• The Rumor Mill on IBM’s Impending Platform Announcements

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• Some Info on i5/OS V6R1 and V6R2 Support

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• A Little More Color on IBM’s Q4 2007 Server Sales

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• Microsoft Rises to Sixth on Patent List for 2007

  January 21, 2008 Alex Woodie

  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

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• BEA Systems Finally Says Yes to an Oracle Buy

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• Gartner Predicts Strong Outsourcing, Weakening Business Intelligence Markets

  January 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• The Official 2008 TPM System i Wish List

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year, and a time when IBM is not only readying a new line of Power-based servers and an improved i5/OS operating system, but also rejiggering its Systems and Technology Group to do a better job chasing server sales among small and medium businesses and to preserve its strength in the enterprise server space. Before the concrete is poured into the 2008 forms, it is probably a good idea for all of us to give Big Blue a sense of the things we would like it to do with the System i product line.

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• Bracing for i5/OS V6R1 and the Winding Down of V5

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the two decades I have been watching the systems and server racket, the OS/400 and i5/OS family of operating systems have probably given their nearly 300,000 or so unique customers the least amount of trouble possible for a complex computer system running mission-critical applications. While some people have crabbed about bugs in particular releases since 1988 or were upset in 1995 and 1996 by the troubles they had making the CISC-to-RISC jump, software upgrades have been a comparatively easy process. And so, as we look ahead this year to the launch of i5/OS V6R1, which is in final best

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• IBM Gets Clustered Storage and EMC Founder with XIV Buy

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The company’s name is pronounced “Ex Eye Vee,” and it stands for the Roman numeral for “fourteen,” in honor of the fourteenth class of the Talpiot technical university, run by the Israeli military, that XIV Limited‘s founders all hail. And now the Israeli startup specializing in clustered disk storage is part of IBM‘s System Storage unit, which has its hands on the small company’s substantial expertise in block-level, virtualized, clustered storage arrays. IBM and XIV did not detail the price it paid for the company, but the Israeli business newspaper Globes reported on December 30, several days before

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• As I See It: Weighty Matters

  January 14, 2008 Victor Rozek

  The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was “time sensitive.” But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn’t hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and

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