The word on the street is that the next iteration of IBM‘s i for Business operating system, i 7.1, will be announced at an unusual Wednesday press conference a little more than a month from now on April 14. While that may seem like an odd time to do an announcement, that just so happens to be the last day of the Northeast IBM i User Groups Conference, which runs from April 12 through 14.

NEUGC is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and if you didn’t want to (or couldn’t) wait until COMMON‘s 50th anniversary, which runs from May

Right away, application modernization sounds like a technical subject. But it really is a business topic. It’s about getting a return on investment by reusing existing assets. Those assets are applications and they need to be enabled for a business environment that has changed since those applications were born and raised. To understand application modernization, it has to be discussed in terms of business strategy, user requirements, and integration. As IBM has been fond of pointing out in the past, the “i” is for integration.

To a large degree, the short history of application modernization has been marked by a

In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I drilled into the quarterly server sales and shipment stats from Gartner, and this week, it is time to take a look at the similar, yet different, set of stats coming out of Gartner’s rival, IDC. The latter companies cuts up and talks about the server racket a little differently from Gartner, and by looking at both, you get a better sense of what is going on.

By IDC’s reckoning, server revenues fell by 3.9 percent to $12.95 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, with shipments actually up

Words can be unreliable. Their meaning changes with context and time. Take cool, for example. Until the late 1950s it referred to ambient temperature when the Beat generation co-opted it as an expression of approval. These days when you see words like “traitorous” and “Pakistan” they conjure up betrayal and terror. But when applied to the life of a person responsible for one of the most important innovations in the history of the computer industry, those meanings are dead wrong. And you have to go back more than 50 years to understand them.

The man in question was born

How much do you know about the general concepts behind business computing? If you’re attending COMMON‘s annual user conference, scheduled to start eight weeks from today at the brand new Hilton Orlando resort in central Florida, you might want to allocate a couple of hours to take the exam for the COMMON Business Computing Associate (CBCA) certification, the first of two business computing certifications the user group is rolling out.

COMMON announced the CBCA and the COMMON Certified Business Computing Professional (CCBCP) at last year’s show in Reno, Nevada. The CBCA, which is targeted at college graduates and others

In case you were happily sleeping away under an apple tree for the last year and missed the economic meltdown and its affect on sales of all kinds of IT hard and soft wares, you might awake and be surprised to find that disk array sales actually declined in 2009. That’s the first time disk array revenues have declined since the dot-com bust coincided with the recession in 2001, causing a 2002 that many wish they could have slept through.

According to the latest stats from Gartner, sales of disk arrays external to servers (and not including internal disk

Educational Grants for RPG & DB2 Summit Available, but Time Is Short

Like crows sitting on a fence, unemployed RPG programmers are waiting for a breeze to stir. It’s a tough job market. You don’t need this publication to break that news. But tough times call for equally tough measures. I continue to hear companies say they can’t find the IBM i talent they are looking for. And I hear people saying those companies are just being too cotton-pickin’ picky.

But this prickly employment desert that is perfect for picky employers, may be cause to take this Smarter Planet idea

So much for my whole idea of Colonizing Endicott from a little more than a year ago. IBM‘s strategy is more like Colonoscopy Endicott–and a whole slew of other facilities in the United States. Last year, IBM chopped an estimated 10,400 workers in its supposed home country, reducing its workforce here to around 105,000. And on March 1, it started cutting again.

According to counts made by Alliance@IBM, the local of the Communications Workers of America union that has been trying to organize IBM for longer than I have been in the IT racket, as of Thursday night,

Just when you think you have IBM figured out, it does something unexpected–and interesting. In previewing its upcoming rack and blade servers based on Intel‘s eight-core “Nehalem-EX” Xeon processors and Big Blue’s own eX5 chipset, IBM took a chip that is aimed at high-end servers with many sockets and tweaked it to make midrange machines that offer processor and memory scalability independent of each other.

The Nehalem-EX processors, which sport eight processor cores with HyperThreading, on-chip DDR3 main memory controllers, and the QuickPath Interconnect point-to-point interconnect, were conceptually at least designed to put the Xeon family of servers into

As it promised it would last fall, the Enterprise Computing Solutions group of master reseller Arrow Electronics has launched its own professional services business.

Arrow ECS is one of the two big master resellers of servers in the world, the other being Avnet, and both buy from server makers in bulk and sell downstream to thousands of other resellers worldwide. Last October, as The Four Hundred reported, Arrow created a vice president of worldwide services position in the ECS group and tapped Joe Burke, a senior-level executive who has done a lot of different jobs within the company, to