It’s been a long time coming. And it has a long way yet to grow. But the idea that the IBM i platform is a wise platform choice for a significant number of existing customers and that many companies are unaware of its attributes is reason enough for supporters to come together. Just prior to the holidays, iManifest Americas presented the first of what is expected to be many Webcasts aimed at building an army of awareness enhancers.

This is a gathering of like-minded folks, but it’s apparent there are differences of opinion and points to be debated.

Still, it’s

It’s that time of year when The Swami dons his turban, dusts off his crystal ball, and peers into a future unseeable to mortal men. And you think your employment is uncertain. We Swamis once benefitted from the faulty memories and short attention spans of our adherents. Stay away from the screwball stuff someone might actually remember (DOS will make a comeback; Paris Hilton will graduate from Harvard), and your average Swami could sound believable.

But the Internet, which The Swami predicted Al Gore would invent, changed everything. A Swami’s prior pronouncements can now be recovered, plucked from the ether

Just after The Four Hundred took a break for the holidays, IBM tweaked a number of products, offers, and prices that affect Power Systems shops running the IBM i operating system. These kinds of things tend to get lost in the day-to-day shuffle, which is why you keep me around to monitor the situation and report on it.

First up, in announcement letter 110-265, IBM is jacking up the number of processor cores and main memory capacity in a base Power 795 configuration. In the original announcement from August 17 last year, a Power 795 using the eight-core Power7

The analysts at Gartner are kicking off 2011 on a positive note: a predicted 5.1 percent increase in worldwide IT spending over 2010. This latest projection from Gartner is already an increase from its previous forecast of 3.5 percent growth for 2011 global IT spending. The current total spending forecast is $3.6 trillion in 2011.

The increase of 5.1 percent in 2011 comes on the heels of news that total IT spending in 2010 was better than Gartner’s predicted 3.2 percent growth. In 2010, worldwide IT spending totaled $3.4 trillion, up 5.4 percent from 2009 levels. Part of the upswing

Midrange enterprise application software maker Lawson Software, which has a strong presence in the healthcare, public sector, and consumer goods sectors, closed out its second quarter of fiscal 2011 ended in November by eating a provider of cloudy human resources management tools called Enwisen.

The deal to buy Enwisen for $70 million was announced on December 20 and closed on December 31, which is when Lawson’s fiscal Q2 ended. Enwisen’s online tools, known as the AnswerSource suite, has an HR central repository and portal for accessing that employee information as well as workflow that controls the hiring and

“This venerable minicomputer platform won the midrange wars, besting Hewlett-Packard’s HP 3000, Digital Equipment’s VAX and MicroVAX, and IBM’s own 9700 and 4300s.”

Ah, but if asked that question on the Jeopardy! game show, would IBM‘s soon-to-be-announced Watson question-answer system actually get the right answer? Considering that Watson owes its existence in part to the fine engineering from the IBM Rochester Labs, one could only hope it would be able to reply, “What is the AS/400?”

In the late 1990s, IBM freaked out Gary Kasparov, a grand master chess player, by defeating him in a chess duel with the

Disk array sales were up smartly in the third quarter of 2010, as The Four Hundred reported as last year came to a close, but storage software revenues grew more slowly than raw capacity, according to IDC.

The IT market researcher said that worldwide sales of storage arrays based on disks (either internal or external arrays) rose by 18.5 percent, to $6.97 billion, in the third quarter, with aggregate capacity sold rocketing up a stunning 65.2 percent, to 4,299 petabytes. This robust growth goes a long way toward pulling the disk array business out of the substantial hole that

It is never easy to be a manufacturer of any clone product, and despite the fact that many companies are willing to try a third-party memory or disk maker during a recession to save money, they are nonetheless–or perhaps, muchtheless–in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating on prices and clone memory or disk makers often see revenues and profits under pressure in a downturn that, in theory, should boost their business. That’s exactly what happened to Dataram in its most recent quarter.

As you know from reading The Four Hundred, Dataram makes clone memory for a lot