Over the past couple of years, Rocket Software has quietly built up a tidy business related to the OS/400 and i, thanks to its acquisitions of application modernization tool maker Seagull Software and terminal emulation software maker BlueZone. With the addition of Aldon, which Rocket Software acquired on March 22 just as IT Jungle was going on hiatus, the software conglomerate is adding application lifecycle management to its IBM i toolbox.

Aldon goes way back in the IBM midrange, all the way back to 1979, in fact, when Albert Magid and Don Parr, founded it as a services company focusing

I read with much interest the January 31 article, AS400 i Mystery Solved written by ITJ editor-in-chief Tim Prickett Morgan in response to a question posed by a reader of The Four Hundred. Reader Dan had a very good point and may well be partially right. However, after working with numerous i shops in the last 15 years or so, I have come to a somewhat different conclusion. I believe the biggest problem with the declining use of the AS/400 has been the fact that it was too far ahead of its time! Let me explain.

About 10 years

Larry Ellison has probably never met a software company that he hasn’t at least thought about owning. With a newfound love for systems–servers, storage, networking, and operating systems–in the wake of its $5.6 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year, Oracle, the company that Ellison co-founded and is still chief executive officer of, is looking for a way to expand its software business to pay for its systems aspirations. If the rumor mill has it right, then Oracle is thinking about trying to buy Lawson Software.

As The Four Hundred reported three weeks ago, Lawson came clean

General Electric, a company nearly twice the size of IBM, is in an Obamic situation, a position so deeply disappointing that it makes one’s heart break. Its Mark I nuclear reactors lie at the heart of a catastrophe in Japan. Its agility at tax avoidance has become a target of the New York Times, which trims its taxes the old fashioned way, by not making money. Meanwhile, GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, is trying to help run the USA. IBM is pointing out, with a straight face, that we need a smarter planet. Who would want a stupider

Email is a big part of business. Before terms like collaboration and social business began dominating the lexicon, email was the digital darling that replaced much of the snail mail and faxing that relied on “hard copies” and filing cabinets. Last week, IBM emailed me. The media relations person wrote to say Ed Brill, the director of messaging for the Lotus division, was in the mood to talk about email and its role as a collaboration tool. That struck me as odd.

It’s strange because Brill and the other executives at the Lotus division of Software Group normally don’t have

There was good news from the U.S. Department of Labor on Friday, even if it wasn’t great news. According to the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for March, the American economy added 216,000 jobs in March, outpacing the population growth in the country and shaving the unemployment rate by one-tenth of a point to 8.8 percent.

That is a two-year low for the unemployment rate, but nowhere near the 4.5 percent structural unemployment rate that economists agree is as close to full employment that the modern U.S. economy can push down to. By the way, that was

Media tablets, such as the iPad, are all the rage in the marketplace right now, and after adding them into the computing hardware spending mix analysts at Gartner have increased their outlook for IT spending in 2011 from a previous forecast of 5.1 percent growth to a 5.6 percent bump.

We previously reported that things were looking up for worldwide IT spending this year, but media tablets are clearly a game changer in 2011. This seemingly small increase of a half point created by the addition of media tablets and the falling exchange rate of the U.S. dollar actually totals

I may not be a formal member of the IBM i choir, but I do stand in the back where there aren’t any pews and sing along in three-part harmony most weeks. Which is why sending me marketing material on the Power Systems and IBM i combination is like preaching to the choir.

That is exactly what IBM did in my email last week, and I must say I am happy about it. Not because I need spam clogging up my email, but because it shows that IBM–not its business partners, but Big Blue itself–is actually doing something about trying

The top brass at Lawson Software aren’t in the mood to talk to Wall Street.

The company is weighing a $1.83 billion takeover offer from Infor, and rumors are swirling around that Oracle may take a run at the enterprise application software maker, too. And thus, instead of attending their quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts last Thursday, Lawson’s execs kicked out a PDF of their prepared comments, posted the financial tables, and zipped their lips about everything that is going on.

In the quarter ended February 28, Lawson’s sales rose by 5 percent, to $196 million. Software

IBM i Manifest Americas marketing person Jenniefer Halverson is leaving the IBM i advocacy group after only four months. It’s a shame, because during her time there the organization gained momentum that it did not have before her arrival. Whether this vehicle has engine strong enough to pull it up the steep hills that lie ahead is yet to be seen. For the time being, this is a setback.

Two factors played a role in Halverson’s decision. The first was a new job opportunity with a burgeoning company in the Windows market. The position was going to be very demanding