Now that IBM has given i5/OS V5R4 a stay of execution and extended its marketing life out to May 27 of this year, the question that everyone now wants to have answered is how long will that venerable operating system for prior Power-based systems have support from Big Blue? It is debatable how much history is any guide, since the IBM i platform is not at a particularly strong point in its upgrade curve for a lot of different reasons.

As you can see from the official OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i support matrix page, IBM has not yet

The Mayan calendar says the world is going to end in 2012, and in the unlikely event that doomsday should indeed come to pass, then 2011 will be the last year we have to worry about anything and make predictions about the future. But I doubt very much humanity will get off that easily. We surely have not for the past several million years from the studies I have read. The end of the world is a metaphor, and things long gone often return again, albeit slightly differently.

I was talking to a dear, old friend this week about the

Social networking has become a significant factor in the business world. Companies are lining up to tell their “Fastest gun in the West” success stories on a multitude of networking sites. The IT industry can’t do enough to help these stories be heard. IBM‘s Lotus division, for one, is doing all it can to promote “social business.” With Lotusphere coming up the end of this month, there will be a hail of social businesses bullets ricocheting around the Web.

There are several business objectives that command a lot of attention in conversations about what it is that social networks

If Bradley Manning had become a quarterback like Peyton Manning or Eli Manning, Julian Assange might never have been accused of having a greater aversion to condoms than the Pope. Instead, Bradley Manning is in the brig, accused of pilfering classified material that ended up in the hands of Wikileaks, which one might want well washed before shaking. From Wikileaks, the fishy secrets ended up in the fish-wrappers produced by the New York Times, the Guardian, der Spiegel, and elsewhere. It’s all enough to make most any IT professional (even you) pay a little more attention

More indications of an economic rebound were uncovered last week through two reports, including an IBM study of midmarket companies that shows businesses have become more bullish with their 2011 IT spending plans compared to 2009, particularly when it comes to innovative technologies that can fuel growth. Meanwhile, it looks like IT salaries have finally bottomed out and are slowly rising, according to a new report from Janco Associates.

According to IBM’s 2011 midmarket study, 53 percent of midsize businesses plan to increase their IT budgets over the next 12 months, compared to only 20 percent who planned an

Hello, TPM:

This is my second response to the 5.4 conversion requirement. Our company can’t–can not–get the source code for the menu/security portion of the ERP system we utilize. We have money and want to upgrade to Power7 hardware, but do not have the $700,000 to $1.5 million to upgrade or change our ERP system.

IBM has told us, through our business partner, that it would cost them $8 million to allow i5/OS V5R4 to run on Power7 and that they don’t see the market to justify the expense. What is $8 million to IBM, a company party?

The counts on the number of patents granted in 2010 have been released, and a sluggish U.S. economy appears to have had no effect on innovation. According to the annual Patent Intelligence & Technology Report released by IFI Claims Patent Services, patent grants in 2010 reached an all-time high of 219,614 utility patents in 2010, up 31 percent from 2009 and the most significant annual increase on record. The old record was set in 2006 when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a total of 173,772 patents.

It has been two years since American-headquartered companies have led the

Jeopardy! Beta Test Round

As The Four Hundred has previously reported, IBM‘s question-answer supercomputer, known as Watson after Big Blue’s founder, Thomas Watson, is gearing up for a contest of wits against two top players of the Jeopardy! game show for three days February. To give the human contestants a chance to see what they are up against, IBM held a single round of the game at its TJ Watson Research Center last week.

While the Watson supercomputer sits on the ground floor in the facility, upstairs IBM has built a complete mock up of the Jeopardy! set,

Oracle‘s prevailing over SAP in a lawsuit regarding TomorrowNow, a provider of third-party support for PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards application suits, to the tune of $1.3 billion plus interest has apparently not diminished the financial prospects of Rimini Street, which is itself embroiled in a lawsuit with Oracle.

Rimini Street is not a public company, so it does not have to report its financial results. But in a statement released last week, the company said that it had over $7 million in revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010, its highest quarterly revenue to date and up

A rising tide indeed does eventually raise all boats. The recovery in application software spending that has been helping Oracle post decent financial results in the past few quarters has finally lifted the revenues of SAP, which is still the largest provider of applications on the planet and which still supports the OS/400 and IBM i platform.

SAP released preliminary financial results for the fourth quarter of 2010, which include the revenue and profits it will derive from its acquisition of database maker Sybase. In the quarter, SAP said that it raked in €1.5 billion in software license sales,