It looks like IBM is a bit eager to peddle some relatively big Power Systems iron to put the finishing touches on its first quarter. And it is no surprise, with a number of long-running promotions getting mothballed in recent weeks. If there is any rule of marketing, it is that you need to keep constantly changing things up to hit the hot buttons of different customers, so IBM is trying a rebate deal with an extremely short time window, and only on one machine: The Power 770.

There have been two generations of Power 770 boxes. The original ones

The future is tied to the past. It’s just not tied too tightly. Understanding that change occurs and better things come as a result is a pretty healthy attitude. Much better than forbidding change or refusing to acknowledge it exists. Change happens. But it’s almost always evolutionary rather than revolutionary. People prefer the level of disruption to be minimal–smooth transitions being far better than unexpected jolts. The row IBM hoed from AS/400 to IBM i is an example of both.

This isn’t a history lesson on the IBM midrange. It’s an example of what can happen when innovative thinking is

There’s not much of a midrange server business left, if the latest numbers from IDC are any indication. If you were thinking that the server business was shaped like a multi-layer cake, with each layer representing the revenues from small, midrange, and high-end machines, that is not the case any more. The midrange–or what we used to think of as the midrange–is being pulled apart by Moore’s Law.

By IDC’s definition, a midrange box is one that costs somewhere between $25,000 and $250,000, including a server with base memory and disk capacity and an operating system. In the fourth quarter,

How do you win a war no matter how it turns out? You sell weapons to all sides. That is what IBM is doing in Kenya, where Vodafone’s Safaricom runs the fabulous M-Pesa mobile payment system. M-Pesa’s transaction volume dwarfs that of Kenya’s banks, five of which have now hired IBM to help them get a piece of the action. Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel, also powered by IBM, has similar ambitions in mobile telephony and micropayment.

M-Pesa is an offspring of Islamic hawala funds transfer; this worries Interpol as it fascinates the Gates Foundation and cheers IBM.

Everyone in

Catching product transitions to conduct a little bit of new business is a tricky thing, and it is particularly difficult when the product transition that you are trying to take advantage of moves suddenly and unexpectedly. Just ask Abacus Solutions, which launched a virtual test drive service for IBM i 6.1 at the end of 2009 just as IBM was getting ready to stop selling i5/OS V5R4. And then Big Blue, at the request of customers facing the Great Recession, changed its mind and kept selling V5R4 a little longer.

The idea behind the test drive service was simple

As the false advertising lawsuit brought by Maxava against Vision Solutions slogs into its third year, the Federal judge overseeing the case has issued a tentative ruling on a preliminary matter. Judge George Wu in December rejected Maxava’s summary judgment motion, and stated he remained open to Vision’s summary judgment arguments. The jury trial originally scheduled to begin last November was delayed, and there’s no trial date currently on the docket.

IBM i high availability software maker Maximum Availability (as the company was then called) filed a civil lawsuit against its larger rival Vision Solutions in December 2009, alleging that

As The Four Hundred explained three weeks ago, Trevor Perry, IBM i advocate extraordinaire, is once again trying to shepherd the IBM i community for its own good, and is on a mission to understand how people talk about the platform formerly known as the AS/400. And he needs you to take a survey, so why don’t you help out?

Several weeks ago, Perry has launched www.ibmi2.com, a site that has a mission of building unity in the IBM i community.

Just like you and me, Perry wants to help the IBM i community, and he’s one of

If you are a Linux user on IBM‘s Power Systems or System z mainframe servers, then you might want to take a gander at the latest Enterprise Server release from SUSE Linux, the commercial Linux distributor owned by software conglomerate Attachmate since last year.

SUSE Linux has puts out Service Pack 2 for its Enterprise Server 11 variant of Linux, basing it on the new Linux 3.0.10 kernel, as you can read in the release notes for SP2. The update to the new Linux kernel also includes updates to the key portions of the open source stack,

“Get your head into the clouds and get back to work!” If your boss has recently issued you this order, you are not alone. There was a time when being accused of having your head in the clouds meant you were spending too much time daydreaming and not enough time producing real work. But, according to a recent IBM study, the number of companies turning to cloud computing is expected to more than double in the next three years.

The study, titled The Power of Cloud: Driving business model innovation, surveyed 572 business and technology executives worldwide. The goal

The annual training and education event known as the Northeast User Groups Conference has been an IBM midrange tradition in New England. It draws primarily from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine. And it’s unique because it combines the several active local user groups from New England along with devoted volunteers from areas where local user groups no longer exist. This year’s conference is scheduled for April 2 through 4.

As anyone who is connected with a local user group knows, it takes a group of dedicated volunteers to row the boat. In this case, they’ve been