As we go to press, IBM has moved into its third quarter and has sold whatever System i and Power Systems with i5/OS or i 6.1 machinery that it could in the second quarter. Hopefully, the news will be good when IBM reports its financial results this week on July 17. We’ll see. The thing to keep in mind, of course, is that you have to know what par is for the i course. If you don’t, you can draw some wrong conclusions about the market and have expectations that can’t be met.

In early June, COMMON Europe released some

Over the past several weeks, I have given you the detailed feeds and speeds of the new Power6-based Power Systems machines running i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 and shown you how the new entry and midrange machines compared to the Power5 and Power5+ generations of System i gear. This week, I will bring it all back together and throw the JS12 and JS22 blade servers into the mix–the first blades from IBM that can support an i operating system–inside the new BladeCenter S chassis for small businesses.

Big Blue may have brought blade servers to the OS/400 and i5/OS platform

Back in May, the analysts at Gartner put out statistics for the first quarter of 2008 for sales and shipments of servers of all kinds on a global basis. And there was much jubilation over at Hewlett-Packard, which Gartner said knocked out IBM as the top server seller globally in the quarter; HP has long-since been the top shipper. But beating Big Blue on its home systems turf is a big deal.

Pity then–and particularly for those HP executives who have bonuses pegged to market share gains–that it apparently did not happen. And hooray, I suppose, for those IBMers

The Capacity BackUp variants of the iSeries and System i kickers to the AS/400, which were initially launched in September 2003 to cut the price of a hot standby server in a high availability cluster, were one of the bright spots in the product line as HA software became gradually more commonplace among OS/400 and i5/OS shops in the past five years. Cutting the price on redundant hardware helped boost HA adoption, which is great. This is all good.

But apparently there are some customers with i570 CBU machines who want to move to real Power 595s, not the Power

Trying to hedge your bets in this world is a tricky business, and in the global economy, it is also unfortunately a necessary business, too. But those hedges, as we are all learning once again as we watch the news each day, don’t always pan out. Sometimes they fall flat. And so it has been with some auction-rate securities that application software maker Lawson Software invested in to try to make the most of its money.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 ended May 31, Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Lawson was able to boost its sales by 9.5 percent to just

Well, from the looks of things, the market for COBOL compilers and related tools to extend COBOL applications to the Web is coming down to three big players–IBM, Micro Focus, and Fujitsu and a few smaller ones–Envyr, Infinite Software, LegacyJ, and Veryant. We’re down to six players because late last week, Micro Focus continued its acquisition binge and bought Liant Software.

Liant, which is based in Austin, Texas, is the creator of the RM/COBOL compiler and toolset, which allows mainframe and AS/400 COBOL applications to be ported over to Unix, Windows,

Here’s a deal that I think has been running since 1988, when the AS/400 was launched. (Well, maybe not that long, but sometimes it feels like it.) To help encourage customers first with vintage AS/400s and then iSeries gear as time rolled by to move to newer machinery, IBM has been offering customers a no-charge service to remove the older gear from your site when you get a new box.

Of course, this is not always about altruism. IBM–and its former IBM Credit Corp and current Global Financing unit, which sells refurbished iron as well as features for vintage gear–has

Sometimes, I think that IT vendors are just trying to drive us all crazy. On July 1, IBM put out an announcement letter (308-800 to be precise) that showed the company had significantly lowered the price of its Ultrium tape media for various tape drives in the TotalStorage family of products. As usual, I went through all the feature codes, explained what they are, and built a table that explains how deep the price cuts were. This is why you keep me around, I suppose.

Anyway, that table looks like this:

In mid-June, server reseller and application software provider Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the i ecosystem and is a significant driver of Power Systems and Modular Systems sales for IBM, said that it had hired JPMorgan Chase to explore the possible future strategies of the company, including the possibility of selling some or all of the company. Those plans are moving ahead.

The Boca Raton, Florida, company that they are all focused on has shifted away from IT distribution and toward supplying IT solutions to end users, hoping to go where the profits are higher. What