If you have been waiting, like I have, for IBM to get Power-based infrastructure clouds to market, it looks like you are going to have to wait a little while longer but no later than the end of this year. The Global Technology Services division of Big Blue’s Global Services giant, which accounts for more than half of the IT giants sales these days, fluffed up the Smart Business Cloud Enterprise last week, IBM’s first true infrastructure cloud.

The Smart Business Cloud – Enterprise, as IBM’s first true infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud is called, is based on the

As The Four Hundred previously reported, a new vice president, Colin Parris, has taken the reins as business line manager for the Power Systems line of servers. And one of the things that IBM has done as Parris took control is have its stable of consultants who do price/performance and other kinds of analysis for Power Systems go out and update their reports to reflect the new Power7 iron and related operating systems that debuted last year.

You can see a list of the updated Power Systems reports here. International Technology Group, the Los Altos, California, consultancy that

Are you Blue? I’m not talking about you nearly frozen survivors of the winter of 2010-11. I’m talking about the IBM Power Systems users who support Big Blue. The COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition is only three weeks away. It’s almost time to pack the bags and head to Minneapolis, where last week COMMON president Pete Massiello told me there will be “a lot of cool things going on.”

First of all, let’s take into account that IBM Rochester, always the hive of IBM i activity, is down the road from Minneapolis. It stands to reason that the COMMON

Corporate facilities are nothing if not spacious. Whether they are housed in towering skyscrapers, or spread out in campus-style configurations, the space required to accommodate a global corporate headquarters can be measured in acres. What, then, can be made of the magical structure known as Ugland House? It may only be a modest four-story building but, with a little fiscal slight-of-hand, it can become home to a countless number of corporations. Conveniently located in the larcenous Cayman Islands, Ugland House hosts not five, not 50, not even 500 companies, but an astonishing 19,000 global corporations.

Anyone inquiring about these companies

Marcus Dee, the CEO of IBM i software vendor looksoftware, passed away on Wednesday after a year-long battle with cancer. Dee, who was 50 when he died, leaves behind a wife and four children under the age of 10. Dee’s friends are mourning the loss of the charismatic Australian, who was a driving force for IBM i application modernization.

The death of Dee was a shock to friends, despite knowing that his prognosis wasn’t good. “We did know his cancer had progressed, and it was going to be only a matter of time. However, it really was quicker than

I agree with the conclusion of the article, AS/400 i Mystery Solved–Again? by Pat Botz.

It was:

So, why is the AS/400 market declining and perceived as old technology? I believe, literally, that because it was so far ahead of its time that many of the shops using it were unable to understand how to integrate the system with the changing environment around it. This led to the misconception of old technology and the need to move on to “newer” more “flexible” systems.

The IBM i Manifest is a group of IBM partners, independent software vendors, consultants and customers joined

IT budgets and hiring plans have hit their highest levels in 18 months among small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), according to a new survey by Spiceworks, a social business network for IT.

The State of SMB IT survey included over 3,000 respondents from 128 countries who work in SMBs, which are defined as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Of the respondents, 30 percent were from North America, 28 percent from EMEA, 26 percent from Asia/Pacific, and 8 percent from Latin America.

The survey, which was conducted in January and February of this year, found that this segment of

The name is International Business Machines, these days that means riding the second wave of globalization. In the first wave after World War II, companies from different parts of the globe busted open new markets and sold their products in far-away countries. In the second wave, which we have been living through for the past decade, companies have global supply chains and workforces and they move jobs where they can be done the cheapest or where they need to be for political reasons.

And so it is that IBM is opening up its very first Power Systems laboratory in the

As is the case in the system market, you need hardware sales to drive software sales in the storage racket, and most of the profit is in the software, not the hardware, but a lot of the revenue is still in the hardware. You need both to be in business.

The analysts at Gartner gave us a sense of how storage disk array market did in 2010. And now it is IDC‘s turn to talk about the sophisticated file system, archiving, mirroring and replication, and other storage software that vendors sell to ride atop servers and storage arrays.

IDC

While Oracle maneuvers to balance higher maintenance fees with some customers unwilling to pay those fees, Rimini Street keeps doing what it can to serve those customers a lower-cost maintenance deal. The businesses that Oracle has driven to the brink are the same ones that are helping Rimini Street set records.

Last week, Rimini Street reported that its Q1 revenue was the highest in the company’s history and its growth approached 100 percent in year-over-year quarterly sales bookings compared to the first quarter of 2010.

Rimini Street provides alternative service contracts for organizations using Oracle software brands such as Siebel,