IBM's Power Systems Sales Plan and Various Gotchas
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Language is a funny thing. As part of the ongoing merger of System i and System p product lines and the obliteration of separate marketing and sales divisions for these products in lieu of the single Power Systems division, which creates Power-based servers, and the Business Systems and Enterprise Systems divisions, which sell all of IBM's products to SMB and enterprise data centers, respectively, Big Blue is trying to control the language that its sales reps and business partners use as they pitch the new Power Systems products, pricing, and approach to OS/400 and i5/OS shops. READ MORE >

Power Systems Performance: First Up, SAP BI Data Mart
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The performance statistics of the new Power Systems machines running the i 6.1 operating system (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) are starting to come out, helping customers who are looking at buying one of these new boxes and moving to the new operating system try to figure out what throughput the new systems have. Performance benchmarks on real-world workloads have been pretty thin for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform for a number of years, and thus far IBM is sticking to the relatively small number of benchmarks plus its own Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) ratings to help customers gauge relative performance. READ MORE >

PowerVM: The i Hypervisor Is Not Hidden Anymore
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to blame someone, go ahead and blame people like me. Or, if it makes you feel any better, just blame me alone. For years, while I have praised the integrated nature of the AS/400 and its progeny, I have railed against the practice that IBM has had of bundling most of its software features on the platform and lumping it all together with a big, fat, single, hardware-software price tag that would give the wealthiest SMB shop a big sticker shock. Perhaps big enough to scare them off, even if a complete Windows stack cost the same or more. READ MORE >

As I See It: That Competitive Bug
by Victor Rozek

It has become an article of faith that competitiveness is inherently good, historically inevitable, and the fountainhead of economic dominance. It's rare that business-related nouns appear in print without their default companion adjective 'competitive.' The job market, global markets, wages, and prices all share the same pugnacious descriptor. As any first-year business student will attest: in order to be successful, companies must pursue competitive advantage by developing competitive solutions and executing competitive strategies. READ MORE >