It is perhaps fitting to discuss the future of cloud computing on the IBM i platform on the same day that IT and consumer electronics darling Apple is expected to launch iCloud, its fourth iteration of online services for its various iMac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. If anyone has dibs on the iCloud name, you would think it would be IBM with its iSeries, System i, and Power Systems-IBM i platforms. But Apple ponied up the $4.5 million to buy the iCloud name from its owner and beat IBM to the punch.

Exactly what iCloud is–and isn’t–remains cloaked in

The troubled ERP software company International Business Systems (IBS) is set to be acquired by Symphony Technology Group (STG), a private equity firm based in Silicon Valley. Under terms of the deal, STG will pay 217.5 million Swedish Kronor, or about $35 million, for all outstanding shares in IBS. The deal was announced mid May and is nearly certain to be approved by IBS shareholders by the end of June.

IBS has been looking for a buyer on and off for the last 18 months. When the first go-round of talks failed last April, the board reacted by terminating Mike

Companies that take on application modernization projects almost always have a great notion. Many of those expectations have come up short. The quickest way frequently doesn’t deliver the hoped for objectives and what often is realized is that more effort than expected is required. Alison Butterill, IBM‘s application development offerings manager for Power Systems, has seen it play out many times. Taking care of the interface is the easy part, she points out, but she also offers advice to make back-end transformations much easier.

The single biggest driver for modernizing applications continues to be users who don’t like the

The moment humans started walking upright, someone was probably trying to improve their posture. In all likelihood there was a Cro-Magnon version of Tony Robbins, hairy, charismatic, with an enviously large cave, who made a living telling his fellow troglodytes how to evolve. Humans, it seems, have a self-improvement gene that, in spite of our best efforts, has unaccountably survived. That’s how we know never to stand under the back end of a woolly mammoth.

The self-help field has a vexingly long history dating back almost as far as writing itself. Long before Egyptians twittered their way to regime change,

The low-end of the server racket came out of the Great Recession first, followed by IBM mainframes and then a push for big Unix boxes as 2010 came to a close. And in the first quarter of 2011, it was the midrange server makers turn to rake in some money, according to the server box counters at IDC. And the rebound couldn’t have come soon enough for vendors, resellers, and customers alike. The latter have been eager to upgrade their systems, and the former have been egging them on for a year or two.

IDC measures the factory revenue

Just before The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the Memorial Day weekend, I took a briefing with the folks at Intel‘s Data Center Group about a new product/service called the AppUp Small Business Service on Hybrid Cloud that will probably give you that sense of déjà vu as I had.

It borrows many of the concepts from the original AS/400 launch a zillion years ago and, more recently, from the Smart Cube appliances that IBM has stopped talking about.

The genius of the AS/400–there are many very smart ideas in the system–was that the box launched with thousands

The Memorial Day holiday got in the way of the Top i Concerns survey being conducted by COMMON Europe, which had hoped to have a representative number of participants ahead of the holiday and its conference in Milan, Italy. But people were busy out there on the Intertubes, so Deshpande Ranga, vice president and events manager at COMMON Europe and the Top Concerns project lead, has extended the survey participation date to June 24.

That’s the AS/400’s birthday week, people, so why not show a little spirit and help COMMON Europe out and participate in the survey?

As the

Just after Attachmate‘s takeover of Novell and just before it did the breaking of that company into two divisions, SUSE selling Linux and Novell selling everything else, Attachmate told the people working on the open source Mono project they were no longer needed at the company. But it is a lot harder to kill an open source project than taking away techie paychecks, and a new project has sprung up to carry on the Mono work.

Mono, of course, is a project founded by Miguel de Icaza, whose is one of the bigwigs behind the Gnome user interface for

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has announced the first update to its Enterprise Linux 6 operating system.

The RHEL 6.1 update comes six months after the major upgrade to the 6.0 version, and Tim Burke, vice president of Linux engineering, tells me that in addition to the 314 updated packages and 49 new packages that were rolled up in the 6.1 update, the Linux 2.6.32 kernel has been tweaked to support a whole slew of new hardware that is coming down the pike later this year and early next. Burke could not be explicit about what hardware has been added

I would have assumed that Power Systems blade servers slapped into BladeCenter blade server enclosures had SupportLine hand-holding from IBM, but apparently not. Or rather more precisely, they do now.

In announcement letter 611-013, IBM extended the Hardware Maintenance Services (product number 6950-95A) to augment that hardware support. To put it in plain English (or rather American), SupportLine is one of the things that makes a Power blade setup an AS/400 and not just an RS/6000.

SupportLine for Power Systems BladeCenter is a remote support option (presumably delivered out of IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility for the Americas region)