When I was a kid, I was crazy about maps. In my family, even when I was quite young, when someone was lost, they tossed me the map to figure out where on earth we were. My Dad and Mom trusted me with the maps more than themselves, which I didn’t think of as peculiar until later in life. (I think visually. They don’t. My Dad thinks with his hands and can make or fix anything, and my Mom thinks with her mouth, and can cut right to the heart of the matter.) To this day, just about every place

Wall Street got a chance to catch its breath a little last Tuesday after the market closed when IBM announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, a quarter that was impacted by the economic crisis last summer and fall but one in which Big Blue nonetheless was able to pull out of the fire profit-wise by cutting costs. More importantly, perhaps, IBM’s top brass reaffirmed that they were on track, despite the state of the global economy, to meet aggressive profit targets.

In the fourth quarter, which bore the brunt of the economic meltdown and which saw 1.53 million

People may have problems defining a data warehouse. They may have problems designing and building a data warehouse, too. But that hasn’t slowed down the desire to get a better grasp on data and use it more effectively to drive the business and preserve revenues. “What many people describe as a data warehouse is actually a data mart or something else,” says Bill O’Connell, chief technology officer of data warehousing within IBM‘s Information Management division.

What distinguishes a data warehouse is an enterprise design and a definition of the business problem to be solved, O’Connell says. The emphasis is

For a while now, people have been talking about utility-style computing, and as was the case a decade ago with application service providing, or ASPs, we are now being barraged with vendors coming out of the woodwork peddling cloud computing or somehow tying what they do to the idea of cloud computing. But the interesting development this time around is that cloud computing is a lot more affordable than ASP was, thanks to cheap iron, open source software, and inexpensive broadband Internet.

These are all necessary conditions, of course, for cloudy, utility computing to take off, but they are far

Earlier this month, UNICOM Systems announced the acquisition of Macro 4, a British developer of utilities and systems management tools for mainframe, System i, and Unix platforms. While the System z was Macro 4’s forte, UNICOM has put a surprising focus on its i OS offerings. Together with SoftLanding’s i OS change management offerings, UNICOM says it will have a “one stop shop” for enterprise computing customers, whether they run i OS, mainframe, or open systems.

In the two and a half years since CICS tool vendor UNICOM shocked the market with its acquisition of i OS change management

Two weeks ago, we told you about the rumors running around that IBM would cut somewhere from 10,000 to 16,000 of its worldwide workforce, which numbers some 400,000 people, so it could keep its profits growing in the double digits even as its revenues are expected to drop in the first half of 2009. Those layoffs have, according to reports from IBMers, began.

IBM has not confirmed that there are layoffs, except to note in its financial reports last week that it is continually rebalancing its workforce, which means firing people where business is slack or projects are not panning

Technology and engineering career site Dice has put out its annual salary survey to take the pulse on compensation rates out there in the tech market, and the news is good and bad. Average salaries were up at the end of 2008 compared to 2007, but IT workers are plenty jumpy because of the economy and what their employers might do to cut costs if things get worse or even just stay bad.

Dice put together its 2008-09 Annual Salary Survey by gathering up information from 19,444 tech workers between August and November last year. This was, you will remember,

While IBM has been making layoffs around the United States and Japan, and perhaps all around the world for all we know, two Big Ten states here in America at least got some good news recently from Big Blue.

The state government of Michigan, which is reeling from the latest pop in a 35-year implosion of the indigenous car market, has worked out a deal with IBM to plunk a global delivery center for application services in the East Lansing campus of Michigan State University. (Penn State, 49; MSU, 18) The center is, according to IBM, the first

Clone memory maker Dataram was for many years a little gun shy about saying that it offered clone memory that was supported on AS/400 and iSeries boxes, but the convergence of the i and p lines by IBM presents the company with some opportunities to make money and to help i and p shops save money.

Last week, Dataram, which is located in Princeton, New Jersey, and which has been making clone memory since 1967, said that it was initiating a free “try and buy” program to help customers get clone memory, which can cost half as much as memory

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to think about getting rid of PCs for a lot of end users at your company, but cutting back on energy use and therefore lowering your carbon footprint is something that more companies are taking seriously. Quite frankly, it is low hanging fruit, like using those swirly fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent lighting.

To make its case, BOSaNOVA has put together a white paper promoting thin clients, which it makes a living selling. The company cites an estimate that has made the rounds in the PC-TC wars, claiming that if