There are few executives in IBM‘s Power Systems laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota, with the experience and knowledge of Ian Jarman, who today holds the title of manager of Power Systems software. During the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, Jarman took some time out of his busy schedule to speak with IT Jungle on a wide range of topics. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

Alex Woodie: There seems to be excitement in the air over RPG Open Access. Can you explain IBM’s rationale for how it brought it to market, where IBM develops half the technology

Around this time every year, the top brass at IBM take what I presume are their limousines and head south from Upstate New York and chi-chi Western Connecticut down to Wall Street to explain themselves to investors. Well, more precisely, the IBMers gather to talk to Wall Street analysts; the several hundred people on the globe that influence a stock as much as (and perhaps more than) the Brownian investment motions of millions of shareholders sweating their 401(k) retirement funds.

Every couple of years, IBM goes a bit out on a limb and makes some big predictions about how the

Although IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, did not utter the words server, mainframe, or Power Systems once in his presentation to Wall Street investors last week as he outlined the next five-year plan for revenue and profit growth for Big Blue, fear not. Systems remain at the very core of what IBM does today and what it will do in the future. But don’t be confused. Systems are the foundation, they are not the house, and that house will have many more stories of software and services atop it than we are used

My wife doesn’t do well without coffee. So as we’re standing in the airport security line at 6 a.m., caffeine deprived and bleary-eyed, she is not a carefree camper. When she spots a woman with a fresh cup, she pounces on her like a hockey goalie on a slow puck, and demands to know, “Where did you get that?” The woman says there is a vendor right next to the security gate. I must have been slow to react. With the impatience of Nixon shoving Zigler, she dispatches me to fetch coffee.

“Mocha grande with four extra shots,” she instructs.

The Young i Professionals (YiPs) want your job. They’ll do the IT equivalent of cleaning out the stables, digging a ditch, or sweeping the shop. They’ll work part time, full time, Sundays, and holidays. Put them on the graveyard shift, if you have one. All they want is a chance to prove their worth. At the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition earlier this month, the YiPs told me they have plans to link people and jobs.

“We hope to create a matching process,” says Justin Porter, one of the YiPs with a desire to become more involved in the IBM

Your untangling of the obscured IBM pricing is depressing. I listened carefully to IBM at COMMON, and asked a few questions myself.

They are 100 percent committed to the proposition that the i/OS eliminates need for as many IT personnel and that you will pay them instead of the personnel. It is built into everything they do and say, with code word “simplified” (as in their pricing–not). It is a serious mistake they will take the AS/400 down with until they change their ways, which will assuredly be too late.

I can’t imagine a person other than

Remember Transitive? That funky upstart company that had created a clever emulator called QuickTransit that could potentially upset a lot of balances of power in the server racket just before IBM showed foresight and bought it? Well, nothing much has happened with Transitive since IBM acquired it for an undisclosed amount in November 2008, but now the formerly independent company is the foundation of a new Power Systems development laboratory located in Manchester, England.

As you will recall, Transitive was founded in 2000 by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer science professor at the University of Manchester who had spent the prior

While the server and storage business certainly took it on the chin in 2009 as the world’s economies coped with a severe slowdown and IT budgets for these items were curtailed if not frozen, the appetite for the glue that connects IT back-ends to Web front-ends–what is commonly called application infrastructure and middleware–continued to grow last year.

According to the latest market statistics from Gartner, worldwide sales of application infrastructure and middleware software grew by 7.1 percent in 2008, to reach $15.5 billion in sales, and continued to grow at a 2.8 percent pace in 2009 to $15.9 billion.

The economy must be on the mend. According to a recent survey of IT shops performed by CareerBuilder, IT managers are shifting gears from cutting costs to worrying about how to retain their top talent.

Respondents to the survey, which was conducted on behalf of CareerBuilder by Harris International, included 203 IT managers and 245 IT employees between February 10 and March 2 in the United States. Nearly half of those sitting on the employer side of the bargaining table–45 percent–said they are worried about losing some of their top talent in the current second quarter (which was in

The balkanization and stackification of the IT industry continued a-pace last week as German software giant SAP weaved when I said, only last week that it should bob and buy database maker Software AG and instead said it would pay $5.8 billion to acquire database maker Sybase.

Sybase needs a sugar daddy and SAP needs a database besides the MaxDB database it co-developed with MySQL, which is now part of archrival Oracle and which never took off as the database of choice for SAP application software. Sybase has some very good complex event processing (CEP) algorithms built into its