As I explained in last week’s issue when I tried to suss out how the midrange market continues to evolve, all the big IT players and plenty of small ones have set their sights on the small and medium business (SMB) market as a means of trying to grow their own businesses. And the reason is simple: the S and M portions of the economy are growing their IT spending at a substantially higher pace than the E, or enterprise, portion of the economy. But to succeed in the midrange, you can’t just concentrate on customers. You also have to

One quarter has ended, and another has begun, and it being summer and all, now is the traditional time when IBM has done some nipping and tucking in its System i and System p product catalogs. Just because we are all one big, happy Power Systems family doesn’t mean that such traditions are now done for. In fact, last week, Big Blue made a few tweaks to the products in the Power Systems lineup.

None of these announcements are huge issues, but if you are in the middle of a Power Systems acquisition, these changes are still significant.

First of

IBM last week announced two additions to DB2 Web Query, the graphical business intelligence tool for generating and viewing reports and queries on the i operating system (formerly i5/OS). In September, IBM will deliver a new tool called Report Broker, which automatically distributes reports, and a new software development kit (SDK), which will enable customers and ISVs to integrate DB2 Web Query with existing applications.

DB2 Web Query is a special version of Information Builder‘s WebFOCUS software that IBM announced in March 2007 and delivered that September. The software, which enables users to write queries for the DB2

A couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done–preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department.

Now, marketing is not a reality-based profession. It is most assuredly faith-based, complete with promises of eternal satisfaction. Just sign here and accept Qwest as your provider, and you will be granted eternal access at heavenly speeds. Well, as

After a protracted, painful, and ultimately successful bid to acquire rival PeopleSoft by Oracle that resulted in the contentious deal being done in January 2005, Oracle’s key enterprise application software rival, SAP, made a wiseguy move–and what looked like a clever move– only a few weeks later in acquiring TomorrowNow, a company that provided support to the application suites under control of the greatly expanded Oracle. But the grins at SAP all turned to chagrins in March 2007 when TomorrowNow and SAP were slapped with lawsuits for illegally downloading Oracle’s support materials.

Last summer, SAP’s chief executive officer,

My dicing and slicing of the demographics of the midrange server market last week elicited an interesting response from a reader, suggesting a much cleaner way of thinking about how to separate small, medium, and large enterprises and their IT departments from each other. Check it out.

Hey, TPM:

Here’s an even simpler distinction, call it B and C. There are companies where the decision to buy a server or an application is made by a hired manager and those where the decision is made by the owners.

• To the former, the money comes from their Budget.
• To the latter,

OK, so I laughed out loud when I saw this recent report from Gartner. Not because the idea is wrong, but because I thought that all end users were pretty much unhappy with their IT departments.

The report, which will be presented in the coming months at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit and its Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit, had this very simple premise: More than 50 percent of end users will be dissatisfied with the slow rate of IT change in their enterprises by 2013. That projection is weighed against the current dissatisfaction with the gung-ho rate of IT

My journalistic spidey sense is still pretty good, it looks like. Two weeks ago, I told you that IBM lowered prices on Ultrium tape cartridges by a pretty big percentage and then raised them right back up again a week later. I also said that I couldn’t wait to see what IBM did on July 15 or July 22, because this story wasn’t over.

Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t over. Let’s recap, just so we don’t cause as much confusion on this as IBM has. Here are the price changes on Ultrium media announced on July 1, in

As we are all well aware, patent laws can be as much of a problem for innovation as they can be a boon for it. A patent is only as good as the clerk’s understanding of the technology field they are issuing patents for, and unfortunately, not everyone can be as smart as Albert Einstein, perhaps the smartest patent clerk in the world.

This is how we get into the situation that we see from time to time in the information technology racket: a small and obscure company holds patents that seem to apply to a broad line of technologies,

Here’s a name that you will recognize: Mike Borman. No, he’s not the Apollo astronaut and former chief executive officer at Eastern Air Lines, but rather the former general manager of the iSeries division at IBM and now the new chief executive officer at systems management product maker Avocent.

Borman was named general manager of the iSeries division in July 2004, and took a bunch of heat at the COMMON midrange user group meeting that fall and made a series of commitments to listen to iSeries shops, improve the product line, and do a better job selling the box.