Some Servers Take a Dive in IBM's Third Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM preannounced its revenues and earnings as the market was swooning two weeks ago in an effort to calm a staggering and falling Wall Street, the company's overall numbers gave the impression that Big Blue was nonetheless weathering the financial storm. While this may be true in the aggregate, to IBM's credit (don't say credit) as an IT supplier, certain portions of its business--particularly certain server lines--didn't do so well. Decide for yourself if this is some kind of leading indicator for the rest of 2008 and maybe 2009. READ MORE >

Gartner, Forrester Cut 2009 IT Spending Growth Estimates
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are sitting in the data center and listening carefully to the board room upstairs, you probably just heard the other shoe drop. The first one is that the economy is slowing because of the mess in the mortgage and credit markets across most of the modern economies. And the second shoe is that IT budgets are now going to start being trimmed, cut, or slashed, depending on the industry and the severity of the economic slowdown. READ MORE >

Infor CEO Preaches Business Darwinism, Prepares for Hyper Business Future
by Dan Burger

Taking a page from Eric Marks' book, Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, Infor chairman and chief executive officer, Jim Schaper, gave the attendees at his company's Inforum user conference last week his preview of business in the year 2015. Infor, the ERP super group that has assembled a collection of major and midrange ERP software firms that specialize in the manufacturing and distribution businesses, is in the early stages of shifting its application development to a service oriented architecture. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Home Deep Owe
by Hesh Wiener

When the dot-com bubble burst about eight years ago, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to prevent what it felt was a menacing deflation. The Fed's policies stemmed the decline but also led to the formation of a bubble in housing that has now burst. When the dot-com bubble burst, the largest computer companies handled it pretty well. The same is likely to be true of housing, where the two giants in housing hardware, Home Depot and Lowe's, seem to be coping about as well as the two top vendors of computer hardware, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. READ MORE >