Along with the April 28 Power6+ enhancements to the entry and midrange server lineup as well as the addition of solid state disks–finally–to the Power Systems lineup, IBM made a slew of storage announcements relating to the Power Systems lineup. In many ways, the announcements had more to do with storage than they did with processors, but this kind of got buried in the zillions of announcements that Big Blue tried to pack in its second Dynamic Infrastructure blitz.

I touched on some of these storage announcements back in the April 27 issue, based on the information I could

There are only three marketing levers in the information technology business: technology, price, and FUD. Without a refresh for top-end Power Systems as part of the April 28 release of the product line, IBM needs to pull one of these three levers, and the technology lever is stuck along with Power6 and Power6+ clock speeds at 5 GHz, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt don’t really work on your own customer base so much as someone else’s. So that leaves price.

And late last week, Big Blue pulled the price lever, kicking out two separate promotions, one on Thursday for the

Micro Focus moved aggressively into the market for testing tools last week with the announcement that it plans to buy Borland Software and the application testing unit of Compuware for a combined $155 million. Micro Focus, which bought System i software developer NetManage a year ago, hopes the acquisitions will give it a good chunk of the fragmented market for testing tools.

In making its bids for Borland and Compuware’s testing tool division, Micro Focus is making a bold bet that the market for testing tools, currently about $2 billion globally, is about to expand in a big way. It’s

The tiny specs on the massive Navajo-sandstone face are two men. They are hanging from absurdly long ropes, inching downward toward a spot a few hundred feet above the ground. The sun is merciless and they work quickly. One man begins boring a small hole in the sheer rock wall, while the other waits to insert a stick of dynamite. When he lights the long fuse, both men scramble up the ropes as high as they can before the explosion tears a portion of the wall away.

The year is 1924. The men have no sophisticated climbing gear, no specialized

Searching for some favorable IT spending-related news in a down economy? Here’s something to get your attention. The application infrastructure and middleware market in 2008 grew 6.9 percent to reach a total of $15.1 billion in sales, according to Gartner statistics. Take into consideration that the increase in 2008 followed a very robust 2007 market that jumped 13.3 percent and totaled $14.1 billion. And the 2007 increase was piggybacked on two previous years of double-digit growth.

Although no longer riding such a prodigious winning streak, the staying power of this segment of the software space is indicative of the strength

As part of the recent batch of Power Systems announcements on April 28, IBM made some important changes to the hardware and software relating to Power-based blade servers and the BladeCenter chassis that makes that subset of the product line usable by the i shops.

First and most importantly, the Virtual I/O Server that runs inside of a PowerVM logical partition and acts as a virtualized interface to disk and tape controllers and their media for the Power-based JS12, JS22, JS23, and JS43 blade servers can now support virtual tape. What this means, in something akin to plain English, is

When XAware, a maker of a Java-based, graphical data integration tool, took the open source plunge with its eponymous product in November 2007, it did not do so to gussy itself up to be acquired. But the vibrancy of XAware’s open source development and distribution effort and its growing customer base were undoubtedly key reasons why Sparxent, a relatively new company that seems to have been established to buy up IT companies last August, bought XAware last week.

Sparxent, which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, was founded in August 2008, right at the beginning of the

One of the bellwethers of the financial services industry as well as the IBM midrange is Jack Henry and Associates. And as you might expect, the company’s third quarter of fiscal 2009 was not a particularly good one. But JHA did no worse than a lot of other software companies, and compared to some, it has managed to do better considering the downturn in the global economy in general and in the banking sector in particular.

For the quarter ended March 31, JHA reported license sales declined by 31 percent to $12.7 million, and hardware sales (which includes Power

Despite a lot of talk to the contrary, performance puzzles do exist in a large percentage of IBM midrange shops. It makes no difference whether the servers are called AS/400s, iSeries, System i, or Power Systems i. That’s not a knock on the hardware or the people who manage it. But to think that all is well because “this box just sits in the corner and runs” is like expecting your car to run its best without any maintenance or tuning whatsoever.

Some would say performance tuning and system automation costs more money than it saves. That’s debatable, but most

Well, it looks like the glorious plan for SAP to take on the midrange market with a line of newly created online applications to be sold SaaS style is running into some speed bumps, if not some road blocks.

SAP launched its Business ByDesign SaaS applications back in September 2007, and the company has been pushing the product out into the future in baby steps, saying repeatedly that it needed more work and that it wants to get the product right. In a report last week in PC World, of all places, Bill McDermott, president of SAP’s global