With the global economy still faltering and its biggest i, AIX, and Linux shops putting the brakes on spending not only just because the economy is bad but also because they are starting to think about the future Power7 chips and what they may have to offer, IBM has to do something if it wants to keep Power Systems sales from crashing. In fact, it needs to do two things, and now the company has done both of them.

The first thing, and perhaps the most important thing, was to guarantee companies that buy Power6 and Power6+ iron today will

Server virtualization might solve a whole bunch of issues, but it creates a whole bunch of others. Seeing that its systems customers are struggling with multiple and incompatible server virtualization hypervisors and management tools for making use of them, even on IBM‘s own Power Systems, System z, and System x product lines, Big Blue has decided that it has the answer to making all of these virtual machines and logical partitions behave themselves, which, not coincidentally, is giving it some leverage in the server market and some cash for its coffers, too.

Just before The Four Hundred went on

IBM‘s deals to try to stimulate business for its Power Systems product line, and the System p and System i products that preceded them, are a bit like the weather. There is a pattern to them, but it is not quite as predictable as you might like. Just before The Four Hundred took a week of summer vacation at the end of July, Big Blue rolled out a bunch of deals to help resellers and its direct sales force grease the wheels of commerce a bit.

Call me old fashioned, but marketeering people are just a little too clever

Penelope realized it was the long absent Odysseus when the grizzled stranger shot an arrow through a dozen ax handles. The legendary William Tell split the apple on his son’s noggin with a crossbow bolt. American Revolutionary Daniel Morgan trained and led the riflemen that beat the Brits at Saratoga and Cowpen. And now Erich Clementi and his boss, Sam Palmisano, are taking belated aim at cloud computing, with particular focus on a market long in the sights of GoDaddy‘s maniac-in-chief Bob Parsons. IBM is battling in the boardroom with buzzwords. Parsons is nabbing the NOCs with knockers.

Well, after much complaining and cajoling, the AS/400 community succeeded in getting IBM and its partner, Zend Technologies, the company behind the PHP programming language, to get a reasonably native port of the PHP engine and related Zend commercial tools for making PHP rugged enough for enterprise application development done for the i5/OS V5R4 and then the i 6.1 operating systems. And now, it looks like we are soon going to have to start asking for the Ruby scripting language to be embraced by the Power Systems-i combination and formally supported.

According to the latest Evans Data semi-annual survey

As July was coming to a close, Microsoft was ramping up the production engine for its Windows 7 desktop and Windows Server 2008 R2 server operating systems just as it was reporting the first decline in annual sales in Microsoft’s history as a publicly traded company.

Welcome to the wonderful world of being a legacy platform, Windows. Fun, ain’t it?

So much fun that Microsoft has to deploy a virtual machine hypervisor inside of Windows 7 to give something akin to a Windows XP compatibility mode (which won’t work perfectly and certainly not on all hardware, which will cause so

There’s plenty of bad news coming out of software companies these days as license sales are dropping and profits are dropping even faster. But not at retail and supply chain software maker JDA Software, at least not in the second quarter.

For the quarter ended June 30, JDA said that software license sales rose by 77.4 percent to $27.6 million, not only outstripped sales in the second quarter of last year, but also outselling by a far margin the company’s $18.6 million in license sales in the second quarter of 2007. The net effect is that after a pretty

Business in the Power Systems reseller channel must be getting tight or some business partners must be playing it a little fast and loose to try to drum up more business because the word coming out of the master resellers is that IBM is going to start slapping penalties on resellers who peddle machines configured with software solutions that are not set up properly.

According to sources familiar with the matter, master resellers Arrow Electronics and Avnet are warning their downstream resellers that starting August 1, IBM will be enforcing penalties on customer transactions that do not meet Big Blue’s

The Latin American market for IBM‘s Power Systems has caught the eye of high availability and disaster recovery vendor Vision Solutions, which last week announced partner agreements with several leading distributors in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Included in this agreement are Avnet Technology Solutions, the solutions distribution leader and an operating group of Avnet, and SISA of Colombia.

“The potential for opportunity and growth throughout this part of the world is tremendous,” says Miguel Flis, vice president of sales for Vision Solutions. “The number of companies searching for a reliable high availability solution at

If your company is not using information technology advancements to aid in customer retention and analytics, you might want to know who is responsible for the 12.5 percent hike in spending within the customer relationship management (CRM) market. It could be your competitors.

According to Gartner analysts, worldwide CRM revenue swelled to $9.15 billion in 2008, a noteworthy surge from the 2007 revenue of $8.13 billion. In a year when IT spending was generally reeled in, a 12.5 percent gain says a lot about CRM.

Companies making the CRM investment are clearly seeing benefits relating to increased revenue, loyalty, and