Let’s cut right to the chase scene. The entry systems portion of the Power Systems lineup that matters most to i5/OS and IBM i shops started to show some signs of life in the fourth quarter, according to the financial results released by IBM last Tuesday after Wall Street closed down to get home through a slushy and cold New York evening. So, like me, you can exhale and then breathe a little bit.

In the fourth quarter ended in December 31, IBM’s revenues grew by 6.6 percent to just a hair over $29 billion, and net income rose by

You may not be aware of it, but IBM still has a cross-platform Midmarket Division even if we no longer have a System i Division. While we could talk on into the night about what Big Blue does and does not do to support the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i platforms, there are actually people at IBM who are dedicated to the midmarket customer base. They think about your business and what it might need in the way of IT products and services, and they want to know where you are going.

Just to put names to the roles, Andy

You probably think you have a better chance of catching a cold than catching a break in the IBM i job market. Well, that probably depends on how recently you’ve had a cold or job. If you haven’t had a cold in a while, you’re due. If you haven’t had a job in a while, your odds are getting better there, too. At least that’s what the latest employment survey results from CareerBuilder indicate.

Compared to a chilly 2010, companies will be warming up to the idea of adding full-time, permanent employees during 2011. That prediction covers all professions, but

If, like most of us, you have only a passing familiarity with the art world, and if someone were to ask you which artist’s work sold for a record amount of money, you might go with one of the Impressionists, perhaps Renoir or Monet, or the troubled Vincent van Gogh, or perhaps Picasso, or maybe one of the old masters like Rembrandt or Vermeer. Any one of those would be a good guess, but everyone would be wrong.

The highest price ever paid for a single canvas was $140 million, which purchased a piece that falls into the abstract expressionist

What tech bubble? So IBM is trading at $150 per share, and Groupon is pondering a $15 billion IPO this year. Those certainly represent hefty valuation discounts in somebody’s mind. Whether it’s a bubble or a return to economic normalcy, the last year has been good for tech stocks, as reflected in a 20 percent rise in the NASDAQ Composite. Here’s a quick roundup of public IBM i software vendors that did better than that, and others that dragged down the curve.

Magic Software: This NASDAQ stock has been on fire recently. The Israeli-based company, which creates development and

It looks like 2011 is getting off to an optimistic start, at least as far as the budget forecasting for IT spending goes. Two weeks ago, the prognosticators at Gartner were projecting that IT spending on hardware, software, and services would rise by 5.9 percent this year to $1.46 trillion. And now, Computer Economics has put together its projections and the news is good after two years of bad. Surveys of the midmarket by IBM show budgets on the rise, too.

In its Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2011 report, announced last week, Computer Economics did surveys

In discussing IBM‘s fourth quarter and full year financial results last week with Wall Street, Mark Loughridge took a few moments, as he has done for several years now, to brag about the competitive wins that the Power Systems lineup is getting against rivals Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. While takeouts had been losing steam earlier in 2010, they heated up as the year ended and IBM got the entire Power7 lineup shipping.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, Loughridge said that IBM had over 280 competitive displacements, which accounted for around $325 million in revenues for Big Blue. (Those

Even if you’re one of the few holdouts who has not succumbed to joining a social network at home, a social network is likely headed into your workplace that will thrust you into the global community whether you’re ready or not. In every marketplace around the globe, companies are scrambling to figure out how to make social software work for their enterprise to connect employees, partners, and customers in a bid to cut costs, improve worker productivity, grow business, and, of course, make money.

According to the Gartner report, Market Trends: Convergence Restructuring the Enterprise Social Software Market, Worldwide, 2010

With IBM saying that it is sold out of older Power 520 machines as well as the new Power7-based Power 720 and 740 entry boxes, if you are trying to upgrade from a vintage OS/400 machine to a more modern release, your other option is to get a refurbished computer from IBM Global Financing or some other used equipment reseller.

IBM is not showing off a huge inventory of machines right now in its Global Financing subsidiary, but as you can see on its refurbished AS/400, iSeries, System i equipment site, it does have two configurations available.

The first

Tape storage, the oldest commercially viable magnetic medium, works by moving the magnetic tape that encodes the 1s and 0s of data over a stationary head. The genius of disk storage was to move both the disk and the head together to radically speed up the retrieval of data. Now, IBM researchers are one step closer to coming up with a completely new way of storing and reading data.

The new technology that the techies at IBM Research are working on is called racetrack memory, and no, it is not about picking the ponies and remembering to tell the truth.