In the wake of the merger of the System i and System p Power-based server lines over the past several months, IBM is taking its Vertical Industry Program, or VIP, marketing approach from the former System i division and applying it as a strategy to peddle the entire portfolio of servers and storage through its newly constituted Business Systems division. Business Systems, you will remember, was created in January 2007 as the marketing machine aimed at small and medium businesses.

The System i adopted the VIP approach to sales, which has very precise application providers working very precise geographies to

If you want to recruit fresh young talent to careers in information technology, you have to show them where the jobs are. No jobs. No students. It might sound like fun to be a blacksmith, but there just hasn’t been much of a calling for those skills in the past 100 years or so. The idea of a high-demand career is very much colored by the local business community. And IBM is well aware of this, being both a global and local IT supplier.

The reality is that a lot of students want to stay in the communities where they

That good ole annuity-style revenue stream, which accounts for a little more than half of IBM‘s sales in any given quarter, was gurgling and burbling along in the first quarter of 2008, helping to float the company’s product sales and delivering pretty hefty overall revenue and profit increases considering the shaky nature of the economy in the United States. And lucky for Big Blue, three-quarters of its revenues come from outside the United States, which means the weak dollar amplifies overseas sales when they are brought back to IBM HQ.

Look at how much the weak dollar helps. Sales

With the economy bumping along, sometimes up and sometimes down, depending on the metrics you want to use, and big IT suppliers looking for rich, new markets to mine, every time someone gets bored and the news gets a little slow, out comes another merger and acquisition rumor. In recent weeks, the chatter out on there on the Internet and at the water coolers of IT suppliers looking for a deal and Wall Street banks looking for some good news (and visa versa) is that Citrix Systems, which itself just last year spent a fortune to acquire server and

The product side of Hewlett-Packard launched its umpteeth assault on the IBM mainframe and AS/400 server base a year and a half ago, and last week HP Services, which actually does server migrations on behalf of customers, announced its companion set of service offerings for legacy application migration, collectively known as the Modernization Factory. The neat bits of the Migration Factory offering are the tools that HP has created to analyze legacy applications to help customers figure out where and what to modernize.

HP is always chasing mainframe and AS/400 accounts to try to talk them into moving to Unix,

The convergence of the System i and System p Power-based server lines that has been taking place in gradual steps was finalized a few weeks ago. But the bean counters at IBM did not fully converge the Power platforms in Big Blue’s financial reports because this merger was not yet finished when IBM ended its first quarter of 2008. But there was another reason IBM might have waited to just report on Power Systems as a single unit, too.

Because if it didn’t, it might have had to show that the delays in rolling out Power6-based servers and AIX 6.1

So you have an iSeries or System i server or you are looking to buy or upgrade to a new Power 520, 550, 570, or 595 server, and you also want to consolidate some Linux workloads onto your machine to reduce complexity and make better use of the iron you invest lots of dough in. The only problem is that some of the Linux applications you have only run on X86 processors.

Last year, if you were a System p customer using AIX or a shop buying what was formerly known as the OpenPower variant of the System p platform

Sometimes, server makers can be perplexing. Every server maker on the planet, and their chip partners if they use them for all or some of their product lines, are keen on showing that they have hardware-assisted virtualization electronics built into their chips. IBM started adding virtualization features into the hardware to better deploy logical partitions a decade ago and a decade earlier in mainframes, so this is old hat to Big Blue even though people make a big deal about it these days on the X64 platform or various RISC or Itanium platforms.

In October 2006, I had a long

When most people think of Kodak, the Rochester, New York, technology company, they probably think of film for cameras or, in more modern times, the company that is trying to stay in business by becoming a place where people upload digital photos to have them printed out or buy the paper to do their own photo printing at home. But Kodak is an expert in all kinds of digital technology, and it has aspirations in a market it calls transactional printing.

And to that end, Kodak last week announced that it has acquired Intermate A/S, a relatively small

With energy costs on the rise on all fronts and data centers running out of room and power to add more servers, the idea of getting green in the data center–conserving energy if possible or getting the most work out of the energy used in computing complexes–has certainly taken hold in the psyches of both the board room and the white noise room. But according to a recent survey, few companies are actually doing anything about it beyond thought.

BlueArc, one of a number of upstart vendors of virtualized, power-efficient network storage arrays, recently commissioned a survey of data