IBM Creates New Power, SMB Server Divisions
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past decade and a half, IBM's two midrange server lines--formerly the AS/400 proprietary server line and the RS/6000 Unix server line but now known as the System i and the System p, respectively--have been on a course to merge. First, they started supporting similar APIs, then similar Power processors, then the exact same hardware, including Power processors, memory, disks, and other peripherals. Then, they started supporting each others' respective i5/OS and AIX operating systems. It would be logical to assume that eventually the System i and System p brands would eventually fall by the wayside and there would be just one Power server line. READ MORE >

Rumor Du Jour: i5/OS on Other Platforms? Not!
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The midrange press was abuzz a little last week about the prospect of IBM porting the i5/OS operating system to other platforms. While this would be an interesting development, and one that would quite possibly breathe some new life into the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, it turns out, alas, that such talk is not true and is the result of a misunderstanding of some comments made by an IBM executive at a user group meeting. READ MORE >

IBM Turns In Its Best Second Quarter in Six Years
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IT industry bellwether IBM had a tough first quarter in 2007, with its business in the United States slowing down. But in the second quarter, Big Blue's U.S. unit rebounded as much as IBM said it might earlier this year, while overseas markets continued to grow as the U.S. dollar continued to be weak. The upshot is that IBM has turned in its best second quarter in revenue and profit growth since 2001, when the bloom was just coming off the dot-com rose. READ MORE >

As I See It: Lawyers, Lies, and Statistics
by Victor Rozek

Here's a statistic guaranteed to curdle the cream in an IT professional's coffee. The huge populations of China and India have produced a correspondingly huge crop of offsprings--628 million kids under the age of 15, give or take a village. That's a lot of young people who will soon (if they haven't already) enter the global labor market. Americans, on the other hand, have sired some 60 million moppets, who blissfully haunt the nation's malls, unaware of the approaching competitive tidal wave about to engulf them. READ MORE >