We are in the heart of the fourth quarter with questionable stats in the Western economies and very good growth in the emerging markets in China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a handful of other countries. With Power Systems revenue on the decline year-on-year, and against a pretty easy compare mind you, I would expect that IBM would be out there wheeling and dealing to crank up Power Systems sales. But thus far, Big Blue is behaving like it thinks it has its pricing right–or perhaps like it was a bit too aggressive on the pricing with this year’s Power7 iron,

It’s been more than a year since the IBM i community in the United States took its first steps toward marketing the platform in the wake of Big Blue’s decision to concentrate on non-platform specific marketing. Success has not been meteoric. There was no reason to believe that it would be. However, by anyone’s measurements, iManifest U.S. has been virtually at a standstill. Can anyone power up this organization? Another person is going to try.

A month ago, iManifest chairman pro tem Jeff Olen announced he would be leaving the leadership position at the organization and that a replacement would

When the top brass at Novell hammered a For Sale sign on the piece of grass at its Waltham, Massachusetts, headquarters back in May after rejecting an unsolicited $2 billion takeover bid from private equity firm Elliott Associates in March, it was pretty clear that bits and pieces of Novell could end up hither and yon and other companies haggled over pieces of the complex software company.

Elliott Associates amassed an 8.5 percent stake in Novell before launching its bid in March, and still holds that stake today as a group of private equity firms familiar to the IBM midrange

Way back in the last century, 13 years before the world was scheduled to end because of a computer glitch, William Greider published a book. It was an 800-page scholarly tome that, I suspect, not many people actually read, but which today is more relevant than it was back when nobody was reading it.

The size and subject matter may have discouraged more than a few potential readers. Only Ivy League grads like Greider would think that the inner workings of the Federal Reserve would be compelling to the casual bibliophile. But the story, it turns out, was not only

IBM has been hoping for years that Linux would drive new workloads on Power-based systems where OS/400-i platforms are the back-end systems just like Linux-based partitions have, to a certain extent, been the salvation of the System z mainframe. It is hard to say for sure how much traction Linux has gotten at OS/400 and i shops–or even AIX shops for that matter–but what I can tell you is that Big Blue wants you to give Linux a shot so badly it is willing to fork out the cash to get you to try the first license.

In announcement letter

The admittedly crazy idea I had to have IBM step in and offer to re-port Mac OS X back to Power Systems and make some arrangement with Apple to sell the operating system on Power7-based servers now that Apple has killed off its own X64-based Xserve products did not meet with universal enthusiasm with readers of The Four Hundred. But not everyone thought it was completely nuts.

–TPM

You are right. This is one crazy idea.

Unfortunately, having IBM put out an Xserve replacement using a PowerPC processor is just plain dumb. Apple went to all of the trouble

Sometimes it takes a lot longer for information trickling out of IBM to reach us than you would think. Back in July I told you all about Big Blue’s merger of the Systems and Technology Group, which makes servers, storage, and chips, and its Software Group, which makes operating systems, databases, and middleware. What was not apparent when IBM consolidated systems and software as well as reconsolidated its services units back into the Global Services behemoth, it had also converged its Power Systems and System z mainframe server lines under one general manager.

The System z and Power Systems machines

German software giant SAP acquired the defunct TomorrowNow software unit to try to steal away some business from application rival Oracle, and by doing so it may have inadvertently helped fuel a new wave of acquisitions by the database, application, and increasingly serious systems vendor. That’s because the jury deciding the TomorrowNow lawsuit has said that SAP should pay Oracle $1.3 billion in damages.

When the trial started four weeks ago, there was some talk that Oracle and SAP were possibly going to settle the issue, but that didn’t happen. You can’t pay for the kind of adverse publicity

Now that the entry and midrange Power7-based servers are out there, IBM is releasing a smattering of benchmark tests on the boxes to show how they stand up on real-world workloads. The latest is on a data warehousing benchmark test based on code from SAP that Big Blue has been favoring in recent years.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not just to highlight the very good SQL processing of the DB2 for i database, but also because no one else runs this benchmark test and therefore IBM can avoid odious comparisons.

As you know, SAP’s ERP software

Hardware spending is a leading indicator for overall IT spending, even after you adjust for Moore’s Law improvements, because the appetite for processing, memory, and I/O capacity has not in the past 40 years abated much. But spending does rise and fall with the economy, and even though late 2009 and through 2010 has seen some good growth, it doesn’t look like we are in the middle of a new dot-com boom.

I just happened to be browsing IDC‘s Web site when it randomly kicked out a hardware spending forecast for 2009 through 2014 in a daily graphic that