As soon as the Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines were updated with slightly different processors, more memory capacity, and PCI-Express 2.0 peripherals last October, you knew that they were not going to be long for the IBM catalog.

In announcement letter 912-016, IBM said that it would stop selling the original Power 710/730 (machine number 8231-E2B), Power 720 (machine number 8202-E4B), and Power 740 (machine number 8231-E6B) on May 25.

The company has also pulled the plug on the 7402-C08 deskside Hardware Management Console (HMC), which is used to manage PowerVM logical partitions on Power Systems

Let’s have a little fun here. Those of us who have made a living in the market for AS/400 systems and their progeny on down to the current Power Systems-IBM i platforms spend a lot of time looking back at the past and pointing out all of the innovations that IBM cooked up in the System/38 and AS/400 product lines since the dawn of the commercial computing era in the midrange. We spend a lot of time talking about keeping legacies alive, but we don’t spend enough time talking about building a new machine that will be worthy of being

Xerox is the latest company to roll out an infrastructure as a service (IAAS) cloud offering that includes support for IBM i workloads. Unveiled last month, Xerox Cloud Services enables small and midsized businesses to run their IBM i, AIX, Windows, and Linux applications on servers owned and managed by Xerox and its IT services arm, formerly called ACS. The $21 billion IT services and printing giant is also allowing partners to white label the cloud offering to their own clients.

Most IBM i professionals know Xerox as a printer manufacturer, but the company has a much broader array of

Real change doesn’t come from the change machine, where a dollar will get you four quarters but it doesn’t change what you can buy with the money. The IBM midrange, on the other hand, could be in for some real change. I’m talking about the change that comes with consuming IT as a service instead of buying it as a product. Are we any closer to that happening than we were five years ago? Could be. Here’s why.

Although it’s tempting to say it all comes down to money and saving it whenever and wherever you can, that’s not the

Carlos Slim Helú worth about $75 billion, might be the richest person in the world. One of many companies Slim and his children control is Mexico-based América Móvil, which spans the Western Hemisphere, serving more than 200 million mobile telephony customers. On Groundhog Day, Straight Talk, one of AM’s brands, aided by a cadre of phone unlockers and iPhone jailbreakers launched its assault on the USA’s cell phone business. For openers, it halved the cost of operating an iPhone. What will follow might do more than change carriers’ market shares. It could reshape the entire mobile client ecosystem.

This

On Big Blue Pulls The Plug On IBM i Discount Deal:

Mr. Tim:

The withdrawal of the 40 percent off user pricing for IBM i was not a big deal. The original 311-171 announcement clearly said that the intention was to encourage customers to move from older machines, not targeted at net new. They had already announced the ability of installed user based machines to move all their users along with an IBM i license for $5,000. Solution Edition machines provide 70 percent off user pricing (as you pointed out). Remember that you can write your own apps and

i Believe Event Ahead of COMMON

If you were thinking of heading out to California a little early to play at Disneyland before the COMMON midrange user group meeting and expo, then application modernization tool maker looksoftware is hosting a special event ahead of COMMON that will probably pique your interest.

The COMMON event is being hosted May 6 through 9 at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, and will presumably feature the top brass from IBM‘s Power Systems division as it always does. (Although with a little more emphasis on AIX as has been happening over the past

This long-running Power Systems Trade-In deal from IBM has had more modifications than a badly written novel. But the fact that IBM keeps on tweaking the deal shows that it is changing the Power Systems product line enough to warrant the changes, which is a good thing.

The Power Systems Trade-In deal gives customers with earlier generations of AS/400, iSeries, and System i machines, as well as pSeries and System p boxes, a cash-rebate that ranges from a low of $250 on a PS700 blade server to a high of $120,000 on a loaded up Power 795 big bad box.

This is a great time to be Magic Software Enterprises. The application development and integration tool maker, which was all but written off several years ago, continued its comeback recently when it announced its financial results for 2011, which were the company’s best ever.

For the fourth quarter ended December 31, Magic reported a 22 percent increase in revenue, to $30.5 million, and a 42 percent increase in net income, to $4.4 million. For fiscal year 2011, the company reported a 28 percent increase in revenue, to $113.3 million, and a whopping 60 percent in net income, to $15

Like a horror movie sequel, the outsourcing of application maintenance work has brushed off the dirt of its would-be grave and is on the prowl again, thirsty for the blood of programmers here in the USA. Outsourcing never really died. It just fell off the pace that was being set prior to 2009, when the trend stumbled rather badly thanks to the Great Recession.

According to a recently released study by Computer Economics, the number of organizations that are outsourcing application maintenance work has risen during the past two years to near pre-recession levels.

After a peek at this