It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd.

The midrange systems and now, server, market and its customer base has always been important. The midrange products from IBM

The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers.

And so it is with IBM‘s future Power7

When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done.

Mark Loughridge,

Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it–or a mix, if they use a mixed model–because these are the people who either cut

This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good.

In fact, in terms of the increase in IT jobs in the United States, the news has been good for a while.

The

Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions is getting ready to report its financial results for the second quarter of 2008, and as is the tradition for public companies, BluePhoenix put out a statement going over preliminary results in conjunction with a big announcement that it was looking to sell its stake in Mainsoft, a maker of .NET and Java tools. The preliminary report was designed to calm down a jittery Wall Street.

BluePhoenix, which is based in Herzliya, Israel, did most of its business in the mainframe market until last summer when it acquired ASNA, which has

I know, I know. The last thing in the world you want to hear about is the need to learn a new programming language. Or, if you are an IT manager, to pay in terms of time and money to get your programming staff trained on a new language. But this is what IBM is asking customers to do with Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), the heart of Web application development in its recently upgraded set of Rational tools.

Half the battle of getting companies to even look at a programming language, much less using it, is to convince programmers that

Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM‘s chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM’s birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable.

For its part, IBM is going to spend $1.5 billion over the

The business intelligence software space may not be the T-Rex of enterprise software like ERP systems have been, but it definitely qualifies as Brontosaurus, chewing cud to make a living rather than attacking competitors for the right to live. The BI software market has grown nicely over the past decade, but like other software markets, it has undergone a lot of consolidation and, in recent months, the U.S. market has been problematic.

According to the latest statistics from Gartner, the global business intelligence software market (including maintenance and various support revenues for vendors) accounted for $5.1 billion in 2007,

The engineers and marketeers at Sun Microsystems worked hard to try to beat IBM to market with a new 1 TB tape drive, and they succeeded in the task last Monday by getting the T10000B tape drive out the door. But IBM was only one day behind Sun, and was so happy to point out that its TS1130 tape drive, also delivering cartridges with 1 TB of capacity, was faster.

Sun’s T10000B comes, of course, from its StorageTek unit, which makes mainframe-class tape drives and libraries as well as disk arrays. And like the IBM unit, it offers 1 TB