Weak Dollar, Services, and Power6 Give IBM a Solid Fourth Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After pre-announcing on last Monday morning that it would have better than expected profits in its fourth quarter, giving Wall Street a helping hand as it tries to climb up the steep cliff it has tumbled off in recent weeks, IBM reported its full and official financial results for the quarter last Thursday afternoon after the market closed. This turns out to be one of the best quarters IBM has turned in during the past decade, in terms of both revenue and profit growth. READ MORE >

IBM Aims for Server Expansion in 2008, Including System i Reincarnation
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past several years, I have ended each work year by attending a server technology conference hosted by UBS, which typically draws the top brass from the major server divisions of the tier one server makers. This year, because of the high cost of putting on the event, UBS decided to not do it. But some of the server makers did attend the Global Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by Lehman Brothers in December. One of them was IBM, and Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president in charge of Systems and Technology Group, had some interesting things to say. READ MORE >

Readers Riff on the 2008 System i Wish List
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In last week's issue of The Four Hundred, I did a stream-of-consciousness rendition of a wish list I had for the System i product line for 2008. Making my own list is fun--well, if you like banging your head against a wall, as most of us in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem apparently do--but the real reason I do it is to try to solicit ideas from readers of this newsletter and publish them so one set of readers of this newsletter--the executives at IBM--can see what we are all thinking. READ MORE >

Sun Casts a $1 Billion Net to Catch MySQL
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 2008 IT market was looking a little boring so far this year, but server and operating system maker and software powerhouse wannabee Sun Microsystems woke everybody up early last Wednesday morning with the news that it would spend $1 billion to acquire open source database maker MySQL. This is arguably one of the smartest moves Sun has made in a decade, and probably rivals the decision it made in the mid-1990s to buy the carcasses from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and the Cray Sparc-based server business. READ MORE >