IBM Reaches Out to Midmarket Business Partners
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As I explained in last week's issue when I tried to suss out how the midrange market continues to evolve, all the big IT players and plenty of small ones have set their sights on the small and medium business (SMB) market as a means of trying to grow their own businesses. And the reason is simple: the S and M portions of the economy are growing their IT spending at a substantially higher pace than the E, or enterprise, portion of the economy. But to succeed in the midrange, you can't just concentrate on customers. You also have to concentrate on partners. READ MORE >

Sundry July Power Systems Announcements
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One quarter has ended, and another has begun, and it being summer and all, now is the traditional time when IBM has done some nipping and tucking in its System i and System p product catalogs. Just because we are all one big, happy Power Systems family doesn't mean that such traditions are now done for. In fact, last week, Big Blue made a few tweaks to the products in the Power Systems lineup. READ MORE >

IBM Updates DB2 Web Query Business Intelligence Tool
by Alex Woodie

IBM last week announced two additions to DB2 Web Query, the graphical business intelligence tool for generating and viewing reports and queries on the i operating system (formerly i5/OS). In September, IBM will deliver a new tool called Report Broker, which automatically distributes reports, and a new software development kit (SDK), which will enable customers and ISVs to integrate DB2 Web Query with existing applications. READ MORE >

As I See It: Babes in Broadband
by Victor Rozek

A couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done--preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department. READ MORE >