Steve Will, the chief architect for the IBM i platform, is a hunter and gatherer of problems and solutions. He oversees the direction of the operating system, does the analysis, takes into account the integration, and supervises the implementation. Along with his team of big thinkers, Will uses customer resources as well as input from ISVs and business partners in the sales channel. A new release of the operating system is due in 2014, and Will touched on that in addition to talking about what has already been accomplished.

As Power Systems general manager Colin Parris noted in the opening

There’s no denying that the IBM i server ecosystem is not what it used to be. The number of customers and users is far down from its heyday over a decade ago, when COMMON could attract 3,000 to 4,000 attendees to its conferences twice a year. The good old days are gone, but nobody was singing The Sky is Crying in Austin last week. In fact, COMMON-goers got revved up for the AS/400’s 25th birthday, which meant passionate reflections on the longevity of this amazing platform and, of course, cake.

COMMON kicked off its 2013 Annual Conference and Exposition by

IBM has created a neat new database feature for its DB2 database for Linux, Unix, and Windows operating systems that will hopefully make its way into the integrated DB2 for i database that resides inside the IBM i operating system. For now, this BLU Accelerator feature, which can radically speed up the sifting through data, is only available for DB2 10.5 and only for reporting and analytics, but there is every reason to believe Big Blue will put it on the IBM i and mainframe versions of its DB2 database and use it to help goose transaction processing.

Like other

Privacy law in the United States really began in 1890 when Louis Brandeis, number one in his graduating class, writing with Samuel Warren in Harvard Law Review, argued that there was a “right to be left alone.” This alienable right had been poorly articulated until Brandeis and Warren brilliantly expressed what their predecessors had not. In the nearly 125 years since, the value placed on personal privacy has waxed and waned. Gibbous only 50 years ago, it became a mere crescent during the past decade, its visible illumination reduced by an improbable combination of terrorism and social media.

By

Big Blue likes to throw its billions around to show that it is an IT big shot, and when IBM uses the “B” word, you know that it is pretty serious about something. Usually it is dividends and share buybacks, but sometimes it is when the company sees an unstoppable force, like the $1 billion investment in Linux in the wake of the dot-com bust, or when it sees it needs to grease the wheels of commerce, as with the $4 billion in financing for partners that the company made available late last year.

The next hot area that IBM

The new role of data in modern business is on the mind of IBM‘s vice president of marketing for Power Systems Zarina Stanford. Transactional data has lost none of its importance, but the need to analyze data quickly is where the business value is today and organizations are already capitalizing on analytics.

“Think about IBM i,” Stanford says. “The core is cognitive computing–sorting through information from DB2 and piecing it together.”

Big data means big value to this marketing executive and she sees IBM i on Power Systems as playing an important role in the industries where the demand

Up, down, up, down. It’s not just the latest data on job numbers that might make you feel a little queasy, it’s also the way those numbers have fluctuated since the beginning of 2013. And it looks like we’re in for another gut-busting drop.

In February we reported on a job explosion in North America with news of a spike in the number of new jobs for IT professionals in the first month of 2013. By March, the outlook was decidedly less peppy when we told you about slower than anticipated growth of 5,700 new jobs in February from a

The IBM online announcement system likes to play a game of cat and mouse with all of us, and sometimes there is an announcement of a new product or a change in a deal with a certain date on it, but damned if I never saw it when I looked through the announcement summaries, which I do pretty religiously on Tuesday and then double-check again late Friday night as The Four Hundred goes to press.

But, once again, IBM snuck another one by me. In announcement letter 313-022, updating a deal trade-in rebate deal that was last changed in

If you are poking around the IBM website, looking for cheap second-hand equipment to run older releases of the IBM i operating system, you might think you are in some kind of a time warp. But fear not, it is not you. It is Big Blue.

Check out the two machines that IBM Global Financing is selling as refurbished systems:

These are exactly the same two machines offered up in January 2011, with the same i5/OS V5R4 software at exactly the same prices. These System i 520 machines were ridiculously priced back then, and I said so at the

Last week, I told you that IBM was giving managed service providers the special utility-priced licenses for IBM i 6.1 and AIX 6.1, similar to the per-core pricing it announced for IBM i 7.1 and AIX 7.1 last October. IBM also mentioned last week that it was adding the PS702 blade server was being added to a discount program for MSPs, but didn’t say what the terms of the deals were.

In announcement letter 313-030. IBM clarified the situation on the minimum amount of dough that MSPs have to blow on PS702 blades and what their discount will be.