As members of the AS/400 and successor communities, you all exercise a certain amount of influence over IBM and its i platform, just by virtue of the checkbook that you, your CIOs, or the owners of your companies have in their desk drawers. This influence is, of course, distributed across the 200,000-plus i community. It is diffuse, even if it is bright. But the candle power of an organization called the AS/400 Large User Group is quite a bit higher, and focused like a laser beam on IBM and its i platform.

Over the years, we’ve all heard about the

Global IT spending will decline by 3 percent to $1.66 trillion this year when measured in U.S. dollars, according to Forrester Research. That’s the first time global IT spending has declined since 2002, the analyst group says. However, when Forrester prognosticators looked into the future using their special local-currency colored glasses, they found that IT spending will actually go up by just a hair, which is 2.5 percent.

Since the value of money from different countries is always going up or going down relative to other currencies, smart people around the world decided they needed a stable way to

Can anyone remember a time when IBM wasn’t the dominate technology company when it comes to patents? This is the 16th consecutive year that Big Blue has piled up more patents than any of its competitors. Sixteen years is a long time for anyone to stay on top of anything. IBM makes it look easy. It removed the element of suspense in this annual announcement a long time ago. No one asks “Who won?” It’s more like: “How many patents did they get this year?”

In 2008, IBM was awarded 4,186 U.S. patents. No company has ever crossed the 4,000-patent

A flock of wild turkeys regularly comes to the house, pressing their little wrinkled heads against the windows, hoping to persuade my wife to toss some corn their way. While they wait, they work the ground beneath the bird feeders, competing with the squirrels for what the birds knock down, tearing up the grass with their large clawed feet, and adorning our patio with whatever remains after turkeys digest corn, bugs, and bird food.

They like it here. Too tough to be tasty to humans, too fast to be caught by most predators, they strut and gobble and make the

Before the U.S. economy went into meltdown, and before we knew that it had been in recession for a year (well, we kinda all knew, but the recession wasn’t officially called until after the presidential election), the common thinking out there was that IT spending growth at small and medium businesses was going to be significantly higher than at larger enterprises, which spend lots more per company but which tend to tighten their belts first and tightly when the economy hits the skids.

It is hard to say if the SMB space is going to be able to take

With the small businesses in the Western economies accounting for a large number of jobs and the bulk of jobs growth, you can bet that the government and IT companies who are keen on selling their wares to SMB shops are very interested in knowing exactly what is on the minds of entrepreneurs right now as we all cope with the recession in various economies.

To that end, software giant Microsoft‘s Office Live small business unit and a tech headhunter called Elance together commissioned a market researcher named Decision Analyst to survey small businesses owners about how they felt

Back in September, IBM announced a special deal on its high-end DS8000 disk arrays for customers attaching those arrays to Power Systems servers sporting the i5/OS V5R4 or i 6.1 operating systems. This deal was tweaked in early December, and then again last week. The tweaks last week are important because they raised prices on the configurations for the DS800 arrays, which given the state of the economy and IT budgets at larger enterprises, seems a bit odd.

The deal has four different Power System i and DS8000 disk array pairings. The first configuration is for a DS8100 with 9.3

You probably knew that the AS/400 and its progeny were popular in India because of the first several waves of outsourcing and offshoring that hit the shores of America in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as companies tried to cut cost. But apparently there is some play now for the AS/400 in Chinese offshoring operations.

A privately held company called Freeborders that is located in San Francisco and operates software development and data centers in China, announced last week that it has expanded a so-called “center of excellence” based on the AS/400. (The company said AS/400, not iSeries

With the annual Lotusphere trade show dedicated to the Notes/Domino and related software kicking off yesterday and running until the end of this week, you can expect IBM to be talking quite a bit about Lotus products this week.

IBM already let the cat out of the bag about Notes/Domino 8.5, which was announced two weeks ago with very little fan-fare (that was being saved up for the Lotusphere show, presumably), including support for Apple‘s Mac OS X operating system for the client and server sides of the Notes/Domino combo. The Lotus support for the Mac operating system would

IBM Global Services and its WebSphere software division should be expecting a boost now that IBM and Ricoh have a new deal to share sales networks. The arrangement more closely ties IBM’s service oriented architecture efforts with Ricoh’s document solutions lineup.

Two years ago, IBM and Ricoh created a joint printing business so that IBM could focus on its core server, storage, software, and services businesses. That high-volume printer business (IBM called it InfoPrint and it has retained that name), along with Ricoh’s document management software, was a good match for a great many IBM mainframe and midrange shops. And