Be My Guest
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like most people who have been following the server racket for a long time, I have been singing the praises of server virtualization as a means to make servers more efficient and thereby help companies not only get more for their money, but hopefully--if not now, then in future years--to actually save some money that they can spend on other things. While virtualization is a great advancement in server technology, it is breaking down a lot of barriers even as it erects virtual ones inside servers of all stripes and sizes. READ MORE >

Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For every generation of AS/400, iSeries, or System i servers and the related OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems, there is a person who, more than anyone else, is associated with the technology that IBM delivers. This person has historically been in charge of steering the development of the hardware and software for the product line and managing the operations of the factories that made the AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers and the supply chains that fed them. This is a big job, and for my money, a much tougher job perhaps than that performed by divisional general managers at Big Blue. READ MORE >

IBM Acquires BI Software Specialist Cognos for $5 Billion
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The third shoe in the business intelligence market has finally fallen, now that IBM last week announced that it would spend $5 billion in cash to acquire Canadian BI software maker Cognos. The IBM deal follows Oracle's snapping up of Hyperion Solutions in March for $3.3 billion and SAP's purchase of Business Objects in October for $6.7 billion. With this deal, the three biggest independent suppliers of business intelligence and analytics software are no longer free agents, no matter how much their new owners will protest otherwise. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: It's Your Gaul
by Hesh Wiener

Like Gaul before Charlemagne, office desktops can be divided in three. One nation uses PCs running a mix of generic and corporate applications. Another nation uses thin, fixed-function clients, even if some of the machines have full-fledged computers inside. The third nation uses PCs, but works with software that shifts most client functionality to a shared terminal support server. For decades, friends and enemies of these nations have made more or less the same old arguments. But now client technology is really different, and so are the end users. Some choices that were right yesterday may be wrong tomorrow. READ MORE >