The new year is well under way and IBM, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, has closed out last year and is facing whatever new challenges it has. The big one is that new Opteron 6200 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Sparc T4 processors from Oracle are out, and the even bigger problem is that the Xeon E5 processors from Intel are shipping under NDA to selected customers and are expected to launch this quarter.

And so, IBM is tweaking its Power Systems Power7 processor pricing a little bit to blunt the

IBM closed out 2011 on a somewhat somber note in terms of hardware sales, but not because of the Power Systems line. That’s good news for any customer that relies on Power Systems, and so is the fact that Big Blue is stealing away business from Unix rivals Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, and so is IBM’s frank admission that Power7-based machines are also taking share away from System z mainframes in the enterprise segment of the server racket.

IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011 after the market closed last Thursday, and because of currency fluctuations

IBM is moving its LotusLive hosting service for Notes onto its SmartCloud infrastructure and calling it SmartCloud for Social Business, the company announced at last week’s Lotusphere. The company also unveiled several new software and services that will be sold under the SC4SB umbrella, including new releases of its flagship social networking platform IBM Connections; an embeddable version of the Lotus Notes social networking features; a new productivity suite called IBM Docs; and new clients for Blackberrys and the new Windows Phone.

Business software vendors like IBM are trying mightily to hook their horses to the social media train that

Recently, I contacted a number of colleagues around the country to find out what concerns occupy their quiet moments. Not surprisingly, at the top of the list was keeping or, in one case, finding a job. Most reported working for years with no prospect of a raise, and several whose spouses were no longer employed had been forced to make lifestyle adjustments. But close behind employment was the desire to maintain or find affordable healthcare.

There is an ironic timeliness to their concern. Every January many Americans try to preempt the need for healthcare by getting fit. After a holiday

Portals are not dead. They’ve just been sleeping. Almost all highly hyped technology eventually moves into reality, where the effects of market consolidation and sometimes technology commoditization can dull a formerly bright star. But this could be a better time and place for portals thanks to social media and cloud computing. The big guys–IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and a few others are poised. While some smaller vendors are featuring lighter weight and lower cost products.

We’re still in the midst of a major hype storm that’s dumping huge amounts of propaganda concerning social media and

Hi Timothy,

Thanks for the article on home-grown RPG software. The company I work for is still running the software we wrote on the System/38 and we continue to enhance it daily. I believe it has given us an edge over many packaged software customers. We don’t have to ask for changes, we make them.

Yes, we too have looked into replacing our systems several times, but haven’t found packages doing things the way we have done for 27 plus years! I just need to find some young talent that wants to learn RPG and doesn’t mind the green screen.

The eagle flies on Friday is an old-time euphemism for Friday is payday. For a lot of folks these days, the eagle doesn’t fly as high as it once did. And others aren’t so sure that eagle isn’t really a vulture circling overhead.

Whether you are an IT pro with a paycheck or a resume in your hand, IT salary reports like the one just released by Computer Economics makes for interesting reading. The same is true if you’re expanding an IT staff or looking for a baseline to compare your IT salary budget with the numbers Computer Economics is

IBM has revealed one possible contender for data storage that we might see far into the future. In a paper presented by techies from the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, Big Blue is showing off that it can encode a bit of data in a dozen iron atoms using antiferromagnetic properties of the atoms.

In the most capacious hard drives used in PCs and servers today, it takes about 1 million atoms to encode a bit of data using disk heads that employ giant magnetoresistance to encode and read data on the platter of a disk drive.

IBM

An enterprise server is almost as hard to get rid of as it is to get the bean counters to pay for it in the first place. That is why server makers sometimes sweeten their new server acquisition deals by agreeing to take back old boxes when customers buy new boxes.

Way back in September 2007 when the new machines were the Power6-based System i machines, IBM launched an AS/400 and eServer iSeries no-charge removal program, which has been updated numerous times over the years. In announcement letter 311-182, IBM has tweaked the no-charge removal the deal one more

IBM just can’t seem to kill the 7042-CR6 hardware management console, or HMC. It has now had its second stay of execution.

The HMC is on its way out over the long haul, of course, as The Four Hundred explained back in April 2011, which IBM announced the Systems Director Management Console, or SDMC. While the HMC was tied to Power Systems iron, managing its PowerVM hypervisor, the SMDC, which runs a new suite of tools for managing Power Systems, System x, and BladeCenter iron and their respective hypervisors. The SDMC tool itself runs on Power Systems machines with