IBM may be mostly a services and software company, but most of the services and software it sells are still, despite all the changes in the IT industry in the past three decades, driven by its own server platforms and the operating systems that IBM creates for them. So in that regard, if you think of services as the extra goodies you used to get when you spent 10 or 100 times as much for a server than you do today and if you think of software as the stuff that used to come with the hardware more or less

System i security software supplier PowerTech hosted its first iNSIGHT 2008 security and compliance conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and one of the main events at the show was the fifth annual State of System i Security report that the company put together to give people an understanding of the real security issues that real AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops are coping with in their production environments.

As my first grade teacher explained in my report cards, there is lots of room for improvement and you just need to apply yourself.

The data behind the 2008

Server consolidation will be a top priority for many IT departments in the coming year. In a recent research study conducted by Gartner, 61 percent of the companies polled were already paring their server count, and 28 percent were planning to do so in the near future. The back story on consolidation is interesting. Life often smacks of irony and the renewed interest in centralization is certainly ironic for those of us who know the history of mainframes and minicomputers.

Starting with IBM’s 1400 series machines in 1960, mainstream computing topologies were centralized. When Datapoint launched the minicomputer it

Living in Chicago, the cold hard winter weather tends to take its toll on my family. Recently my family was really sick with all of us experiencing a high temperature. During this recent bout with the flu, I started to chuckle as I was in line at our local Walgreen’s buying a thermometer. Why was I laughing? Because this would be the fifth thermometer I have purchased in the last five years! For some reason, my family can’t seem to have the discipline to put the thermometer back in the medicine cabinet. As someone that is responsible for the family

IT hardware and software giant Arrow Electronics continues to benefit from the desire by smaller and often regional IT distributors to get out of peddling basic infrastructure and move up the stack to selling solutions. Last week, Arrow increased its presence in Europe, particularly among small and medium businesses, with the acquisition of the Logix subsidiary of Groupe Open. In doing so, Groupe Open will focus on its IT services businesses and leave the value-added reselling and distribution to others.

The acquisition of the Logix subsidiary of Groupe Open follows two years of acquisitions by Arrow and its remaining

The Internet is a wonderful thing in so many ways. One of them is that the Internet is somewhat self-aware, and if you tell it to look for certain patterns, it can find them. I did a trolling through some search engines last week, and ran across a few deals involving the System i that were woven in between all the references to content generated by IT Jungle’s writers. These deals are probably more representative of the kinds of sales that IBM and its business partners do every week than the big deals that make the trade press from time

Systems management software maker Tango/04 Computing Group, has spent a lot of time and energy moving beyond its Spanish home market and expanding its product line beyond systems management to broader security auditing and business service management, and that strategy has provided the Barcelona, Spain, company revenue growth and profits for the past several years. And according to Raúl Cristián Aguirre, president and chief executive officer at Tango/04, 2007 was a very good year, indeed.

Of course, Tango/04 is a privately held company–and one that has its share of private equity and other companies sniffing around for an acquisition

In its ongoing effort to attack the midrange market with its ERP software, German software giant SAP was last week showing off a prototype bundle of one of its software stacks riding atop Linux on servers based on Intel‘s X64 Xeon processors. The event for the prototype sneak peek was CeBIT, the annual IT extravaganza–and the largest IT trade show in the world, by the way–which is held in Hannover, Germany.

The bundle includes SAP’s Business All-in-One ERP stack, a variant of its flagship mySAP software aimed at midrange companies that are a bit less complex than the multinational

The first step toward solving any problem is, as we all know, admitting that there is a problem in the first place. The proliferation of various forms of structured and unstructured information and the persistence of paper-based documents has made a mess of things. But according to a recent survey of companies performed by AIIM, an association of vendors and users in the electronic content management space, companies are finally starting to wake up and smell the ECM software.

AIIM used to be known as the Association for Information and Image Management, but has evolved into one of those

Last fall, IBM announced a new bit of systems software for its BladeCenter blade servers that virtualizes the Ethernet network and Fibre Channel storage area network addressing schemes built into adapter hardware in servers. This software, called Open Fabric Manager, takes hardware virtualization one more necessary step forward. But the software is new and it is not necessarily cheap. And so IBM is testing its pricing with a discount promotion.

As I explained last fall when Open Fabric Manager was announced, the software, which runs inside the service processor in the BladeCenter chassis, allows for the hard-coded Media Access Control