As is usually the case with an IBM Power Systems announcement, there is no one simple way to characterize the price/performance of the new entry Power7-based machines that made their debut in August and that started shipping on September 17. But I can tell you this much after an initial analysis of the entry Power 720 boxes that are the most likely choice of platform for IBM i shops: If you plan to grow, this box is a lot better than its predecessors.

This is true for two reasons. First, with anywhere from four to six cores in a single

The battle of the midrange continues. And Microsoft continues to put the heat on IBM. We know it best as a struggle for IBM i shops to remain i-centric when it comes to their mission critical applications as Microsoft technologies gain stronger footholds in enterprises. Last week I talked with Dee Hester, who heads up platform migration sales in North America and Latin America for Microsoft. Here’s the view from where he sits.

Hester works for Microsoft’s Enterprise Partner Group (EPG), which has a goal of accelerating the adoption of Microsoft technologies at the enterprise level and supporting business

Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but how come IBM is always giving shops using Unix gear from rivals Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu a good deal? How come Big Blue takes a long time to get around to giving a similar deal to its own iSeries shops, if at all? Don’t they need a little financial help as encouragement to move up to more modern Power Systems machines, too?

Here’s the deal, which doesn’t exactly apply to you unless you can do a whole lot of sweet-talking with your IBM sales rep or business partner.

File this under useless proclamations: The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession officially ended in June 2009. Pardon us if no one noticed. With over 15 million unemployed and one in seven Americans living in poverty, a lot of folks were too busy surviving to join the celebration. Granted, poverty is relative. In this case it means that a family of four is subsisting on less than $22,000 a year. Good luck with that.

Forty-four million people now live that way, with another 3.3 million about to join them when their unemployment benefits run out.

As for

Oracle is ratcheting up its so-called “engineered systems” to run its operating system, middleware, and application stack, and is beginning to give people the impression that it is dead serious about being in the hardware business. Oracle did not come easily to hardware, being a software vendor, but thinks it can get hardware gross margins up to 60 percent and double system revenues to around $2 billion a quarter over the next couple of years. And completely engineered systems, from chip to app, are the key.

Last week at its OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco, the top brass at the

It’s not easy doing IBM‘s marketing job for it while also trying to make a living, as many of us out there in AS/400 Land know full well. When a United States arm of the iManifest movement needed a spearhead, Jeff Olen, who is the chief operating officer at the IBM i consultancy that bears his name, Olen Business Consulting, volunteered. But Olen can no longer be the leader for iManifest U.S., and so, he needs one of you to step in and do the job.

Olen posted the following message on the LinkedIn group for iManifest U.S:

It’s been a full business week since IBM started shipping the four new entry Power Systems machines and the i Solution Edition variants of the boxes specifically tailored to IBM i customers to cut them a break, and now apparently a little marketing is going to begin in the midrange.

Apropos of nothing last week, IBM put out a statement about the new entry machines with the requisite “we love the midrange” gushing. For instance, take this:

“We continue to develop and deploy the powerful technologies that growing businesses need to improve efficiency, innovate and scale for future growth,” said

Sometimes it is easier to buy off a competitive threat and figure out how to make best use of it later than to worry about making complex justifications about an acquisition at the front end. That’s what IBM did when it shelled out $810 million to buy NUMA-based server maker Sequent Computer Systems in the summer of 1999, and that is what is going on now with Big Blue’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza last week.

The Sequent deal was every bit as much about blunting a future attack of Windows-based NUMA servers that offered the kind of scalability that

Despite the continued poor economic conditions, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are growing their IT budgets, albeit slowly, according to a new survey from IT management software vendor Spiceworks. SMBs increased their IT spending plans by 4 percent over the last six months, the survey found. Much of the increase will go to upgrading existing servers and adopting promising new technologies. Few plan to hire more IT staff.

According to Spiceworks’ bi-annual “Voice of IT” market research program, the budget freeze is slowly melting at SMBs, which the company defines as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The

The global enterprise software market is on the rebound this year after taking it on the chin thanks to the Great Recession last year. According to the analysts at Gartner, worldwide software sales across all categories will come to $232 billion in 2010, up 4.5 percent from last year’s spending levels.

Gartner is projecting that software spending will rise even faster in 2011, up 6.3 percent to $246.6 billion, and is projecting for sales to hit $297 billion by 2014. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent over the six years running from 2009 through 2014.