A New Year, A New IBM Systems and Technology Group
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM's desire to get a much larger share of IT sales to small and medium business (SMBs) and the company's heavy reliance on the financial sector for core software and system sales has compelled the company's top brass to reorganize its Systems and Technology Group. Bill Zeitler has managed IBM's server and systems unit for so long that no one can remember his predecessor--hint: there wasn't one--and last Thursday he told STG employees about the final phase of a year-long transformation that has been underway in the group. READ MORE >

Rocket Software Buys NetManage for $69 Million
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Rocket Software, a privately held maker of mainframe and System i tools based in Newton, Massachusetts, has made the shareholders of NetManage an offer they probably will not refuse. After IT Jungle went on holiday in December, Rocket Software said that it was willing to pay $7.20 a share, or $69 million, to acquire publicly held NetManage, which makes host connectivity and legacy application modernization software for mainframe and System i gear and which is based in Cupertino, California. READ MORE >

Servers Get Their First Power and Performance Benchmark
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the first 40 years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Motherboarding
by Hesh Wiener

In 1995, IBM shifted its proprietary midrange systems from CISC to RISC processor technology. Today, the System i is to a considerable extent a variation of the System p--or visa versa, depending on how you want to look at it. Last year, IBM sent a processor guru out to talk about a chip called z6, a sibling of the new Power6 chip that executes mainframe instructions. IBM will soon announce z6 mainframes that share a lot more than just some processor technology with the System p. They could easily be more than 50 percent System p, by weight. READ MORE >