When first we practice to deceive. . . . . Since the beginning of 2008, IBM has tangled itself in a web of nonsensical numbers to report its financial results for its System i, System p, and Power Systems lines. I know that the top brass has given some bookkeeping reasons why it started calling things Legacy i and Converged System p instead of just Power Systems running i, AIX, and Linux. And as I have said since the beginning of this process, it is horse hockey.

Unlike the relatively few people who have picked up on this theme and

For all of the talk about how IBM is enthusiastic about pushing the Power Systems i product into small and medium businesses, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder. I know a number of customers out there are doing just the same after IBM has apparently and quietly changed the pricing and bundling of its application development tools for the i platform yet again.

Back on January 29, when IBM was rolling out i 6.1, IBM previewed Rational Developer for System i (RDi) Version 7.1, which has the official designation of 5733-RDI in the IBM catalog.

Infor, with its “Open SOA” initiative just beginning to spew out products for its massive ERP software installed base, is aiming for that customer dream of actually reducing IT complexity while increasing interoperability and reducing costs. Can it make that dream come true or does that only occur in the marketing department’s dream world? With more than 18,000 ERP software customers running on the IBM System i, and another 50,000 or so running ERP on other platforms, there are a lot of eyes on Infor.

The Infor view of SOA is interesting because of its open approach, which avoids

As the election draws near, the experts are again speculating about which sector of society will provide the winning margin. Will it be the undecideds, or first-time voters, or minorities who ultimately decide the course of the nation? Or perhaps our future will be fashioned by the frozen hands of hockey moms, or the lead feet of NASCAR dads, or the uppity minds of latte-sipping intellectuals. Or, who knows, maybe Chicago’s cemetery precincts will weigh in, or space aliens will drop off their absentee ballots?

Or, just maybe, none of them will matter.

The astute candidate will be courting another

While a lot of the conversations in the board rooms, corner offices, and cubicles these days are about budgets, and the IT budget in particular since CEOs and CFOs often try to make cuts there first and make-do with the hard and soft wares they have in times of economic crisis, IT spending slows but it has never stopped. And it won’t in 2009, either. In fact, there are a whole slew of technologies that companies will deploy regardless of the economic situation–and maybe particularly if the economy continues to sour.

As part of its recent Symposium/ITxpo, an annual event

I had a quick question. Your articles cover worldwide server sales by vendors in great detail and I have enjoyed reading them. One piece of information I have not been able to find is what portion of the worldwide server market is from the United States. If there are between 30 and 35 million installed servers worldwide, where are they?

I have looked all over for this information but have had no luck. Any help from you will be appreciated.

–Sanjay

You’re right. This information is hard to come by, especially since IDC and Gartner like to get paid lots

Tom Jarosh, the IBM executive who took the AS/400 line through the Y2K crisis, the MRP-to-ERP upgrade cycle, and the dot-com at the end of the 1990s, passed away on October 17. Jarosh spent his career at Big Blue, and was still intimately involved with Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group. The cause of death was melanoma; 55 is far too young for Jarosh to be gone.

Jarosh was raised in Pittsburgh, and was the oldest of 10 children in the family. He got his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and in 1975, he

Last week, after 26 years of being a community for AS/400 developers, the Application Systems Users Group of Greater Cleveland announced that it was powering itself down. The move follows the relatively recent closures of AS/400 user groups in the Denver and Phoenix metropolitan areas.

Andy Gladys, the ASUGGC’s founder and president, posted a message to members and the rest of the AS/400 community explaining why he founded the user group in the wake of IBM’s announcement and delivery of the System/38 midrange system back in 1981.

“With such advanced features and functionality, it was a herald for the great

In our ongoing effort to try to case out the small and medium business arena as it relates to IT, we this week bring you a report from Access Markets International Partners about the expected spending on server and networking gear in Western Europe in 2008.

According to estimates made by AMI-Partners, which is based on surveys it conducts around the world about buying plans, SMBs (by which AMI means companies with under 1,000 employees) in Western Europe are expected to shell out $7.6 billion on servers and networking gear in 2008. (Western Europe, in AMI-Partners’ definition includes the United

Last week, IBM continued to tweak its product pricing for the Power Systems i and System i product line.

The price of the base 9407-M15 (that’s the original Power Systems Power 520 i Edition) and the 8203-E4A (that’s the converged i-AIX-Linux box announced on October 7 that has twice the Power6 cores) was dropped by $299. Then the price for the feature 7112 and 7113 deskside covers for these two boxes was raised from $300 to $599, and the price for the rack-mount drawer rail kit for these two machines was upped from $150 to $300.

This could be the