Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It looks like IBM is finally getting around to adding features to the Power Systems-IBM i combination to make it more amenable to so-called cloud computing. It is not clear when these features, such as live migration of logical partitions, will be available, but hopefully it will be soon. Once these updated features are available in the next release of the operating system, it will be truly possible for IBM, hosting companies, or maybe brand new start-ups to offer cloudy i infrastructure. READ MORE >

Infor Makes a $1.83 Billion Bid for Lawson
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With rumors going around early last week that it had hired Barclays Capital to advise it on its options, midrange application software supplier Lawson Software finally fessed up that late on Friday night that something was indeed afoot. The Barclays Capital rumor had caused an 18 percent run-up in the company's stock and that was because everyone figured that it was because the software maker was looking at buying something or selling itself. READ MORE >

IBM Lays Out Plans for Future Growth and Profits
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's not every day that I get invited up to IBM Country up north of me to spend the day with the top 20 executives at Big Blue. In fact, it was only last Tuesday. So I decided to go, despite the flooding on the local roads between where I live in upstate Manhattan and IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. My faithful rented Zipcar and a general sense of direction got me where I was going despite the road closures, and the highlight for me was meeting some of the techies who work at IBM Research, including the top people behind the Watson question-answer machine. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Tablet Vivant, Memories Mordant
by Hesh Wiener

Hitachi, which once ate IBM's disk drive business, has regurgitated, selling its rotating storage operations to Western Digital. Meanwhile, outfits that track memory prices generally agree that DRAM has become a drug on the market. The only storage chips selling like hotcakes are the kind used to build flash memory devices. Even those current darlings of the electronics world may get whacked, pricewise, as the Korean kings of NAND segue to 30 nanometers. What's going on here? It's iPads on the client side and green blades on the server end of the wire, that's what. READ MORE >