The annual Lotusphere shindig kicked off in Orlando, Florida, yesterday and will run until Thursday this week. While IBM will no doubt talk about all the new widgets and gadgets it is cooking up as part of its “Project Vulcan” and “Project Concord” development efforts, which were first divulged in 2010, I don’t expect the people from Big Blue’s Lotus division to talk all that much about server platforms.

That’s a shame, given how Oracle, the Acadia Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) partnership from Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware, and the Frontline partnership between Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft

IBM is feeling particularly social this week. That’s what an event like Lotusphere will do for Big Blue. To set the stage for Lotusphere–IBM’s week of social network and collaboration software celebration–the company put the emphasis on LotusLive. That’s IBM tools for collaboration–you know, email, Web conferencing, social networking–in a public cloud, or, if you prefer, an IBM-managed stack of systems and software running at your location. Let the fanfare begin.

Cloud computing is on the rise (more on that in just a minute) and IBM shared a list of companies that are already onboard with LotusLive. That list includes

RPG is showing surprising legs. At 52 years old, conventional thinking would hold that the programming language would be in mid-life crisis and suffering from the slow and inevitable decline of its powers. Instead, interest in Report Program Generator seems to be gaining steam, according to Tiobe Software‘s monthly index of the popularity of programming languages. Nobody’s confusing RPG with Java or C, but the IBM i coder’s old standby is proving that it still has a lot to give.

RPG surged from the 33rd most popular language a year ago to claim the number 18 spot this month,

At a kosher deli, a customer was surprised when the waiter, who was Chinese, took his order in Yiddish. On the way out, the diner asked the restaurant’s manager how they found this remarkable waiter. “Keep shtum,” the manager replied, sotto voce. “He thinks we’re teaching him English!”

IBM thinks it can persuade customers that Lotus offerings will make them part of the social networking phenomenon that has attracted more than 500 million users to Facebook and 200 million to Twitter, and that this will somehow be good for them. How pathetic. And how tone deaf!

With this kind

It is not only good to be the king, but also profitable. Sam Palmisano, who holds the three jobs of president, chief executive officer, and chairman at IBM raked in the dough in 2010 as the company turned in what Wall Street and its top brass believes was a great year.

IBM i shops, who no doubt still call themselves AS/400 customers, probably have a slightly different view of the year, having seen a lot of focus on Smarter Planet and Power Systems running AIX and not enough action on the i front to make them happy. It is hard

I finally figured out why the AS/400 does not thrive in today’s marketplace–why it has declined slowly over time.

While everyone that works on the AS/400 loves it, what they really love is the AS/400 of 10, 15, and 20 years ago. If most of the veterans on the AS/400 do not know or care to use newer features of RPGLE (service programs, subprocedures, free-format, and so forth) or CLLE (activation groups), how could we ever hope to get others to know/love the platform? All others see is 20-plus year old technology.

–Dan

Hi, Dan:

I think you are right.

IBM is getting so old that it seems to have forgotten its own birthday. But last week, the company launched a new Web site called IBM at 100 to celebrate its centennial as a company.

Technically speaking, the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, or CTR, was founded on June 16, 1911, in Endicott, New York, and this is the centennial that Big Blue is arbitrarily celebrating. A credible case can be made for making 1996 IBM’s centennial year, since that was 100 years after Herman Hollerith, who invented a tabulating machine driven by punch cards, set up the Tabulating Machine Company.

High availability software vendor Maxava announced last week that IBM has bestowed upon it the status of a premier business partner, an upgrade from the previous business partner status that it had previously.

This may not sound like a big deal to those of us on the outside of the IBM midrange partner community, but that elevation will make a substantial difference in Maxava’s business going forward.

As an advanced partner, Maxava was already privy to event and campaign support funding and had access to IBM’s internal business intelligence markets for the areas where it has products to peddle alongside

Classroom instruction. Web-based training. Teleconferences. Mix it all together and what do you have? Blended learning, a structured combination of classroom and self-study instruction with a strong component of social networking thrown in. And it’s the hottest trend in education. At least, that’s what Bill Hansen of Manta Technologies is betting on.

In today’s world, online universities and for-profit schools are churning out graduates who no longer have the time or luxury of getting an education in a traditional college setting. These students are already in the workforce, going after valuable education at night and on the weekends to boost

If you thought the terms “e-business” and “on-demand” and “converged infrastructure” were tiresome, then “cloud computing” might just give you a stroke. Like the term or not, companies are keen on having more flexible IT infrastructure with utility-style pricing. And every survey that anyone is doing these days is showing it.

Just like the home personal computing wave transformed all of business desktop computing to graphical environments–and made Microsoft the undisputed king of the desktop and a shoe-in for the data center–applet-style applications for smartphones (I hesitate to call them applications) and server virtualization are making CEOs and end users