If I don’t hear the word stimulus again this year, I will be just fine, thank you very much. The past year has been stimulating enough, and I would like for all of us to get back to business. Apparently, to get there is going to require some economic stimulus, rather than the kind you get from listening to the news for hours on end, as I do. Like the kind that President-elect Obama outlined last Thursday in a speech at George Mason University in Virginia.

The numbers are absurd, beyond real human reckoning when an average salary is in

For many IBM employees, last week was torture. Rumors have been swirling that jobs are on the chopping block and that close to 16,000 workers will become victims of a one-two combination punch from the economic downturn and IBM’s continual moves to lower its costs and extend its string of profitable quarterly reports.

As is its standard practice, IBM has nothing to say on the topic of layoffs. That includes any denial that this move is about to be made.

Information on the rumored job losses comes primarily from the Website of the IBM Employees Union, Alliance@IBM. (Yes, IBM

You might think that the combination of do-more-with-less business planning and the dire economic reports that dominate the daily news coverage would cause IT budgets to fizzle like last year’s uncorked bottle of champagne. That’s not exactly true, even though three out of four organizations are targeting IT spending as a good place to make cuts. You can’t forget about the one in four companies that are moving their business plans ahead by investing in IT.

Investing in IT is something a lot of companies aren’t very good at, if you add the word “strategic” to describe the investing. At

In 1967, a turbulent America gave birth to the Youth International Party and its pie assassin, Aron Kay. The following year, Yippies led the havoc at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention. They set a high (or low) watermark for protests of American policy that lasted 40 years. But in 2008, in Baghdad, a reporter named Muntazer al-Zaidi became the World’s Most Notorious Hurler of Insults when he lobbed a pair of shoes at President George W. Bush: soles of a new regime. How impolite! Still, the IT establishment might actually gain from some clever irreverence.

Aron Kay’s pie throwing

Trying to get a handle on how the IT job market is doing is not an easy task. If you look at data from the U.S. Department of Labor and peel out the sections of its monthly jobs reports to look at IT manufacturers and services companies, then the layoffs have not been so bad. But, of course, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not look at employment and unemployment by job type and title, but rather by industry, so you can’t get a real sense of what is happening in the jobs market from Uncle Sam.

If I

It is not often when an engineer rises to the top ranks of a company, not even when that company makes electromechanical and then computing components, as IBM has done for nine decades now. But Jack Kuehler, a former president and vice chairman of the board at Big Blue, was one such man.

Kuehler died on December 20 of Parkinson’s disease, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

Kuehler was born in Nebraska, but he was very much part of the early Silicon Valley culture that exists in large part in that location, by the way, because

New York-based VAI continued its thrust into international markets last week when it announced a new reseller agreement with Kingfisher Associates. The English software consultancy will sell and service VAI’s ERP software, and perhaps provide a jumping off point for continued European expansion by VAI in the future.

Founded in 1988, Kingfisher Associates provides custom RPG and Java programming services to companies that utilize the IBM Power Systems server (formerly AS/400). The company, which is based in southern England, primarily serves small and mid size businesses, and targets the AS/400 (Power Systems) industrial strongholds of manufacturing, distribution, and retail.

Midrange ERP software maker Lawson Software reported its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2009, and like many other companies in the IT sector, the quarter saw sales dampen thanks to the global economic turmoil.

For the quarter ended November 30, Lawson said that its overall sales fell by 5.6 percent to $206.3 million. Software license fees, a barometer of sorts for economic activity, fell by 8.9 percent to just over $30 million, while maintenance fees rose by 6.3 percent to $90.1 million. Consulting revenues, another economic indicator (but probably not as good as license sales in

AS/400 and mainframe legacy application rehosting software supplier Infinite Software has acquired another reseller of Hewlett-Packard. Last Friday, Infinite announced it has bought a controlling stake in Roundstone Systems, its second one since forming a partnership last year with HP to sell its rehosting software.

Roundstone Systems, which is located in Oakland, California, was founded in January 2003 and was one of HP’s fastest growing resellers that year. The company has partnerships with HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Brocade Communications, VMware, and Novell, and has anchored its business on selling HP enterprise and blade servers

The PandaLabs malware detection and analysis lab maintained by security software maker Panda Security has announced its annual security report for the just-ended 2008. And man, is it ugly out there on the Internet, or rather, in there on the PCs and servers of the world.

In 2008, PandaLabs says that it detected an average of 35,000 malware samples a day, and 22,000 of those detected were new infections launched by hackers. (No wonder antivirus software eats so much resources, eh?) PandaLabs says that the total count of malware threats in 2008 was above 15 million, which is more than