IBM‘s future Power7 chip may be just about done as far as the engineering is concerned, and its server designs might also be more or less completed as well. But there is plenty of time yet to tweak the boxes, and I doubt very much that the final packaging and pricing for the future Power7 machinery is anywhere close to being set. Which is a pity, really.

With the fourth quarter nearly upon us and many companies finishing up their 2009 budgets and planning for their system upgrades in 2010, now is the time to start thinking about Power7

This will be a recurring theme for me in the next couple of years as I watch Oracle and its soon-to-be server, storage, and operating system division (formerly known as Sun Microsystems) preach to us about the benefits of an application development system with a consistent and tightly integrated software stack tuned very closely to iron. The recurring theme will be that I get really annoyed.

As The Four Hundred told you last summer, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle teamed up to create something called the HP Oracle Database Machine, one of Oracle’s several forays into the hardware business, based

IBM is selling its U2 database and application development products to Rocket Software, the companies announced last week. The deal includes the UniVerse and UniData suites of “multivalue” database management systems, as well as associated programming tools, which together are referred to as U2. Rocket says it intends to keep the U2 teams and business model intact. Terms of the deal were not announced.

Depending on how you apply the term “legacy” to IT products, U2 is either a dinosaur of technology that should be relegated to maintenance mode or another cutting edge product that’s been underutilized and under

Users and resellers of Sun Microsystems iron have been shaken up by Oracle‘s acquisition plans. IBM is trying to exploit the situation, picking off as many Sun accounts as possible. Big Blue says its Power-AIX systems have won over many customers and adds that its mainframes and System x products are making big inroads, too. What is missing from this picture is the i-on-Power line. This could prove problematic. IBM’s dropping the i may mean dropping business machines, too, opening market gaps that Oracle and Microsoft can exploit, even in accounts where IBM is nominally the prime vendor.

IBM

The non-stop boom in disk storage hit a wall six months ago, a wall called the economic meltdown, and sales of disk arrays are still slumping even as the economies of the world look like they are starting to stabilize a bit. The market analysts at IDC say that both internal disk arrays embedded in servers as well as external ones that link up to them from the outside in myriad ways have been impacted by the meltdown.

All told, global disk array sales dropped by 18.7 percent in the second quarter, to $5.7 billion, but vendors nonetheless managed to

Earlier this year, around the end of May, four of the top educators on IBM i development technologies had a tough decision to make. They had just concluded the fifth RPG and DB2 Summit, a bi-annual education and training conference with a reputation for excellence. But the economic storm clouds were ominous. Training budgets were being dialed back and the conference business was taking a beating. One conference after another was reporting attendance rates that were generally in the neighborhood of 50 percent of one year earlier. Other conferences were being canceled, and some were redesigned as virtual conferences

The Poughkeepsie Journal, the upstate New York paper that keeps close tabs on IBM, and the Alliance@IBM, a member of the Communications Workers of America union that has been trying to unionize Big Blue for decades, have tallied up the layoffs this year at IBM, and reckon that the total of job cuts in he United States is kissing 10,000.

According to a report in the Poughkeepsie Journal, Lee Conrad, the national organizer for Alliance@IBM, reckons that the 17 stealthy job cuts, which IBM calls “resource actions,” this year at the company have resulted in 9,308

A day after announcing its Exadata V2 database cluster appliance with Sun Microsystems, software giant Oracle said that its first quarter of fiscal 2010 was more or less what it expected. Slightly more profits and slightly less revenues than expected by Wall Street, in fact, but that is situation normal these days as vendors slash costs deep to keep investors from freaking out.

For the quarter ended August 31, Oracle’s sales came to just a tad bit over $5 billion, down 5 percent compared to the year-ago quarter, and net income rose by 4 percent to $1.12 billion. Oracle

Keep your eye on Dubuque. It could well be the 21st century version of Peoria. You know, “If it plays in Peoria, it will play anywhere.” IBM is planning on it playing well in Dubuque. That’s in Iowa, in case you didn’t know. And what’s playing there are a couple of projects with a high priority for Big Blue.

Just last Friday, the Dubuque City Council put its stamp of approval on a partnership with IBM that makes it the first American city to participate in IBM’s Smarter City Initiative. The mayor of Dubuque called it “another defining moment in

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Department has quietly let pass its right to contest the $1.2 billion acquisition of analytics software maker SPSS by IBM. The deal was announced in July, and SPSS shareholders will be brought together on October 2 to vote for or against the acquisition.

It is hard to imagine SPSS shareholders won’t go for the deal, or that European antitrust regulators will poke their nose in the deal and try to put the kibosh on it. And with IBM paying a 42.5 percent premium for SPSS, based on the closing price on Wall Street