Q&A with IBM’s Mark Shearer: Still Mister System i

When IBM reorganized its Systems and Technology Group once last July and then again this January, the System i product line seemed to get a bit lost in the shuffle. In July, the System i went from being a division to being a product line split between high-end and low-end divisions, Power Systems and Business Systems, and then in January IBM finished redrawing the organization chart and cut product development and manufacturing from sales and marketing.

More than a few people have had the impression that the System i product line

Well, it is probably not a big surprise to anyone that revenues for servers running Linux or Windows outpaced the sales of the rest of the market in the final quarter of 2007. In fact, one way of looking at the market statistics just released by analysts at IDC is that Linux and Windows boxes are the main reason why the server market managed to grow revenues by 2.4 percent to $15.7 billion, driven by a 9 percent growth in shipments.

However, as a similar modeling of the server market for Q4 and all of 2007 from Gartner reckoned, IDC

It has been a busy couple of weeks for legacy application rehosting environment provider Infinite Software, which you probably remember by its former name, California Software. Several weeks ago, Infinite Software announced that it had partnered with server and operating system maker Hewlett-Packard in an effort to offer customers with vintage RPG and COBOL applications running on AS/400, iSeries, and System i platforms the option of running that code on HP’s Itanium-based Integrity servers running HP-UX, Windows, or Linux.

And last week, Infinite Software, which is based in Laguna Niguel in southern California, announced that it has acquired Altos

In computing, even the industry leaders can get hit with surprises coming from angles they never dreamed of. Sometimes these new ideas substantially change or extend the world of computing. These disruptive developments add new dimensions to information processing. And it’s often very hard for the established leaders to understand what is emerging before their eyes. This is a situation much like the one at the heart of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a short, witty novel about mathematics and Victorian society written by Edwin A. Abbott, a theologian and scholar. Ballmer, Palmisano, and you ought to

There are a lot of different ways to skin a system design, but the one that has been favored by processor and system designers alike for the past three decades is to boost the clock speed on the processor as high as possible, make each clock do more work, and add layers and layers of progressively faster main memory to the box to keep those faster processors fed. There are a number of problems with this approach, and they have caused a performance and capacity gap between central processors and memory subsystems that is still not being properly addressed. But

The now annual COMMON midrange system user conference and vendor exposition will be held at the end of March and into early April in Nashville, Tennessee, and the user group wants people to stick around beyond April Fool’s Day for a big announcement from key executives within IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group.

Specifically, the notice up on the COMMON Web site says that Mark Shearer, currently vice president of marketing and offerings for the Business Systems division, and Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division, will jointly host a special town hall meeting on the morning April

System i application tool maker Magic Software Enterprises is continuing to get itself on a firmer financial footing as its ramps up product and services sales. Sales were up smartly in the fourth quarter, the company swung to a solid profit thanks to its sale of an application subsidiary.

In the fourth quarter ended December 31, Magic Software booked sales of $15.7 million, an increase of 13.8 percent from the year-ago period. In the fourth quarter of last year, Magic Software had an operating loss of $500,000 and managed to pull itself up to breakeven after a major restructuring as

An Austrian software development firm that dates back to 1968 and that was one of the innovators in the human resources application software market, Personal and Informatik, last week said that it has divested itself of its OS/400 and i5/OS human resources application, LOGA/400. Viennese IT services company Infoniqa Group will be taking over support for the product.

The mainframe and midrange application ecosystems used to be quite diverse and are quite old, and many of us outside of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany have probably never heard of P&I AG or its LOGA/400 HR applications. P&I has a complex

The business partner and strategic alliance program at BluePhoenix has added a heavy hitter to the lineup. Alan Zwiren, a former IBM channel executive responsible for worldwide information management channel sales has taken the position of vice president of partners and strategic alliance sales for the application modernization tools and services company. Zwiren is no stranger to the System i, which figures to be a positive factor for ASNA, the System i application tools vendor that was acquired by BluePhoenix in August 2007.

Zwiren is coming off seven years at Big Blue and is a 20-year veteran of the

Go ahead, call me stupid. Or old-fashioned. Or just plain Puritan. But I will never in a zillion years understand the logic of share buybacks–and especially those on a massive scale like IBM has undertaken since the mid-1990s. And last week, IBM’s board of directors authorized the company to shell out another $15 billion to buy back shares on the open market.

As IBM itself pointed out in its announcement of the share repurchase authorization, the company has bought back a staggering $94 billion in its own stock from 1995 through 2007 inclusive. IBM still has $400 million in buybacks