It might seem a bit illogical to do any planning for the future on the mood of a giant rodent living in a small rural town on the west end of Pennsylvania, but given the experience I have had trusting the whiz kids from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, I am beginning to think that maybe it would be a good idea for Punxsutawney Phil to be sitting in on boardroom meetings at the major financial services firms and perhaps attending Congress as a representative.

He might even be able to run a division or two at IBM, now that

Time moves on, as it always does. And that means that IBM wants to start cutting older products in the Power Systems i product line as it peddles the current products and puts the finishing touches on whatever future products we can expect to be rolled out later in 2009 and maybe in early 2010. Last week, IBM warned customers that it was sunsetting i5/OS V5R4 and at the same time killed off some iSeries older iron.

As it turns out, i5/OS V5R4 will be withdrawn from marketing on January 5, 2010. That release of the AS/400-style operating system was

Maximum Availability will today roll out a new program that lets customers subscribe to *noMAX, its i OS high availability software, instead of buying it outright. By allowing customers to pay for their software on a monthly basis instead of shelling out $20,000 or more in upfront software license fees, MaxAva is helping customers fly under the radar of the budget director, while perhaps boosting its business in a tough economy. MaxAva also made a couple of new features available to *noMAX customers.

The IT industry has been moving toward a subscription model for some time. The rise of on-demand

It is a tough economic environment out there, and with IBM trying to scare up a little midrange business, sometimes that means making more deals and sometimes that means raising prices so the deals you have give you a little more dough. As is usually the case, you have to have a lot of time on your hands to figure out exactly what IBM has changed prices on, and luckily for you, I did the work for you.

IBM’s price change announcement letters remind me of an old joke I heard when I first started out as a cub reporter

Yes, ladies and gentleman of the midrange and elsewhere in Server Land (because we know you are reading this), it is that time again in the quarter when we play the game called Guess What Big Blue Servers Sold, How Much, and When. Get out your stack of quarterly reports from IBM, your thinking cap, your fuzzy dice, and your spreadsheet program of choice, and let’s see if you can come up with better numbers than I did.

As this newsletter reported last week, IBM’s worldwide sales in the fourth quarter declined by 6.4 percent to just

The people who read The Four Hundred tend to be a vocal, but polite bunch, which is a welcome and refreshing thing compared to how the rest of the people in the world sometimes talk to each other. Here’s some feedback we got on stories that have run thus far in 2009:

Feedback on AS/400 LUG: Friends in High Places

I guess it would be too much to ask to see the current unmet requirements list of this group. Sounds like their needs might be completely the opposite needs of a platform wanting to get new accounts. Also, it surely

Our good friend Doug Bidwell, over at Power Systems reseller DLB Associates and who certainly still calls himself a ‘400 reseller, wanted to give you all a head’s up about some potential issues IBM has found with the Job Watcher performance monitoring tool for the OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, and i 6.1 operating systems when running inside LPARs when it is collecting SQL information on the system.

The iDoctor suite of tools, which include Job Watcher, are often used by IBM’s Rochester tech support team or by resellers to support their i platform customers. The iDoctor team sent out the

For telecom and financial services companies that depend on Latin American BYTE software and the IBM System i, the partnership between looksoftware and BYTE, announced last week, will bring modernized applications with an improved user interface and better integration to the independent software vendor’s product lineup.

Development and implementation of BYTE’s first application has already been completed. According to Homero Bosch, BYTE’s manager of distributors and channels, after “an intensive evaluation” of application modernization products was completed, it only took four weeks for the technical personnel at BYTE to generate a prototype, obtain final approval, and begin implementation of an

JDA Software handed in a fourth quarter financial report showing a loss, but more importantly managed to ring up a gain in total revenue, which resulted in a record-breaking quarter and record-breaking year for the Scottsdale, Arizona, company with a substantial IBM i customer base. Fourth quarter revenue was bolstered by a 53 percent gain in software license sales.

JDA’s fourth quarter ended December 31, 2008, and for that time frame the company reported total revenues of $106.2 million and software revenues of $34.3 million, compared to total revenues of $98.5 million and software revenues of $22.4 million for fourth

Well, that little drama has finally come to an end, and just in time for the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. Mark Papermaster, a Power processor and system chipset guru from IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, is going to be allowed to go work as the head of Apple‘s iPod and iPhone hardware development, reporting to ailing chief executive officer, Steve Jobs.

Papermaster took the job at Apple last October, and a few days later IBM sued Papermaster to block him from joining Apple. A few days after that, a Federal court judge on IBM’s home