The Power Systems 550 M50 Versus Its Predecessors
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM said that it was mostly concerned with preserving the price points of its i-class machinery as it made the transition from the System i to Power Systems i Editions, the company wasn't kidding. With the user-priced entry Power 520 M15 and M25 editions, customers are seeing some price/performance improvements, but with the larger Power 550 M50 machine, the bang for the buck is not appreciably different from its predecessor System i 550 boxes. You can debate for yourself whether or not this matters all that much, but I think it does matter. READ MORE >

IBM Rejiggers Development Tools on Entry Power 520 i Editions
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At the prices that IBM has historically charged for the AS/400 and its successor systems, you'd think that the compilers and related application development tools would just come as part of the system, much as the DB2/400 database did--and still does in the most recent DB2 for i incarnation inside the i 6.1 operating system. But, when Software Group was created more than a decade ago, the former system product groups started losing control of the software stacks that ran on their systems--that were for all intents and purposes the systems. READ MORE >

Job Word Cloud Redux: The AS/400 Sees Some Improvement
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, in a story entitled Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let's Talk About Jobs, I gathered up some job posting data from three of the big job sites in the United States--Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster--as jobs related to programming languages and operating system platforms. Some readers offered me some suggestions for improving my searches, and I requeried the data to see what effect those suggestions had. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Digital Leader
by Victor Rozek

Remote management, like remote viewing, is a specialized skill with a small practitioner base and an even smaller number of players who can actually do it successfully. Leading a tightly knit group of people, all of whom work in the same facility--and with whom you can directly interact--is one thing. Leading groups in a distributed world, where people are separated by continents and cultures, and with whom you have no personal contact, is quite another. And although management schools and how-to theories abound, there is really no place to learn the complexities of managing people who aren't there. So what's an aspiring leader to do? READ MORE >