Surprise, surprise, surprise. Attendees of the COMMON midrange conference and expo in Reno, Nevada, got a sneak preview of some announcements that IBM is making on Tuesday. As many of us had been expecting, the announcements–all part of a much larger Dynamic Infrastructure push by Big Blue–do indeed include Power6+ processors inside Power Systems iron. That’s not the surprise. But this is: these are not the first machines to use the Power6+ kickers to the Power6 chips.

As it turns out, as I have come to discover, and as you almost certainly do not already know, some of the

IBM‘s Power Systems division, which sells what were formerly known as System i and System p servers and which are simply called Power Systems these days, was a relative bright spot among its various server lines in the company’s financial report for the first quarter of 2009. But even the popularity of IBM’s high-end Power boxes could not defy the same pressures that all of IBM’s other groups are feeling thanks to the economic meltdown.

For the first quarter, IBM’s revenues fell across all of its major product groups–some more than others–and profits took a slight haircut, too. But,

The AS/400 community has always been an international one, and in fact, for most of the 30 years that IBM has been selling midrange systems, the company did a lot more box shipments in Europe than it did in the United States. This made sense, given that Europe was not yet economically united and each country had its own businesses. Mergers around the world have given rise to a lot of consolidation of companies and their platforms, which has diluted the multinational feel of the i platform a bit. But just a bit.

To get a feel for what i

Well, the drama between IBM and systems rival Sun Microsystems is over, now that database and application software giant Oracle is ponying up $5.6 billion in cash and debt to acquire Sun. Or, perhaps, it is just beginning, and perhaps Oracle has seen the light and will be creating a little something midrange folk know as the Application System, 400 Not Included, slash reserved for competitive battles in the marketplace.

Sun’s private equity backers and frustrated Wall Street investors ran out of patience with Sun’s promises of eventual revenue growth and a return to profitability about the same time that

Retail and supply chain management application software maker JDA Software reported its financial results for the first quarter, and like just about every other IT vendor on the planet, JDA was hit by the economic downturn, which hurt sales a little and profits a lot.

For the quarter ended in March, JDA says that it had revenues of $83.3 million, down 11.2 percent, more or less matching the revenue decline that IBM itself saw in the first quarter of this year. JDA’s software licenses in the quarter fell by a much more dramatic 23.5 percent to $15.3 million, but maintenance

Network Services Plus, a long-time peddler of AS/400 and successor products and services, has tapped Halcyon Software to provide system monitoring and automation capabilities to customers who use NSPI’s i-related hosting services.

NSPI, which is located in the Roswell suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, has been around the IBM midrange for the past 22 years and, among other things, does consulting for JD Edwards suites as well as application hosting and business continuity services. Three weeks ago, NSPI announced a partnership with high availability software maker Maximum Availability, which will see NSPI sell, implement, and support Maximum Availability’s