The Rest of the Power7 Lineup Is Coming August 17
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are in the middle of negotiating a deal on a low-end Power 520, a midrange Power 550 or 750, or a high-end Power 595 server at the moment, you might want to put those negotiations on hold. It looks like IBM is getting ready to complete the rollout of the Power7-based Power Systems servers, and as I suggested in the lead story from last week's issue, the four entry machines (including the Power 720 and three other new variants added more recently) and the high-end Power 795 are moving up from their original October launch date. READ MORE >

Microsoft Azure: An AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I may be a whippersnapper compared to many of you dyed-in-the-wool System/38, System/36, and AS/400 old-timers, but I have been around long enough to see the irony of things with a certain amount of good humor and healthy detachment. And so I got a good chuckle last week when I saw that Microsoft was taking its Azure public cloud computing platform private, and perhaps to many more masses than it would have gotten through a public-only cloud. READ MORE >

Increase in IT Jobs Led by Contract Worker Demands
by Dan Burger

In the IT job market, recession-proof careers were about as reliable as tissue paper umbrellas. A lot of people got rained on. It's not much better now than it was a year ago, but it is better. From a variety of sources comes the word that companies are ready to hire again. Some will try to reclaim quality people that were laid off, while others will look for less experienced, less expensive replacements or additions. Shops running their businesses on the IBM i operating system are following the same hiring pattern as everyone else. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Smart Cube Is IBM's Half-AS Imitation of Apple
by Hesh Wiener

There are something like 225,000 iPhone programs available for download from the Apple App Store. By contrast, there are only about 10,000 true iPad apps. Google's Android phones IBM AS/400, now called the i like Apple products (but easily distinguished by checking sales volume) has a pathetic Web store selling canned systems under the Smart Cube rubric. There are about 80 software packages, but only 26 of them are for the i; the rest are for Intel-based Linux servers. READ MORE >