The System/38 languished as an exotic and expensive box through most of the 1980s and the System/36 entry systems sold like hot cakes a few years later, and that experience taught IBM two lessons that were embodied in the first AS/400s from 1988 and continue to be the hallmark of Big Blue’s midrange systems today, regardless of their processor architecture. The first is that it is necessary to have as broad a selection of systems as can be affordably designed and manufactured, and the second is that you can always charge a premium for more performance and greater scalability.

In

You are sitting on a gold mine of database technology and probably don’t even know it. You have many of the essential pieces undiscovered in your existing system. Untapped capabilities in DB2 for i, the integrated relational database at the heart of IBM i 6.1 and 7.1, can be put to use meeting business requirements that have executives nervously searching for answers. Your first discovery is that a database does far more than store information. Take a closer look at what you have here.

This is an information management system, not a container. It’s not just a barn, a

The buying spree at IBM continued again last week, as the company spun the acquisition wheel of fortune and landed on blade and rack Ethernet switch maker Blade Network Technologies for what is rumored to be $400 million in cash. The deal marks the re-entry of Big Blue to the networking business–if you don’t count the OEM agreements with Blade Network, Juniper Networks, and Brocade Communications and the reseller agreement with Cisco Systems.

I don’t count these as being in the networking business, but before last year and the Dynamic Infrastructure blitz, IBM didn’t even try to look

When a country spends more on computing, its economic growth is likely to be healthier–so Gartner says in its most recent discussion of IT spending in the BRIC countries. Gartner made this declaration at its most recent dog-and-pony show in Sao Paolo during mid-September. Brazil leads the BRIC countries and possibly the world in the portion of gross domestic product (GDP) it pumps into computing and its pace of spending on IT will grow during the next few years. The laggard BRIC, it turns out, is Russia.

Last year, end user companies in Brazil spent $88 billion, or 8.6

The CIO’s job is not an easy one: One part salesman on IT innovation, one part global project manager, charged with knitting together the wares of multiple suppliers into a coherent, reliable and cost-effective application. And one part prognosticator on the success or failure of major vendors in an industry where repeated waves of change regularly swamp unwary incumbents. Just consider the fates of former leaders including Amdahl, Burroughs, Compaq, Cullinet, Data General, Digital Equipment, Exodus, and Wang, among others. Every decade or so, a new crowd of entrepreneurs overwhelm the incumbents, leaving the IT department to sweep up the

It was a busy month for IBM and its team of PTF programmers, according to Doug Bidwell, who puts together the System i PTF Guide for you to keep track of Big Blue’s PTF patches for i5/OS and IBM i operating systems.

In the latest PTF Guide, which you can see here, if you drill down into the Technology Refresh, you will see that Big Blue has delivered the patches to i 7.1 that allow the operating system and its database to run on the new Power7-based Power 710, 720, 730, 740, and 795 machines. The patches are also

Uncle Sam helped out Lawson Software in its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended August 31 in a big way by charging the company less taxes than it did in the year ago quarter. So even though Lawson’s overall sales were up only 3 percent, to $174.7 million, in the quarter and operating expenses rose by 5 percent, the company was nonetheless able to boost net income by 61 percent, to $9.6 million.

In the quarter, Lawson’s software license fee revenues were $24.5 million, down 6 percent, but in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Harry Debes, president and

IT is good. IT is beneficial. It’s a truism that information technology helps organizations become more efficient and more competitive. After all, people don’t adopt computers so they can waste their time and fall further behind. But according to a recent risk management study by IBM, organizations should devote more time to understanding the potential downsides and harm that result from the use of IT, and should adopt more formal IT risk management practices.

To get a better idea of how companies deal with risk, IBM Global Business Services interviewed more than 500 IT managers and CIOs for companies

The prognosticators at Gartner have lowered their IT spending projections for 2010 based on surveys of C-level executives at some 1,600 companies. But only a smidgen.

When the executives were polled back at the end of 2009, the weighted average rise expected in 2010 across all of the companies was an increase in IT spending of 1.3 percent. This came on the heels of an average 8.1 percent decline in spending in 2008 across these same companies. In a survey that ran from June through August, Gartner talked to the same execs and found that, on average, spending growth is

The war between Oracle on one side and Hewlett-Packard and SAP on what increasingly is looking like the other side heated up bigtime last week as headless HP, which ousted top exec Mark Hurd on August 6, replaced him with former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker.

Rather than give all three jobs to one person, HP’s board of directors decided to split up the titles, making Apotheker, who spent 20 years at SAP and helped it build up the world’s largest application software empire but who was let go back in February after some missteps at the German giant, HP’s president