It’s probably a good thing that most of you out there in AS/400 Land are looking to acquire a Power 720 server, and one with not too many processor cores activated running the IBM i operating system. For you, whether you are comparing the Power 720-IBM i tag team to Power-based servers running AIX and Oracle databases, the Power 720 is an absolutely competitive platform, user for user, dollar for dollar.

This would seem to indicate someone at IBM is listening. Which is good news. However, the Power 750, the next stop up for most IBM i shops, has IBM

There’s a new sheriff at midrange application software giant Infor, and his name is Charles Phillips. Yes, that Charles Phillips, the ex-marine and former Morgan Stanley software analyst who had been taking orders from Oracle co-founder and chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, until early September. Now, Phillips will be the one giving the orders, and at a company that will be increasingly competing with Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and others in the enterprise software racket.

Infor, of course, is the midrange ERP, CRM, and SCM software maker that is an amalgam of myriad software companies that created products

The IBM i community needs new blood. We joke about the gray hairs and the no hairs, the beards and the pot bellies. It’s surprising you don’t find Geritol tonic and Revitol wrinkle cream as the official sponsors of the annual COMMON conference. You can almost see the retirement barn from where much of this herd is pastured. But in case you haven’t noticed, there are whippersnappers among us–young professionals with enthusiasm for the platform and a desire to network with others and eager to mix the best of the old and the new.

The YiPs (Young i Professionals) have

IBM‘s most economical servers, the System x machines, have been booming for a year, bringing Big Blue a revenue boost of more than 30 percent. At the other end of IBM’s product range, multi-million dollar mainframes have enjoyed a 15 percent jump in sales. But in the center IBM is in trouble. Big Blue’s best efforts have failed to produce a turnaround. For the past six quarters, Power Systems server revenue has been down at least 10 percent and sometimes much more. You can’t tell by the company’s confident posture, but IBM is in crisis.

Maybe IBM’s troubles are

Avnet Technology Solutions (ATS) may peddle hardware and software from every major supplier in the world, but its 25-year relationship with IBM is special for a number of reasons–about three billion of them this year, in fact. Last week ATS executives predicted it will do $5 billion in business with Big Blue by 2015, an aggressive growth rate it hopes to power in part with new vertically oriented business practices it launched for the energy, financial services, and retail industries.

The relationship between Avnet and IBM was on full display last week in San Antonio, Texas, where IBM held its

You have finally hit upon the future of IBM and Apple, and perhaps the belated possible salvation for IBM customers worldwide on all IBM platforms:

“For years, I have been joking–well, half joking–that IBM should buy Apple. Wouldn’t it be funny if Apple, with its $51 billion cash hoard and maybe another $37 billion in its stock, took a controlling stake in IBM? Imagine the user interface and integrated database and programming tools Apple could buff up for IBM i . . . .”

With the System i platform losing 25,000 customers per year and only 100,000 customers left,

The fight continues between the lawyers handling rivals Oracle and SAP in the TomorrowNow lawsuit as well as the PR people at these two companies and Hewlett-Packard, which has hired former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker to be its new CEO.

The TomorrowNow trial, the result of a lawsuit filed in March 2007 by Oracle in the wake of SAP’s acquisition of the provider of third party maintenance on PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE software suites, was almost delayed last week, but the judge handling the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco

Supply chain and retail software specialist JDA Software has turned in a very good third quarter, with revenues up 65 percent, to $158.4 million, and net income rising 32 percent, to $8.3 million.

In the quarter ended September 30, software license sales fell by a half point to $16.3 million, but subscription and other recurring revenues rose by a factor of 6.4 to $5.8 million. Maintenance service revenues for JDA rose by 42.6 percent, to $64.2 million, and consulting services sales in the quarter more than doubled to $65.9 million. Reimbursed expenses were more than double as well, hitting $6.3

In an effort to bring some order to the market for flash-based solid state drives (SSDs), which are increasingly being sprinkled into servers and PCs to boost performance and decrease energy consumption for I/O bandwidth, a slew of interested vendors in the storage and server rackets ganged up last week to create the SSD Form Factor Working Group.

I know, that sounds pretty boring, but it is important, and Intel, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, and IBM are to be commended for sitting down at the table and hammering out SSD interface and form factor specifications to

On the list of CIO duties and responsibilities, mind reader is the one that rarely shows up but is often required. And the brain silo that needs to be tapped into? The CEO’s, of course. Whether the grand poobah of your company is forthcoming about it or not, his reliance on the IT department grows each day, each month, each year. So that you have a better idea what Mr. Big Cheese in the corner office is expecting, the analysts at Gartner brain-scanned a bunch of top execs and this is their diagnosis.

Ranking near the top of the revelations