After pre-announcing on last Monday morning that it would have better than expected profits in its fourth quarter, giving Wall Street a helping hand as it tries to climb up the steep cliff it has tumbled off in recent weeks, IBM reported its full and official financial results for the quarter last Thursday afternoon after the market closed. This turns out to be one of the best quarters IBM has turned in during the past decade, in terms of both revenue and profit growth.

The big hero for the quarter is probably the increasing prices for oil, which is driving

For the past several years, I have ended each work year by attending a server technology conference hosted by UBS, which typically draws the top brass from the major server divisions of the tier one server makers. This year, because of the high cost of putting on the event, UBS decided to not do it. But some of the server makers did attend the Global Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by Lehman Brothers in December. One of them was IBM, and Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president in charge of Systems and Technology Group, had some interesting things

In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I did a stream-of-consciousness rendition of a wish list I had for the System i product line for 2008. Making my own list is fun–well, if you like banging your head against a wall, as most of us in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem apparently do–but the real reason I do it is to try to solicit ideas from readers of this newsletter and publish them so one set of readers of this newsletter–the executives at IBM–can see what we are all thinking.

A number of you responded to my

The 2008 IT market was looking a little boring so far this year, but server and operating system maker and software powerhouse wannabee Sun Microsystems woke everybody up early last Wednesday morning with the news that it would spend $1 billion to acquire open source database maker MySQL. This is arguably one of the smartest moves Sun has made in a decade, and probably rivals the decision it made in the mid-1990s to buy the carcasses from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and the Cray Sparc-based server business.

That is a qualified “probably” because Sun’s early embrace of Internet technologies,

A year ago, when it was just becoming clear that IBM was going to take longer to get its Power6-based server platforms to market than many had expected, there were plenty of rumors going around when IBM would get its revamped System i and System p iron and their respective i5/OS V6R1 and AIX 6.1 operating systems to market. As we headed into summer, mainframe customers heard that the new z6-based machines were coming, and they held back spending, too.

There’s just no question at all that IBM had planned to have the Power6 processors and their servers into the

I am convinced that IBM is getting ready to take the wraps off i5/OS, and it is not because I have any solid information. Not yet, anyway. I am hearing a lot of different things about what IBM may and may not be doing, and when it may or may not be doing them. But I have gotten my hands on some concrete information about V6R1 that comes from IBM’s top techies, and it has some information you will find useful as you make your plans.

First and foremost, on an operating system roadmap that IBM put together only a

Whatever IBM did to stop the eight-quarter decline in sales of System i servers, my advice is to keep doing more of that. (Unless it pumped the channel full of iron to get good numbers, as vendors are sometimes tempted to do, particularly in the fourth quarter when the bonuses of their employees and partners, as well as their own, are at stake.) The Power-based server line was one of the saviors of Big Blue’s ending quarter of 2007, and for once, the System i product line was helping out instead of hurting.

As we reported in the lead story

Microsoft was awarded more than 1,600 patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2007, placing it sixth on the list of biggest patent performers, according to IFI Patent Intelligence, which tracks patent awards. IBM, which tried but failed to patent outsourcing last year, won the patent count for the 16th straight year, with more than 3,100 patents.

One way to gauge the level of innovation occurring in the IT industry is to count the number of patents awarded to companies. Since the organizations getting the most patents year after year tend to be developers of

Smaller or beleaguered software companies of all kinds and stripes are coming in from the rain like drenched animals into a warm barn with the economy in the United States still wobbly. In a maturing market, as that for information technology certainly is, consolidation is the inevitable consequence of the maturity of a product, and this process gets accelerated when smart companies think they can’t go it alone any more. Such is the case with middleware software maker BEA Systems, which last week accepted a takeover offer of $8.5 billion from database and application software giant Oracle.

Oracle

I don’t know what is more disconcerting: the large number of predictions and prognostications that we usually see being publicly made about the forthcoming IT spending year as one year ends and a new one begins, or the lack of such auguries–at least publicly–from the usual suspects in the IT consulting racket. But at least some of the analysts at Gartner have the itch to predict, and they made some calls recently about the outsourcing and the business intelligence software markets.

The amount of money that companies worldwide spend on outsourcing is just staggering. In 2007, the global outsourcing market