A moment of indignation on behalf of midrange shops that are up to their necks in both IBM i and Windows: Why on earth does the ARM architecture get a version of Windows ahead of the Power server platform? What’s more important: Hundreds of thousands of customers who spend billions of dollars on expensive systems, or tens of millions of consumers who spend billions of dollars on smartphones and tablets that have hardly any profit margin? Why is the latter billion better than the former, BillG?

Way back when 20 years ago, when I still didn’t have very much hair

The question is often asked, “What is IBM doing for the small to midsize businesses that run on the IBM i platform?” From a numbers standpoint, this is the largest segment of customers Big Blue can claim under a single brand, with 95 percent of the IBM i installed base being SMBs. IBM built the System/3X and AS/400 business over three decades, and it did so with application software. It has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade, and now the company has seen that to keep and expand this business, it needs application software.

With this strategy,

The Power Systems business is humming along relative to other Unix and proprietary platforms, but success for IBM is measured relative to itself, quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year and at the bottom line. And thus Big Blue has doubled down on a Power Systems rebated deal designed to get European companies off old iron and onto new, as well as offering financing deals across its server and storage line in Australia and New Zealand to attract some business.

Under the 2011 Power Trade In Program NE IOT, IBM is offering customers who have old RS64, PowerPC, Power2, Power3, Power4, Power4, Power5, Power5+,

You may remember the movie Apotheker Now, or perhaps the novel on which it was based, Bartz of Darkness. The story, as you undoubtedly recall, concerns Fulton J. Wintel, sent into the wilderness by the greedy tyrant Leopold 2.0 to bring back whacko Kemeny Kurtz. Wintel finds Kurtz, who soon expires, muttering, “The oracle, the oracle.” The tale portrays the underside of Silicon Valley during the Doofus Era, when companies dexterously developing and exploiting new technologies overwhelmed those that slipped even once, or looked like they might have.

It’s the whacko season. Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo are beset by

For those of you who seldom find your way to the IBM i homepage, here’s a peek at an archived webinar you can find there under the title of Optimizing on Power Systems for Superior Economics. It co-stars Ian Jarman, IBM’s program director of global marketing for Power Systems, and Brad Day, an IT industry analyst and president of Enterprise Computing Advisors.

I visit the IBM i site from time to time in search of new resources and information to pass along to IT Jungle readers. Last week, I decided to check out the Power Systems webinar.

This

Victor, really good article on the need for and benefits of silence. Thank you!

In Tai Chi, we say that “stillness is the master of unrest.” You’ve stated the same thing with regards to silence. Well done, sir.

–Mike

Thanks for another terrific article. I also enjoy backpacking in the mountains. . . . especially the Sierra, when I can get there from Rhode Island.

–Ed

Victor, I have enjoyed all your columns for some time but Going Silent, which struck a chord, prompted me to say thank you. Very much.

–Tim

I really enjoyed your article this week. I

Back in late March, high availability software maker Maxava put $50,000 of its money where all of our mouths were to try to help out the IBM i community.

June 30 was the cutoff date to put in an application for a grant of a few grand, which could not be used for any personal expenses or any other costs that had been already incurred by a user group or other organization.

Allan Campbell, chief executive officer of Maxava, tells The Four Hundred that there were over 20 applicants for iFoundation grants, and that most of them were approved. “We

SAP paid $20 million in fines and plead guilty in federal court last week in the criminal case over TomorrowNow’s illegal downloading of support information from Oracle. In exchange for its plea and the fines, the Department of Justice dropped its criminal case against SAP and its now defunct TomorrowNow subsidiary. Oracle’s civil case against SAP is still under appeal.

SAP plead guilty to 11 felony counts of unauthorized access of Oracle’s computer system and one felony count of criminal copyright infringement. It will pay the fine of $20 million to Oracle and be under probation for three years.

There’s no shortage to the amount of digital junk that we want to keep, just in case it might be useful some day, and because of this, the disk array business continues to see both revenue and capacity shipment growth grow even as disk subsystems get more efficient at storing data.

In the second quarter, the analysts at IDC reckon that total disk array revenues rose by 10.2 percent to $7.49 billion while aggregate capacity rose by a stunning 46.7 percent to 5,353 petabytes. Sales of external disk arrays–the kind used by most midrange and high-end servers–rose by 12.2 percent

Long-time readers at IT Jungle and especially those that are trying to sort out IBM‘s patches for the IBM i operating system every week, rejoice. The System i PTF Guide is back.

The System i PTF Guide is put together by Doug Bidwell, the president of DLB Associates, an IBM business partner that supports midrange customers on the OS/400 and Windows platforms, including suites from JDE, Lawson, SSA GT, Harris Data, Friedman, and others. Bidwell knows his midrange hardware cold, and as a service to all of IT Jungle‘s readers for many years, he has put together the