Well, the Power7+ era of IBM‘s Power Systems family of servers and now its Pure Systems modular systems is nearly upon us. Or at least the beginning of the era is. It has been a long time since IBM refreshed an entire lineup of Power-based commercial systems from top to bottom, all in one fell swoop, and there is every reason to believe that IBM will have a staggered approach to the Power7+ rollout this time around, too.

In fact, I wracked my brains, and I cannot think of when IBM last did such a rollout. Certainly not since

If you are trying to get to the future, you can’t always be looking over your shoulder at the past. You have to keep your eyes on the road ahead. And if any message was clear at the iBelieve event hosted by looksoftware last Thursday in my hometown of New York City, it is that we can celebrate our long history but we have to keep moving, keep learning, keep changing, and keep pace with modern technologies like the IBM i platform itself has managed to do. And perhaps with a lot more grace than the humans who program and

It could happen to you. Like a sucker punch from the president of your company, one day you get the word the IBM midrange system is being replaced. And before you can even ask–“How could this happen?”–you’re flat on your back seeing stars. You should have seen this coming. The murmurs about old technology unable to solve modern business problems, inaccessible silos of information, and the surge of the Window/Unix manifest destiny have been heard for years.

Just like ignorance of the law isn’t going to get you off the hook for a speeding ticket, claiming you didn’t notice other

In a lengthy study published in September, IBM says vendors and users have done a pretty good job tackling computer security problems lately, despite some persistently festering issues. The report deals with threats to user organizations that arrive via the Internet. This was unfortunate because sabotage had just become a very hot topic in security circles. In August, destructive malware called Shamoon trashed 30,000 workstations at Saudi Aramco and an unspecified number of client systems at Qatar’s Rasgas. The vector was most likely a flash drive carried by an insider, not a website or email.

IBM’s star-crossed (or perhaps Shamoon-crossed)

It hasn’t quite been a year since IBM tapped Virginia M. Rometty as president and chief executive officer, and now comes the announcement from IBM’s board of directors that Rometty will take over as chairman of the board, effective October 1, 2012. Rometty succeeds Sam Palmisano, who will stay on as a senior adviser to the company until he retires on December 1, 2012. So as of today, Rometty is driving the Big Blue bus.

IBM CEO, president, and newly appointed chairman of the board, Ginni Rometty.

There is no doubt that Rometty, 55, is ready to take the wheel.

Banking software and payment processing service Jack Henry and Associates has pumped up its sales to above $1 billion for the latest fiscal year just ended, the first time the company has hit that sales level and almost assuring that someone–Oracle, Infor, or even Microsoft–is going to try to try to buy the company.

But Jack Henry has done just fine on its own, thank you very much. In the fiscal 2012 year ended on June 30, the software and service provider that specializes in sales to small and regional banks, booked $1.03 billion in sales,

The use of internal disk arrays inside of database, data warehousing, and Hadoop data munching clusters seems to be having an effect on sales of external disk array sales. Maybe.

In the second quarter, according to Gartner, external controller-based disk arrays (meaning they have their own brains instead of relying on controllers under the skins of the servers that the arrays attach to) accounted for $5.5 billion in revenues, up 6.7 percent and marking the eleventh quarter in a row that external disk array sales have gone up. However, Gartner was expecting for 7.9 percent growth and around $62

An April trial date has been set in the false advertising and trade libel case that IBM i high availability software maker Maxava brought against its rival Vision Solutions and the reseller Sirius Computer Solutions. A jury in a Los Angeles courtroom will decide the case next spring–unless the two sides agree to a settlement or the trial is delayed once more.

Maxava and Vision have been going at it since December 2009, when Maxava filed its false advertising lawsuit in U.S. District Court Central District of California Western Division, based in Los Angeles. Maxava (which at that time

Managed service providers (MSPs) are lined up like suitcases at the baggage claim. Their destination is the small to midsize market. For years, IBM and the rest of the IT giants have searched for ways to crack that market, without a great deal of success. Managed services, via the cloud, are their best opportunity to date. Another indicator that managed service providers are gearing up for a coming change in IT buying behavior is IBM latest program designed for expanding its MSP network. Central to this program are two of Big Blue’s favorite topics: SmartCloud and PureSystems.

IBM claims there

Sending people around to make the sales pitch and then take orders for product sales is expensive and inefficient even if it is more personable, and IBM wants you to try something new and buy software online.

In a deal running on IBM’s website, Big Blue is opening up its online software catalog in the United States and Canada and sweetening the deal a bit if customers buy online. IBM is not offering discounts on the software, so it is reasonable to expect that big ticket items like operating systems and middleware will be bought this way. But the