Sun Broadens Its Blade Server Lineup
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For all of the talk about the blade server form factor in the server space, blades have not grown anywhere near as fast as many had expected and after the failures of a number of players, the market is dominated in a disproportionate fashion by Hewlett-Packard and IBM. While Dell, Fujitsu, NEC, Sun Microsystems, and a number of players are trying to get into the game--some for the second time, in fact--none has broken out sufficiently in blades to make this a three horse race. With the "Constellation" blade server announcements that Sun made last week, the company hopes to change that. READ MORE >

CIOs Get Ready to Hire in the Summer
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The IT business took it on the chin seven years ago after spending like a drunken sailor on dot-com businesses and application modernization efforts, and in the wake of the global recession after the September 11 terrorist attacks, companies not only stopped hiring IT staff, they put projects on hold and, in some cases, they let go of employees they could no longer afford to keep. What a difference six years makes. According to Robert Half Technology, which has been monitoring IT hiring practices since 1995, the increase in expected hiring in the third quarter is the highest since the fourth quarter of 2001. READ MORE >

Open Source Software Sales Pegged at $5.8 Billion by 2011
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With open source operating systems, Web servers, databases, middleware, and development tools widely and freely available, it is hard to quantify the impact that these products have on the IT market at large. Most of the big open source software projects these days have commercial-grade support that is equivalent to that offered by the vendors of closed-source software, and it is here that open source projects get the money to pay at least some of the programmers who work on key pieces of the product that they sell support contracts for. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Missing Inaction
by Hesh Wiener

IBM, which is neck-and-neck in the server trade with Hewlett-Packard, formerly made typewriters, disk drives, printers, and personal computers. Over the past two decades it shed many of the products it used to manufacture, by continued to grow by creating a huge services group and absorbing a number of software companies. Except for its typewriters, none of the products IBM dropped have disappeared, the way DB Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, or Judge Crater vanished. Today, IBM still manufactures some servers and storage devices, and perhaps it doesn't have to manufacture anything at all. READ MORE >