In the wake of any major server launch, IBM‘s top marketeers have usually put together two sets of comparisons for IBM’s own sales reps and its business partner resellers. One set of comparisons looks at the new product line and compares and contrasts it with the immediately prior product line, usually highlighting scalability increases or price/performance improvements for given configurations. In the AS/400 family, IBM used to make a lot more comparisons to Unix and other proprietary platforms, too, which helped customers remain confident that the platform was competitive.

The latter type of competitive platform comparisons are not usually

There is a lot of vintage server iron out there in the world, and most of it could only be classified as energy efficient if the characterization was being done by a pathological liar. The same holds true for a lot of RISC/Unix iron. And with energy costs rising, companies wanting to scale their applications without paying for new data centers, and the desire to have systems that can better exploit virtualization, server makers enjoyed a pretty good first quarter for shipments and sales from January through March, according to statistics compiled by Gartner.

In the first quarter of

Farmers have their tractors. Managers have their PowerPoint and Excel programs. Plumbers have their wrenches and torches. And programmers have something given the utterly inelegant name of the integrated development environment, which just goes to show you that the marketing people get to name things far too often. Call it what you will, but the IDE is the tool that most of the professional programmers in the world–and there are millions and millions of them–stare at each day as they craft the applications that let the rest of us do our work.

Picking the right IDE is not an easy

It has been variously described as art, science, a teachable skill, a creative process, and an exercise in logic. And because it can boast of having all those properties, the nature of programming remains as elusive as good government. The challenge in pinning down the essence of programming is that no single descriptor is exact or sufficient. Almost anything you can say about it elicits a “yes, but. . .” reaction.

Yes, programming has artistic elements, but how artistic is an accounting program? Yes, IT began as Computer Science, and during the formative years programmers wore lab coats and coded

The consolidation crunch in the server reseller space continued last week as Mainline Information Systems of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California. The combination of the two firms brings together two of IBM‘s largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers.

Both companies have unashamedly referred to themselves as “True Blue” resellers, and focus exclusively on IBM’s servers, operating systems, databases, and middleware or software that is officially pushed by IBM itself, such as Linux or VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor for X64 iron. Mainline has also used

Well, this will come as no surprise to most people considering IBM‘s rejiggering of its server product lines and marketing groups over the past year. COMMON Belgium, the midrange user group in that European country that is part of the larger COMMON Europe umbrella organization, has announced that it will be broadening its scope from the OS/400, i5/OS, and i platform to cover the entire range of small and medium business customers that use systems from IBM.

The move is a logical one, considering that there is no longer a System i division within IBM’s Systems and Technology

I don’t know exactly how this rumor got started up again, but it did. Some people contacted me late last week and said that they heard from someone who heard from someone who attended the COMMON Europe Conference in Barcelona that ran in mid-May that IBM and Microsoft were working on a port of the Windows operating system to the Power6 processors.

According to one telling of the rumor, Mark Shearer, the former general manager of the former System i division and now vice president of marketing and offerings for IBM’s Business Systems division, told people at COMMON Europe that

IT professionals are, by nature, a pretty skeptical lot. You’d expect that, after being told so many promises about how such and such a technology was going to make their lives easier, and maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, and, to be fair, after making their own predictions about the impact of their own code or IT architecture, which may or may not have panned out for end users. And so it is during the new energy crunch and this whole “green IT” phenomenon. People sometimes over do it.

That is not to say that large data centers are

The impending announcement of its new Rich Internet Application Platform were not to blame for earnings pressure at Magic Software Enterprises in the first quarter ended March 31, but from the numbers, it looks like the effects of currency exchange rates have pushed up sales and administrative costs relative to sales levels. This is what happens when IT companies sell into the United States when the dollar is dropping in value; the reverse happens, of course, when U.S.-based IT companies do a lot of sales overseas but have their administrative costs booked in local dollars.

Anyway, in the first quarter,

Maybe it is because I have 10 gallons of London Porter homebrew gurgling behind me in my office as I write this–hopefully it will be ready to bottle by the Memorial Day weekend–but it occurs to me, watching IBM as I do and Hewlett-Packard‘s proposed $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, that the services sector of the IT racket is like a sprinkle of yeast in a giant vat of sugar water. It is perhaps going to keep growing until it eats all the sugar in the pot.

While the market researchers at IDC and Gartner probably