Information about the midrange of the corporate computing market–the place where hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide generate tens of billions of dollars in server and storage spending a year–is a little hard to come by. I always have an eye out for statistics because it is so rare to see anything quantitative that is available to the public. I am sure there is plenty of data available on the midrange from the server makers themselves and the big IT market researchers, but that is the kind of information that costs big bucks these days.

That has not, however, always

For most people, the prospect of fundamental change is about as comforting as a root canal. By their state of nature, most people are change averse, preferring the quiet predictability of the status quo to the frothy tumult of a fundamental shift. That is, until change seems to be the only tenable answer.

America voted for change during this election cycle because change seemed to be the only tenable answer. Putting politics aside, few will argue against the notion that this country faces some great challenges, many of which are fairly troubling. This sort of recognition tends to trigger a

To find out what companies in the wholesale and distribution business are doing to succeed in these turbulent economic times, I set up an appointment with IBM‘s wholesale industry segment executive, Roberto Sanchez, who works not only with customers, but also with independent software vendors and resellers in the sales channel. Sanchez understands the System i because many companies rely on it in this market and also because he was once a systems engineer for the AS/400.

Like most executives at IBM, Sanchez would rather not talk about platform specifics. His point of view is solution specific instead. Customers

When the Internet was first spreading around the globe with the speed and infectiousness of an airborne virus, it soon became evident that many nations would not tolerate the unchecked proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Governments that could not abide opposition became intent on regulating what would otherwise facilitate a dangerous flow of uncensored data and subversive ideas.

Toward that end, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were subjected to some economic arm twisting. What specific threats were made, or incentives offered, is unknown. What is known is that America’s technology giants capitulated to the will of foreign governments. To

IT equipment leasing, a favorite method used by hardware suppliers that garner revenue from places they never could crack otherwise, is feeling the woozy effects of the stormy economic seas. It’s not just IT equipment leases that are taking on water. All types of equipment leasing are in the same boat. The name on that boat is the S.S. Default. It’s much too early, however, to say the boat is sinking.

When the living is good and the credit is easy, there seems to be no brakes on who can finance equipment or how they can pay it off. Just

As many iSeries and System i shops have found out, the move to Power6-based blade servers and the Virtual I/O server that is required to support the i 6.1 operating system is a bit tricky compared to the OS/400 installation and migration procedures that they are accustomed to. That’s one reason why I was a bit surprised by a recent IBM Power Systems announcement.

The announcement, which is a set of implementation services for Power Systems JS12 and JS22 blade servers running AIX 6.1 or Linux, did not include the other operating system supported on the blades. That being the

A Federal Court judge on Friday granted a temporary injunction preventing Mark Papermaster, the former IBM executive who helped build the Power processor architecture, from joining Apple, where he had taken a job leading the hardware engineering teams working on the iPhone and the iPod.

IBM filed a lawsuit against Papermaster in late October to prevent him from joining Apple, which it claimed would violate the non-compete clause Papermaster signed in 2006. As its “top expert” on the Power architecture, head of the blade server unit, and a member of an elite group of IBMers that set strategic goals

While IT departments are understandably excited about the possibilities of so-called Web 2.0-style online applications and how they might be used within their organizations, these same IT shops are equally perplexed about how they are going to control and secure the use of these online applications among their end users.

In a way, this is an echo of how the commercialized Internet first entered corporations in the mid-1990s. And it did not enter from the data center, but from the end user desktops. And ditto for the wide use of PCs in the mid-1980s and then graphical user environments in

It’s been a rough couple of months for the U.S. economy, and it has also been tough on i platform reseller and application software developer Agilysys, which four weeks ago said it wasn’t going to make its numbers in the quarter and then two weeks ago did a management shakeup that saw four top executives leave the company. Last week, Agilysys wanted to let everyone know it is getting its financial house in order–and fast.

The company, which is publicly traded, will report its second quarter of fiscal 209 results on November 20, but wanted to let everyone know

As readers of The Four Hundred are aware, Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, has been rejiggering its management and business model in an attempt to get its midrange hardware and application software revenues growing again. The third quarter ended in September proved difficult for IBS, as it was for most companies thanks to the economic crisis.

In the quarter ended in September, software license sales fell at IBS by 12 percent to 89.4 million Swedish krona. (SEK is the accepted abbreviation for this currency, which is valued at about 13 cents as we go to press on