The computer business is cryptic, and you have to be playing inside baseball to understand that headline. The LUG is, of course, the Large AS/400 User Group, a non-profit comprised of the largest IBM i shops in the world. ISVs are, of course, independent software vendors who peddle products for the OS/400 and i platform. And iASP is not the International Association for the Study of Pain or the Indiana Association of School Principals, but rather the independent auxiliary storage pool feature of the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i operating system family.

I have seen a lot of

The Others category was the big winner for IBM in the fourth quarter of 2010 for server sales, according to the latest statistics from Gartner. Pent-up demand for mainframes helped Big Blue rake in the bucks for its new System zEnterprise 196. And, I think but I cannot prove, the Power Systems-IBM i combo did its part in the quarter to help raise Big Blue’s revenues in the system racket.

Gartner believes that in the final quarter of last year, server makers shipped 2.38 million servers, representing $14.7 billion in revenues. That represented only 6.5 percent growth in shipments

As all the latest, greatest collaboration tools–or if you prefer the term social business tools–make their way into companies, another river of data is in need of organization. Some businesses have yet to skillfully manage their transactional data and business processes, while others have those handles in place and are on an organizational mission to do the same for what is commonly called unstructured data–the emails, the instant messages, the blogs, the modern communications that are increasingly permeating business.

It’s not a safe bet that information technology can save us from what it creates, but its record is really pretty

Here is how the game show Jeopardy works. The presenter says that the answer is “9W.” The contestant must come up with the right question, “Do you spell your name with a V, Herr Wagner?” Here is another example: The answer is Linux. A winning response is, “What’s in the server?” or “What runs on the Watson server?” Jeopardy fans loved watching the computer win as it prepared to take away their jobs. And astute Power box users who bet their careers on IBM i or AIX formulated some special questions, such as “How much would we save if we

The IT sector turned in its best growth since 2007, according to the analysts at IDC. That’s good news, and the news kept getting better as 2010 went on. Maybe 2011 won’t be so bad if the world settles down a little politically.

IDC said in its latest Worldwide Black Book that IT spending worldwide rose by 8 percent, to more than $1.5 trillion as measured in constant currency. I am a bit mystified here as to how IDC can say it is in constant currency but use U.S. dollars. I believe that must mean it locked in an

Change management software maker MKS has turned in a stellar quarter, dealing with the Great Recession deftly and continuing to grow revenues and boost profits through the downturn.

While the Waterloo, Ontario, company has, like other Canadian firms, benefitted from the fact that the Canadian economy did not take a financial hit, MKS sells a lot of its software in the United States and Europe so the fact that it was able to power through shows there is plenty of demand for application lifecycle management tools.

In the third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended January 31, MKS reported total revenues

Will this lawsuit between Oracle and SAP concerning the long-defunct TomorrowNow third-party software support business ever end? It sure doesn’t look like it.

Last week, after mulling over Oracle’s $1.3 billion jury award from last November for a few months, SAP’s lawyers came back and filed motions with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland suggesting to Judge Phyllis Hamilton that the jury award was way out of whack with the reality of the damage caused by TomorrowNow.

Back in March 2007, you will recall, after SAP had acquired TomorrowNow to offer third-party support

In the wake of IBM‘s impressive win with the Watson question-answer machine on the Jeopardy! game show two weeks ago, the company got down to business with some partners to try to commercialize the contraption.

Healthcare, as you might expect, is the first place where IBM is looking to turn Watson on its head and have it answer questions instead of providing them. Medicine is particularly slippery, given the complexity of human chemistry and physiology and the fact that we are all just a little bit different thanks to differences in genetics, environments, and habits. When I talked to

My alarm didn’t go off. I couldn’t find my car keys. My kid wouldn’t get up this morning. We’ve all had those days when we just couldn’t get it together to be on time. But a recent survey by CareerBuilder reveals that the recession appears to have improved punctuality in the workplace.

The national survey, conducted among 2,482 U.S. employers and 3,910 U.S. employees between November 15 and December 2, 2010, revealed that 15 percent of workers said they arrive late to work at least once a week, which is actually a slight improvement from 16 percent in 2009 and

After a wave of acquisitions and consolidations in the wake of the Great Recession, the business intelligence (BI) software market is looking to settle down and grow a little more predictably, but perhaps a little less enthusiastically, in the next five years, according to prognostications coming out of Gartner.

Which were no doubt done on some whirlygig-driven BI piece of software.

Gartner believes that sales of BI software will rise by 9.7 percent, to $10.8 billion, in 2011, with growth tapering off through 2014 but slowing. Gartner’s projections show growth will still be in the “high single digits” at