It is the beginning of a new year, and a time when IBM is not only readying a new line of Power-based servers and an improved i5/OS operating system, but also rejiggering its Systems and Technology Group to do a better job chasing server sales among small and medium businesses and to preserve its strength in the enterprise server space. Before the concrete is poured into the 2008 forms, it is probably a good idea for all of us to give Big Blue a sense of the things we would like it to do with the System i product line.

In the two decades I have been watching the systems and server racket, the OS/400 and i5/OS family of operating systems have probably given their nearly 300,000 or so unique customers the least amount of trouble possible for a complex computer system running mission-critical applications. While some people have crabbed about bugs in particular releases since 1988 or were upset in 1995 and 1996 by the troubles they had making the CISC-to-RISC jump, software upgrades have been a comparatively easy process.

And so, as we look ahead this year to the launch of i5/OS V6R1, which is in final best

The company’s name is pronounced “Ex Eye Vee,” and it stands for the Roman numeral for “fourteen,” in honor of the fourteenth class of the Talpiot technical university, run by the Israeli military, that XIV Limited‘s founders all hail. And now the Israeli startup specializing in clustered disk storage is part of IBM‘s System Storage unit, which has its hands on the small company’s substantial expertise in block-level, virtualized, clustered storage arrays.

IBM and XIV did not detail the price it paid for the company, but the Israeli business newspaper Globes reported on December 30, several days before

The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was “time sensitive.” But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn’t hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and

The concept of service oriented architecture (SOA) remains a slippery fish to grasp. For many people, SOA defies an accurate and meaningful description. Some deny that it is anything new. It can be said that it entails new standards-based ways of tying business processes together, another way of saying interoperability, and that is perhaps its most valuable benefit. Not being able to precisely describe it doesn’t stand in the way of people claiming to know it when they see it.

Because SOA is thought of so differently depending on the person you ask, the very nature of surveys on this

Rocket Software is a hungry software company these days, and has made another acquisition after gobbling up NetManage for $69 million only a few weeks ago. Last week, Rocket Software announced that it had picked up the assets of a privately held information lifecycle management (ILM) software maker named Arkivio for an undisclosed sum.

Arkivio, which is not just some made-up buzzword but Italian for “archive,” was founded in December 2000 after four former executives from a company that made network attached storage called Creative Design Solutions was bought by then-relatively healthy disk maker Maxtor a year earlier. (Maxtor was

Many data center managers across the globe have heard of Norcross, Georgia-based Canvas Systems, which is a distributor of new and used servers that run i5/OS, Unix, Windows, Linux servers from IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems as well as storage, networking, IP telephony, and systems software associated with these boxes. Now, Canvas Systems has a new IT consulting and managed services sister company that has been given the name Corus Group.

The new company, which will also be located in Norcross and, like its sibling, will serve customers around the globe, is not to be

Back in February 2007, Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at Stanford University, created a model of server installed base and electricity usage for these servers based on data from IDC to try to get a handle on how much power servers were consuming and how quickly that consumption was growing. The data in Koomey’s original model was based on IDC stats for the United States and the world as a whole, and he has now updated it with finer-grained data from IDC to show power use by geographical regions.

The original

It is starting to look like the acquisition of rival ERP vendor Intentia International was a good idea for Lawson Software despite some of the criticism that investors heaped upon the two companies when Lawson shelled out $480 million in stock to buy Intentia back in June 2005. In the second quarter of its fiscal 2008, Lawson booked sales of $218.6 million in its second quarter of fiscal 2008 ended November 30, up 18 percent compared to the prior year’s second quarter.

Importantly, Lawson had double-digit revenue growth across sales of software licenses, maintenance, and consulting revenues. Specifically, software license

This one reminds me of the conversation I had with my father over standard versus automatic transmissions in cars when I was a lazy teenager and there was a cranky clutch that took way too much of a delicate touch to work correctly. Two professors of computer science at New York University who are also the top brass at a company specializing in the Ada programming language, have written a paper that explains why Java is a terrible first language for newbie coders to learn.

In a paper entitled Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?,