Despite all the changes in the Power Systems lineup with the Power7 processors this year and a slew of entry and midrange servers, the most likely servers that IBM i shops are likely to buy, for a whole cornucopia of different colored reasons, are the Power 720 or 750 with a modest number of relatively low-speed processors. The good news for Power 720 shops is that the i 7.1 software stack, which includes an integrated DB2 database, is absolutely competitive with combination of IBM‘s AIX Unix variant and the most appropriate 11g relational database from Oracle.

The bad

People are curious about the iManifest Japan effort, and so I would like to give you an update. After the advertisement titled “IBM i Manifest” in the Nihon Keizai Shinbun published on January 13, 2009, which strongly promoted IBM i, the Japanese iManifest community decided to gear up to take iManifest to the next level. First, we set up an advisory board consisting of 15 members from 15 companies (which has grown to 21 members from 21 companies), and formed five task forces.

The iManifest board has met once per month since March 2009 to discuss what IBM i

The hoped-for big bounce in Power Systems sales is going to have to wait until the fourth quarter, it looks like. With IBM only shipping high-end Power 795 and entry Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 systems for two weeks in the third quarter, these new machines, which were announced in the middle of August, probably did more damage to the quarter than they helped in terms of Power7-based server sales. Now, all eyes are turned to the fourth quarter, where IBM will have a complete Power7 systems lineup and perhaps the normal server bump to help it post some

As far as women are concerned, “Guys. . . are the new ball and chain.” That’s one of the doleful conclusions reached by Hanna Rosin in her recent article in The Atlantic called “The End of Men.” To the typical insecure male, that title would be dismissed as excessively provocative. But as Ms. Rosin soberly documents–albeit with just a little dash of feminist glee–men appear to have lost their economic, educational, and biological edge and are teetering somewhere between pathetic and irrelevant. Ouch!

Well, Ms. Rosin, that’s certainly not true in my castle where I am still the. . .

There are a lot of official and unofficial indicators in the IT job market. The way the United States government calculates the unemployment rate is less than rigorous–some would say disingenuous, others would say a boldface lie–and we don’t really have a good indicator for job openings and unemployed workers by the job that they perform, or more precisely that they would like to if they could find a job.

I am always trying to figure out ways to gauge what is going on in the AS/400 and successor markets, and a little more than two years ago I did

AS400, without the slash, still leads the pack.

–Crowell

Indeed it do. Here’s the same search, with no slash in the AS400. (You can run the query yourself against Google Trends by clicking here. Take a gander:

Google Trends for various AS/400-related terms. (Click graphic to enlarge.)

It’s like IBM never changed the name of the platform, or more precisely, it kept trying and met with less and less success with each name it tried. Well, it isn’t just like that, of course–that is exactly and precisely what happened. No metaphor required.

–TPM

Hello, Timothy:

This was an

The inevitable shift of electronics manufacturing to Asia continued apace last week as IBM began the final phase out of its Power Systems manufacturing in Ireland.

According to a report in the Irish Times last Thursday, Big Blue is set to move the server manufacturing that it was doing in its factory in Mulhuddart, west of the capitol city of Dublin, to a factory in Shenzhen, China. IBM has been making Power-based servers (including the Smart Cube appliances) in China for some time, but entry and midrange Power Systems machines for the European, African, and Asian markets came out of

If you were expecting the IT market to suddenly start expanding again like it was 1999, you are in for a splash of cold water in the face to wake you from that dream.

According to the prognosticators at Gartner, IT spending is on track to hit $2.4 trillion in 2010, up 2.4 percent compared to last year. This may not sound like a lot, but the IT industry is very large (especially when you toss in telecom costs, as this data does, alongside hardware, software, and services spending) and like a large body of water, it takes a

IBM continues the Herculean task of cleaning out the AS/400, iSeries, and System i stables to make way for the Power Systems trotters and last week announced it was cutting some more features and upgrades from the product catalog.

Let’s talk about the upgrade chops first, since they probably affect more people. As you can see in announcement letter 910-239, IBM killed off upgrades from the 9402-236, the so-called Advanced 36 clone of the System/36 running on early PowerPC processors and sporting the SSP operating system, to its AS/400 9402-600 and 9402-620 machines. The AS/400 Model 600 machines were

IBM last week bought Clarity Systems, a developer of Windows-based business intelligence tools designed to help finance officers comply with regulatory reporting requirements and derive more insight out of their financial systems. It was IBM’s 24th acquisition of a BI-related company in the last four years.

Based in Toronto, Ontario, Clarity Systems develops two main product lines. Its flagship Clarity7 products help customers derive insight from their data via ad-hoc reporting and visual scorecards and also includes powerful budgeting and financial modeling capabilities. But IBM acquired Clarity primarily for its Clarity FSR (“financial statement reporting”) product, which helps companies