As I sit here on Thursday afternoon, IBM has not yet confirmed that there are product announcements coming out this week relating to the Power Systems platform, much less mentioned the new i 7.1 operating system, perhaps a new Power Systems 720 or 795 if we are lucky (because I like to chew on iron), or the Open Access for RPG tool that we caught some hints about at the end of last year and once again in early March.

IBM hasn’t briefed anyone on i 7.1 yet, but the word I hear is that the announcement will be

IBM and its peers in the IT racket have a way of making even neat technology sound boring with the public product names they choose, even if they do show a little flair with product names from time to time when those products are in development. So it is with data analytics and online transaction processing clusters that Big Blue rolled out last week, which I am rechristening the Smartie and Pizzazz systems because, well, because I just can’t stand typing Smart Analytics System and PureScale Application Server every time I mention the machines.

It is no secret that Oracle

You may know it as application modernization, but depending on who’s doing the talking, you might also find terms like application rationalization and enterprise modernization used to describe similar IT projects. Everyone agrees, however, that success incorporates a business plan. Whether your business runs on an IBM i (iSeries and AS/400 terminology preferences accepted), Microsoft Windows, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, Oracle Solaris Unix, or any other platform makes no difference. Modernization is not something only one set of platforms have to cope with. They all have issues.

“One of the first things I try to dispel,” says Tim Hahn, IBM’s chief architect

Movie images can be powerful and enduring. Years after they no longer reside in our conscious mind, they are still stored in memory, which is why Barack Obama owes Sidney Poitier a debt of gratitude. Back in 1967 when civil rights advocates were greeted with dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and worse, Poitier made a movie called In the Heat of the Night. It showed us that a black man could be better looking, smarter, more articulate, and a better dresser than a white man. Candidate Obama didn’t have to wholly reinvent the image because for a generation of voters

It has been no secret to readers of The Four Hundred that some IBM announcements were afoot in early February and were expected again around the middle of April.

While IBM has not yet arranged for prebriefings with the press on the announcements, which is its normal practice, I have heard from sources at Big Blue that there are some announcements planned for Tuesday, and more than a few of them have said that the expected new version of the i For Business, platform, i 7.1, will be one of the major things revealed. I know that business partners downstream

Back in January, when I was discussing a Power Systems trade-in deal that IBM had tweaked, I said that I could no longer see the second-hand Power Systems that IBM’s Global Financing unit peddles running the i5/OS and i operating systems. An intrepid reader of The Four Hundred found a different place where “Certified Pre-owned Power Systems – iOS” machines are available second-hand (or perhaps third for all we know) and pointed it out to me.

So I thought that you, like myself and this reader, would get a chuckle out of what Big Blue is charging for some vintage

Shares of Lawson Software lurched upward last week after the company reported a 28 percent increase in license fees for its third quarter, which ended February 28. The good news concerning license fees–a closely watched barometer of the future health of public software companies like Lawson–overshadowed the news of a sizable drop in profitability for the company, which it attributed in part to an acquisition.

Total revenues for Lawson’s third quarter of fiscal year 2010 were $186.2 million, a 7 percent increase over the $173.8 million reported for the third quarter of fiscal year 2009. License revenue for the quarter

The economy may be on the mend here and there in the world, but apparently small and medium businesses are waiting to see things get a whole lot better before they get their checkbooks out and start spending like it was 2008 on IT goods and services.

Researchers from IDC has radically lowered their forecasts for IT spending at SMBs, and now say that between 2010 and 2014, IT spending among this class of companies, which are conservative by nature, will only grow by 5.5 percent.

“The downturn had a devastating impact on SMBs worldwide,” explained Ray Boggs, vice president

Last May, as The Four Hundred previously reported, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, along with two and a half years of input from the IT industry, established an Energy Star power efficiency benchmark and rating system for servers. That initial spec was for what was called computer servers, meaning single-socket and two-socket boxes. In February of this year, the spec was expanded to include what are called enterprise servers, which means machines with four or more sockets.

As it turns out, the new Power7-based Power 750 machines and their special supercomputer variant, the Power

Here’s something you don’t see every day in the tech industry, and you certainly don’t see very often in any company affiliated with the IBM midrange: one of them going public.

Qlik Technologies, which peddles Windows-based business intelligence that interfaces with AS/400 and i systems, has been growing like crazy in recent years and is ready to get some cash from Wall Street to take it up to the next level. The company filed its S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to kick off the process, which you can read here.

The Swedish company moved