The More Things Change
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Do you sometimes think that the part of IBM's brain related to the AS/400 and its successor platforms has been put in stasis so it is still, in some way, in 1988? That perhaps the people who do marketing for the IBM i platform are not located in Somers, New York, but rather in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Day just keeps looping and looping, like in that fabulous 1993 film by the same name? Maybe it is just me, but despite all of the technology changes and name changes, the Power Systems-IBM i combo does not seem to have changed all that much in important respects from the AS/400s announced in 1988. READ MORE >

Big Sam Is Worried About Oracle--And For Good Reason
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The rivalry between IBM and Oracle, which could define the way enterprise computing gets done at a lot of IT shops, is shaping up nicely. Last week, at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal, IBM's president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, spoke for more than an hour, ranging over a number of topics, including its rivalries with Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle also posted its financials for its first quarter of fiscal 2011 and laid out its goals for creating engineered systems READ MORE >

Focus Melds Crowdsourced IT Analysis with Social Media
by Alex Woodie

A new online venture called Focus is looking to shake up the status quo in the market for B2B and IT analysis with a business plan that combines social media mechanisms with mostly crowdsourced content. If all goes as founder and CEO Scott Albro plans--and it seems to be so far, considering www.focus.com is attracting 12 million people per month, according to Albro--the big players in IT analysis, such as Gartner, will be forced to change how they produce and distribute content. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Seismically Active Storage
by Hesh Weiner

During the early 1970s, the iconic large computer was the System/370-158 mainframe from IBM. It ran at and defined 1 MIPS. Its magnetic core memory technology was boosted by virtualization. But during the lifecycle of the 158, IBM fell behind. READ MORE >