As you read this story on Monday, I am dressed up in my journalist monkey suit–tan chinos, a colorful oxford shirt, a brown corduroy jacket, and comfortable shoes–attending a Smarter Planet press event at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Ballroom off Columbus Circle in my hometown of New York, New York. The event, of course, is hosted by IBM, and the main reason I care enough to make myself presentable is because this is the coming out party for the first of the Power7-based servers from Big Blue.

Someone said something about lunch, too, of course. But I will be

There is an understandable amount of cynicism among the AS/400 faithful that IBM has neglected the OS/400 operating system, stealing all the best goodies from OS/400 and weaving them into AIX and then not adding some nifty features, such as live partition mobility for PowerVM, to i/OS, the modern instantiation of OS/400. Moreover, i/OS releases are anything but regular and Big Blue doesn’t roll up dot releases like other operating system makers do.

On the former, I cannot report, I am sad to say, that much has changed. But I can tell you, based on internal IBM roadmaps that I

I’ve done big boxes, and little boxes, and in-between boxes in my theoretical and completely hypothetical System iWant, 2010 Edition, Power7-based machines. As I sit down to write the next installment in the System iWant series, IBM is getting ready to launch some kind of Power7-based servers on February 8, and as far as I know, blades are not part of the announcement. So I feel perfectly comfortable in giving Big Blue whatever advice I can come up with to make its Power7 blades better.

With the Power7 server designs, IBM could do some really interesting things with blade servers

Sam Palmisano hasn’t changed much over the years. From his photos, IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman appears to be a slightly larger version of his former self–a middle-aged man with a round, boyish face and a soft body; a stranger to physical exertion. Granted, as an executive he isn’t paid to chop wood, but I was hoping for a little more mental exertion than was evident in his recent Newsweek column, The Future of the City.

Newsweek, after all, has some prestige, and when guest columnists are invited to contribute their thoughts, they usually put

On January 25, IBM‘s PartnerWorld organization officially began operating Software Value Plus, a new plan that aims to match experienced IBM business partners with customers looking to install particular IBM software products. While the plan will impose new restrictions on which partners can sell what products–rarely a popular move among loyal business partners–on launch day IBM sweetened the deal with new sales incentives and training and certification programs targeting cloud computing.

Navigating the PartnerWorld labyrinth is never an easy task for the army of hardware resellers, consultants, systems integrators, and software developers that make their living, in whole or

In theory, everyone can agree that training is crucial to ongoing employee development. It’s a major factor in their success, professional development, and willingness to continue working for an employer. And organizations can see the benefits from developing their employees’ skills relating to technological innovations that provide a company with competitive advantages. Yet somewhere between theory and reality there’s a disconnect. Lately, it’s the budget that gets the blame.

“The general feeling among the conference organizers is that training budgets are loosening up,” says Paul Rogers, one of many volunteers who pour their efforts into the Northeast User Groups Conference

Faced with a tight budget and a to-do list of IT projects as long as your right arm, what chance does social networking have of breaking into the top priorities in your department? That may depend on how far into the future you plan. It also might be affected by a few things the analysts at Gartner target in a report released last week.

The trend toward using social networking systems in business is undeniable, but plenty of obstacles must be overcome before managers and employees alike can be made comfortable. During the next three to four years, expect the

It’s either feast or famine in the processor racket, and this week will see two server chips being announced and others being previewed for launch later in the quarter. All of the new chips coming out have their enthusiasts–some will even buy systems that use them!–and each chip will find its niche or volumes, as the case may be, despite the homogenization pressure in the systems sector.

As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, IBM is rolling out the first of its Power7-based systems today in New York as part of a much wider Smarter Planet marketing

The people behind the Four Hundred stack of newsletters live and work all over the country, and that means email and instant messaging are our equivalents of the water cooler. It is where we talk about what we are up to both personally and professionally, and it is also where we deal with the smaller issues that are facing us and can be solved without a phone call. (Both email and IM are essentially free, and Guild Companies is frugal.) Like many of you out there in AS/400 Land, we are confused about how to talk about the platform. Here’s

The members of the Transcation Processing Council last week ratified and announced a new add-on feature of the popular TPC suite of tests for measuring online transaction processing and data warehousing performance. For years, the TPC tests have measured performance and bang for the buck. But now, thanks to the TPC-Energy specification, vendors now have a consistent way to measure, audit, and report how the systems they test consume energy as they run benchmarks.

According to Mike Nikolaiev, who is the manager of the systems performance unit at Hewlett-Packard and chaired the TPC-Energy committee, this is the first specification that