IBM Expands VIP to All Systems for Precision Sales
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of the merger of the System i and System p Power-based server lines over the past several months, IBM is taking its Vertical Industry Program, or VIP, marketing approach from the former System i division and applying it as a strategy to peddle the entire portfolio of servers and storage through its newly constituted Business Systems division. Business Systems, you will remember, was created in January 2007 as the marketing machine aimed at small and medium businesses. READ MORE >

Power Systems Adds New Choices for IBM's Academic Initiative
by Dan Burger

If you want to recruit fresh young talent to careers in information technology, you have to show them where the jobs are. No jobs. No students. It might sound like fun to be a blacksmith, but there just hasn't been much of a calling for those skills in the past 100 years or so. The idea of a high-demand career is very much colored by the local business community. And IBM is well aware of this, being both a global and local IT supplier. READ MORE >

IBM's Q1 Driven by Mainframes, Unix, Services, and the Weak Dollar
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

That good ole annuity-style revenue stream, which accounts for a little more than half of IBM's sales in any given quarter, was gurgling and burbling along in the first quarter of 2008, helping to float the company's product sales and delivering pretty hefty overall revenue and profit increases considering the shaky nature of the economy in the United States. And lucky for Big Blue, three-quarters of its revenues come from outside the United States, which means the weak dollar amplifies overseas sales when they are brought back to IBM HQ. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Everybody Wants Citrix Systems?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the economy bumping along, sometimes up and sometimes down, depending on the metrics you want to use, and big IT suppliers looking for rich, new markets to mine, every time someone gets bored and the news gets a little slow, out comes another merger and acquisition rumor. In recent weeks, the chatter out on there on the Internet and at the water coolers of IT suppliers looking for a deal and Wall Street banks looking for some good news (and visa versa) is that Citrix Systems, which itself just last year spent a fortune to acquire server and desktop hypervisor expert XenSource, is possibly in play. READ MORE >