It’s been a little more than a decade in the making, but I have a hunch that IBM is getting closer to doing with brands what it has already done with technology when it comes to its System i and System p Power-based machinery: consolidate. Server consolidation is one of the driving forces–if not the driving force–in the server racket these days, so there is logic here, and once IBM merged the System i and System p development and manufacturing operations into Power Systems last July, it has always been just a matter of time before Big Blue would do

Having formally declared war for the umpteenth time on the mainframe last October with its Application Modernization Initiative in partnership with database maker Oracle and server chip maker Intel, Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to take a run at the OS/400 and i5/OS installed base. Getting customers to change platforms is never easy, even when they are not particularly happy, but rehosting environments certainly help and have always been part of such programs.

And so it is with HP’s moves to get customers to leave their AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers. With Infinite Software (formerly known as California Software)

It is a story that is playing out in every industry these days. The credit crunch on the world’s financial markets, caused by the American housing bubble popping and the consequent unraveling of the mortgage-backed securities that were making many of the big private equity firms flush with cash, has made it hard for companies to buy their way into new businesses. And so it seems to be with Rocket Software and its $69 million acquisition of host connectivity and application modernization software maker NetManage.

Rocket Software, based in Newton, Massachusetts, is a privately held maker of utility software

One of the early traumas that children suffer is often at the hands of well-meaning parents who hire clowns to entertain at birthday parties. The grotesquely painted face, the loud unfamiliar costume, the over-sized feet, and the parental pressure to have fun because this is costing Daddy a couple-hundred bucks all combine to confuse and frighten the child. More than one party has been disrupted when the birthday celebrant runs off crying in search of his or her mother.

Corporate parents–those practitioners of tough love known collectively as management–are bringing this same notion of traumatic fun to the workplace. Forget

The appetite for high performance server clusters, vector supercomputers, and a few exotic hybrid machines continued to outpace the growth rate in the overall server space in 2007, according to market research just completed by IDC. The so-called HPC market, which most of us old hands still think of as supercomputers, has always been on the cutting edge of technology, but in recent years, it has been one of the key drivers of the server market as supercomputing has become more mainstream.

In addition to the casing of HPC server sales, IDC has also worked with the supercomputer industry–all

I just wanted to thank you for the information you are providing in your newsletters. I look forward to them. I keep waiting for news of a native graphical connection from RPG to the browser and am glad to see that question asked of IBM managers from time to time.

I understand from Kurt Rump at the Rochester Briefing Center that they have some research projects in Rochester that are looking into this. Hopefully that will eventually make it into the real world. My question to him was if they were splitting up the organization to address the needs large

Note: This article was originally printed in the October 1994 edition of The Four Hundred, as IBM was readying PowerPC-based AS/400s and Hewlett-Packard already had power RISC servers in the midrange.

Military forces, espionage agencies and computer companies have something in common: They like to use code names for projects, particularly secret projects. The monikers lend mystery, dignity, and importance to a risky yet often worthwhile undertaking. For instance, IBM called its AS/400 development project Silverlake, after the giant pond north of the Mayo Clinic in downtown Rochester, Minnesota. In retrospect, this was probably a better name to borrow

If at first you don’t exceed your sales targets, try, try again. IBM last week once again tweaked a deal it announced in October 2007 that gave customers buying specific System i configurations a freebie BladeCenter H chassis and two HS21 blade servers, which use Intel‘s Xeon processors.

In the original deal, customers in the United States who spent at least $150,000 and those in Canada who spent at least $220,000 on a new System i 520, 525, 550, 570, or 595 with at least two iSCSI PCI-X features installed (for linking to blade servers received the BladeCenter chassis)

IT vendors haven’t had something so exciting to salivate over and rub their hands about since the advent of Java more than a decade ago. Every new layer of abstraction in the information technology sprawl always leads to more flexibility, but it usually also comes at a price: more iron, and more software and services expenses. The question that IT vendors are wondering about now is will service oriented architecture, a means of leaving legacy applications and databases in place and then extending them with a new abstraction layer of services, be the money pot they all act like it

Mainline Information Systems, the Tallahassee, Florida, reseller of the entire portfolio of IBM servers and storage, said last week that it has partnered with BPO Management Services, a business process outsourcing service provider located in Anaheim, California, to offer managed hosting and co-location services to BPO’s customers.

BPO Management Services is, as its name suggests, a company that provides outsourced back-office computing functions such as human resources, content management, and finance and accounting; the BP part of BPO presumably means shifting your company from what it is currently doing on your own platforms and re-engineering your processes to