While The Four Hundred was on holiday at the end of July, IBM hosted a shindig at one of its adjunct T.J. Watson Research Center campuses in Hawthorne, New York, which is just a 30-minute drive from my house in Upstate Manhattan. And even though I was busy with a bunch of non-work work–you know what I am talking about here, people–I decided to put on some clean clothes and go listen to some of the top brass at Big Blue talk some about this business analytics and optimization (BAO) opportunity that IBM is chasing and the systems it is

If its new 20/20 promotional program has its desired effect, Maximum Availability will have more installations of its *noMAX high availability software suite to look forward to. Under the program, which the company announced late last week, Maximum Availability is enticing users of other System i HA products to switch to *noMAX with the promise that they will pay 20 percent less than they do under their current contract.

Competitive upgrade programs are nothing new in the i OS software market, nor in the IT industry as a whole, for that matter. Before the i OS HA space experienced its

Although the number of IBM iSeries shops that run AIX, or backup AIX, in a partition on the iSeries is pretty much a speck on the map, a considerably larger number of iSeries shops share their data center space with significant AIX systems. Disaster recovery and high availability vendor Vision Solutions sees this mix on a regular basis. Although well-known on the i side, the company is looking for a similarly commanding position on the AIX side.

Vision was able to gain its dominating status in the AS/400 market through a combination of product development and acquisitions of its key

Unless you’re a statistician or a baseball fan, statistics are boring. The numbers generated by the seizing economy and the ill-chosen efforts to resuscitate it, are sterile, too big to grasp, and void of back story. For the purpose of understanding, statistics are to experience what birth certificates are to giving birth. In other words, stripped of all consequence, there can be no understanding. William Greider, in his groundbreaking book Secrets of the Temple, an in-depth exploration of the workings of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged that each time the Board of Governors voted to increase interest rates, they understood

The two key master distributors of IBM and other brands of servers and storage, Avnet and Arrow Electronics, reported their financial results for their most recent quarters, and both companies are hoping that the server market has finally hit bottom.

Avnet closed out its fiscal 2009 year on June 27, and said that in the fourth quarter it saw a gut-wrenching 19.5 percent revenue decline across its combined Technology Solutions and Electronics Marketing groups, to $3.77 billion. In the Technology Solutions business, which is where servers and storage from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others are peddled

Here’s a story you don’t hear every day: there is a new midrange user group opening up shop here in the United States.

Having moved from the Washington, D.C., area down to the outskirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently, AS/400 evangelist Don Rima has decided that the region needed a user group of its own and has therefore started up the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group. Chattanooga is about halfway between Nashville and Atlanta, Georgia, the latter being a hotbed of System/3X and AS/400 software development for about as long as IBM has been in the systems business.

The Atlanta

Helping make the trains run on time is something that midrange systems have a lot of experience with. Long before there were PC servers, midrange boxes were scattered along the routes of railroads, providing local processing capacity for ticketing and linking back to reservation systems, which as many times as not were running on mainframes.

With IT budgets under pressure and the need to do even more complex stuff to help Amtrak run better, America’s national commuter railroad decided it was time to renew and extend its IT outsourcing contract with Big Blue. Amtrak announced a five-year deal that will,

Application development tool and integration middleware provider Magic Software Enterprises has been able to wring some more profits out of its business even as the slowing economy makes it tough to do so. However, like so many other software companies these days, the profits are down from where they were a year ago despite plenty of belt tightening.

In the quarter ended June 30, Magic Software posted sales of $13.6 million, down 15.2 percent from last year’s second quarter and down 1.3 percent from the first quarter, when it booked $13.8 million in sales worldwide. By cutting back on research

According to a new report out of Gartner, IT managers and chief information officers are having a tough time getting their arms wrapped around personnel costs in their shops.

Gartner has just put its 2009 IT Market Compensation Study out, which is based on surveys it performed back in March at 325 IT organization in the United States, and some 66 percent of the respondents to the survey said that they did not have a formal IT workforce planning process that would “enable them to leverage opportunities presented by this downturn.”

I don’t find that shocking. I am a

AS/400 shops are, perhaps more than any other system community until Sun Microsystems is finally consumed by Oracle, are keenly aware of product branding and the effects of not using a brand well to identify the differentiating features of that product.

Market research company Millard Brown Optimor, which specializes in branding and, interestingly, assigning values to brands, has just released its BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report, which you can see here. And it argues that rather than being just some silly naming, proper brands allow established companies to more easily and more cheaply enter