicon-based circuits seem to be coming up against the limits of physics. That means no single vendor–with the current exception of Intel with its X64 monopoly–can rely on its own financial position to keep investing in ever-more-clever technologies to make faster chips. So most of the major players are ganging up to collaboratively come up with new chip-making processes.

In December, Japanese electronics maker Toshiba said that it would join an alliance of chip and electronic equipment suppliers put together

Israeli System i security software maker Bsafe Solutions is teaming up Indian information technology services company Satyam Computer Services that will see the latter company peddle security services to its growing customer base.

Under the deal announced in December, Satyam, which is based in the tech center of Hyderabad, India, and has 45,700 IT staffers doing engineering and application development work, will create a services offering that will deploy Bsafe’s Enterprise Security suite to System i and System z customers who not only want to manage security on these boxes, but on the Windows and Linux servers that are attached

Not everyone finds their action heroes on the big screen. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme take a seat. You guys are pretty tough when it comes to fiction and fantasy, but could you come up big in a real-life data center where fighting chaos requires a budget and a schedule to save the day?

It’s time for the IT Action Heroes to bask in some glory.

Meet Iain Williamson, senior IT manager with Scotiabank. He was instrumental in establishing and executing Scotiabank’s change management strategy that brought automation, structure, and repeatability to a geographically distributed team of application developers.