Q&A with IBM’s Ross Mauri: Talking Power Systems and Power7

Back in early 2006, one of the up-and-coming executives at IBM was tapped to become the general manager of the company’s fast-growing pSeries Unix server and workstation business line. Two reorganizations and two years later, and that executive, Ross Mauri, a graduate of Marist College–one of the hotbeds of academic mainframia–who aspired once to merely be an MVS systems programmer at Big Blue, found himself in charge of a very big piece of IBM. Perhaps the most important part, too.

Mauri is in charge of the Power Systems division, of

I have never understood why IT suppliers do not just come out and report their sales by product categories, but I suspect that we can blame the accountants and chief financial officers at those suppliers and the nervousness of the marketeers, who want to say as little as possible about how well or poorly they are doing in any product category. Anyway, because IT vendors only talk broadly and vaguely about their sales, IT consultants, Wall Street analysts, and wiseguy journalists are left each quarter to take a stab at trying to figure out actual sales for products.

Because the

Our intrepid PTF watcher, Doug Bidwell of Power Systems reseller and systems integrator DLB Associates, says that starting with last week’s batch of PTF patches for the latest releases of the i operating system, Big Blue has done something that it probably should have done a long time ago. It has created a Security Group PTF set of patches, which roll security patches all together in one place for a specific OS/400, i5/OS, or i release.

Bidwell says that the advent of the security group patches is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, instead of dodging the security issues

Isaac Newton’s contributions to science and mathematics were monumental. They elevated English technology to a state of great prominence and helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment. More than three centuries later, every teenager studying science is taught classical mechanics, and Newton’s principles provides food for thought in other disciplines, too. IBM‘s recent financial results, a sunny patch on a graying economic landscape, beg for analysis as well as praise, and Newton’s laws might offer just the metaphorical basis required to examine Big Blue’s blooming.

The top stories in the business press may be dire, but as we previously

Remember that report out of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses I told you about a few weeks ago that said IT jobs were growing in the United States despite the wobbly economy? Maybe it is time to get a second opinion about how IT jobs are lining up this year. That’s why the analysts at Gartner did their own surveys, and the news suggests that the IT job market is weakening a bit in the States.

This will come as little surprise, with the home mortgage mess and the intertwined effects on the financial services sector and consumer

I sympathize with your wife’s plight concerning broadband. My phone carrier is AT&T. They told me my house was about 250 yards too far from the switch for them to supply me with DSL. Later, I was talking to customer service with my ISP, and she asked me if I wanted DSL service. I started on a rant similar to the one you just published, and she told me she had checked my address and they could supply me with DSL service.

It seems that PeoplePC subcontracts DSL service from AT&T and supplies subscribers who live too far from the

German application software giant SAP reported its financial results for its second quarter of 2008, and the company is being hit pretty hard by the dollar-euro exchange rate that has been propping up multinational IT suppliers based in the United States in recent years. That has put profits under pressure, as have expenses related to the roll out of new product lines, and that has forced SAP to do what software companies do in such times: raise prices.

For the second quarter ended June 30, SAP’s sales (based on generally accepted accounting principles for the United States) rose strongly at

This month, i platform training specialist Manta Technologies announced a new course to keep system administrators abreast of the latest software available from IBM for the System i and Power System i servers running i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1.

The new course, called Using IBM Systems Director Navigator for i5/OS, which teaches system admins to use the new Web console management tool for the i platform, which is similar to but different from the System i Navigator admin client that Big Blue has peddled for the past several years. This Web console is going to eventually replace System i

Market researcher Yankee Group, like every other IT consultancy, is trying to figure out a new angle on this whole server virtualization phenomenon so it can make a little noise and a little money, too. To that end, Yankee released some of the results of surveys it has done in recent months to help spur demand for two new virtualization reports it has issued, just to give us all a little taste of the data.

The two reports that Yankee put out–2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Survey and Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Bighorn–are based on

As we all know, IBM likes to spend big bucks on a sure thing, like over $100 billion in stock buybacks since the mid-1990s, and does not like to shell out what against its scale is a lot of dough for doing acquisitions. That said, IBM is perfectly willing to spend money on fast-rising companies in what it perceives to be hot markets that it can leverage its global scale with to turn them into profit engines. Last week’s $340 million acquisition of ILOG, a maker of business rules management, supply chain management, and related applications.

ILOG, in case