With the Power7 processors not expected until later this year, now is as good a time as any to think about what these boxes might look like. In the past several months, I have walked you through all of the details I could find about the upcoming Power7 processors and the very sparse technical details about the servers that will make use of them. In the absence of real data, it is always a good idea to do a thought experiment about what these machines should look like to compare and contrast them with the Power Systems that IBM eventually

The long line of IT analysts and market researchers who want to say good riddance to the IT recession that has been under way since early 2008 has begun to form, and Computer Economics and Forrester Research are at the front of the line making their prognostications. While the IT spending environment seems to have brightened, it is going to be a while, it seems, before we return to anything like normal–if late 2007 and early 2008 were normal.

According to the Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2010 report put out by Computer Economics at the end of

Everybody wants to have an AS/400 to sell–except, perhaps, IBM. I mean a conceptual AS/400, of course, not literally a machine running OS/400, DB2/400, and RPG/400. Last week, to some fanfare and more than a little confusion, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft said they would be tag teaming to create an integrated set of IT systems under a partnership called Frontline.

Forget that this is also the name of a hard-hitting newscast, or the insecticide that you are too wary of to put on the back of your dog or cat to get rid of fleas and ticks. HP and Microsoft

Last week, speaking at Chatham House in London, IBM‘s chairman Sam Palmisano urged his audience to build what he calls a “smarter planet” right now. This will be quite a job, so big that when IBM published its official version of the Chatham House transcript of Palmisano’s presentation, the corporation called its document Welcome to the Decade of Smart. In his talk, Palmisano welcomed the wired up Internet of Things, but noted that a wired world has its risks, too.

He bravely mentioned George Orwell‘s flat.

The apartment where Orwell lived while writing 1984 in the Islington

Over the years, Lawson Software has carved out a number of niches for itself in the midrange and enterprise application space, including providing solutions to governments and healthcare providers. With a $160 million acquisition of Healthvision Solutions, Lawson is making some heavy bets that the medical industry is going to do a lot more automation and that it needs to be one of the key providers of software to hospitals, medical practices, clinics, and doctors.

Healthvision, which is based in Dallas, sells integration products and services to hospitals and other healthcare organizations. The company was founded in 1989 and

For what seems like a zillion years running–alright, for the past 17 years now–IBM has come out as the top dog in the annual rankings of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A few years back, the USPTO stopped giving out data about patent counts, but market researcher IFI Patent Intelligence takes the raw patent data and dices and slices it like the patent office used to.

Like supercomputing prowess, missile counts, and gross domestic product growth, patent counts have an inherently political slant to them, and people don’t like to admit it. But there are

Who does the housekeeping chores on your IBM AS/400, iSeries, System i, or Power Systems box running i/OS? If you answer, “No one,” then the next question is have you noticed the server isn’t performing like it used to? And if you have someone doing tasks such as identifying and clearing job logs and journal entries, cleaning up the IFS, managing job and message queues, and staying current with file reorgs, how much time is devoted to those tasks?

Paying IT staff to do work that could be eliminated through automation is not a particularly good use of money. You

The Australian i/OS application modernization software vendor looksoftware has chosen Japanese Power Systems VAR SOLPAC to be its master reseller in Japan, the vendors announced last week.

In addition to selling System i, Unix, and X64 servers, Tokyo-based SOLPAC consults on installations of Oracle and SAP ERP systems, provides Web design, delivers training and education, and runs servers and applications as a business process outsourcer (BPO).

The 13-year-old company employs 220 people and had gross sales of 2,750 million yen (about $30 million) per year, according to its Web site. That makes it one of IBM‘s biggest business partners

Carlin Music is no one-hit wonder. It’s one of the world’s largest independent music publishers, with 100 years of popular music history in its catalog. Carlin’s music and royalty management systems are highly automated, as you might expect.

In terms of IT, Carlin gets by on more than just a song. It turns out that this company–with operations in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom–relies on Vision Solutions’ Vision Director software to maintain tempo.

Vision Director is a set of utilities for proactively monitoring, managing, and optimizing IBM Power Systems i servers (including System i, iSeries,

Enterprise application powerhouse SAP said last week after a preliminary review of its books that it would finish off 2009 a bit better than expected. Don’t get too excited. Just because business in Q4 was better than expected doesn’t mean it was great. And that’s why SAP also said that it was rejiggering its maintenance fees to reflect the new economic realities out there in the global economy.

Based on U.S. accounting rules, SAP said its sales for software and related services in the fourth quarter ended December 31 would come in at €2.56 billion, down 4 percent from the