When IBM preannounced its revenues and earnings as the market was swooning two weeks ago in an effort to calm a staggering and falling Wall Street, the company’s overall numbers gave the impression that Big Blue was nonetheless weathering the financial storm. While this may be true in the aggregate, to IBM’s credit (don’t say credit) as an IT supplier, certain portions of its business–particularly certain server lines–didn’t do so well. Decide for yourself if this is some kind of leading indicator for the rest of 2008 and maybe 2009.

IBM’s sales for the third quarter came to $25.3 billion,

Taking a page from Eric Marks’ book, Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, Infor chairman and chief executive officer, Jim Schaper, gave the attendees at his company’s Inforum user conference last week his preview of business in the year 2015. Infor, the ERP super group that has assembled a collection of major and midrange ERP software firms that specialize in the manufacturing and distribution businesses, is in the early stages of shifting its application development to a service oriented architecture.

The move to what Infor calls its “Open SOA,” a technology framework with middleware built in, has the aim of

Timothy,

I read in a recent eWeek article that the Mono 2.0 release, which implements the features of .NET 2.0, was announced on October 6. Is there any news regarding whether IBM will ever support Mono in IBM i? (I would assume not.) We have a mixed shop here: Power Systems for our main business application and Windows/Sharepoint/.NET for our Website and intranet. I am doing both RPG and C# development.

It would be great if we could one day run C# apps and Web services on the IBM i to potentially update our RPG program front-ends and interface with

While the underlying technologies that allow us to reach out and touch someone through the telephone networks have changed dramatically and continuously over the past 50 years, the convergence of computer and telephone networks and new software to merge business applications seamlessly with telephone networks has led to much enthusiasm about so-called unified communications. And companies are getting wise to the hype.

IT analyst firm IDC has done its fifth annual Voice over IP with InfoWorld magazine (which is owned by the same company as IDC and a slew of other IT trade rags, including ComputerWorld), and has used

For as long as I have been watching the IBM midrange, the company has been trying to push more and more gear through its reseller channel and put the burden of training for sales, configuration, and support onto the partner channel. Business partners grouse about ever-lowering margins, and the pressure that comes from Moore’s Law, which makes all aspects of computing that have to do with electronics cheaper as people costs go up every year.

The spread between the two is where the growth in the IT market has come from.

But, if you are a business partner or an

Even before Wall Street and the other stock markets of the world started melting down with such intensity in late September and early October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit in the U.S. Department of Labor, was showing that computer hardware and software tech companies have stopped hiring in the States and telecommunications companies have started making cuts.

The U.S. economy has been losing jobs all year, and in the September statistics, which you can read in detail here, the bureau calculates that 159,000 people lost their jobs. (This is the non-farm labor pool, by the way.) Jobs

This week, application software powerhouses SAP and Oracle will be back on the phone trying to get their ongoing, and for SAP, embarrassing, lawsuit concerning the now defunct TomorrowNow third-party support business going again.

According to a report on the Dow Jones newswires, Oracle and SAP had a conference call to try to sell the suit, and are going to take another crack at it. The report in the Dow Jones wire had an SAP spokesperson confirming that the talks were ongoing with the judge in the case and that the next conference would be on October 20.

The lawsuit