Power7 Blades Plus i Versus X64 Blades Plus Windows
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The price/performance saga continues, and in this week's issue of The Four Hundred, we pit the new Power7-based Power Systems 700, 701, and 702 servers against their rough equivalents in the X64 blade server world. Two weeks ago, when I fixed an error I had discovered with the PS701 blade configurations, I showed you that the Power7 blades were a mixed bag, with the entry AIX blades able to hold their own against IBM's AIX on the same hardware and configured with the Oracle 11g R2 Standard Edition One entry database. READ MORE >

Transitions Push Systems and Technology Group into the Red
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As previously reported a month ago in The Four Hundred, IBM had a pretty good first quarter to start out 2010. Big Blue's overall sales rose by 5 percent to $22.9 billion, and net income increased by 13 percent to $2.6 billion. The Systems and Technology Group, which makes and sells IBM's chips, servers, and storage arrays, managed 4.9 percent growth, to $3.38 billion. But if you drill down into the numbers, as I did, you'll see that the Power7 transition and the wait for the System z11 mainframes have pushed STG into the red. READ MORE >

AS/400 LUG Shares Chief i Architect's "Why i?" Arguments
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back when I started in this AS/400 racket as a newbie reporter who would never dream of asking a mean question of anyone and did not have much of a sense of the business world or how it truly used computers to get work done, I heard something that seemed like a timeless truth even in the late 1980s: No one ever got fired for buying IBM. And no one back then had to justify buying an AS/400. The back-end apps you wanted ran on it, it had an IBM label and a sophisticated, easy to use database and programming language, and hundreds of thousands of companies owned them. READ MORE >

Creativity Is the New Business Kool-Aid, IBM CEO Study Finds
by Alex Woodie

CEOs around the world today place more emphasis on the creativity of their leaders than their rigor, management discipline, integrity, or vision, according to a newly released study from IBM. Indeed, the study finds that the creative management style--which is marked by taking calculated risks and communicating in new ways--will lead to more success as companies struggle to find their way in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. READ MORE >