German software giant SAP is feeling pretty good about its growth in the first quarter selling software and the fact that it was able to push up profits nearly two and a half times faster than revenue growth in the period that ended in March.

Specifically, SAP said that in the first quarter, its revenues rose by 7 percent to €3.6 billion, with profits after taxes using generally accepted international accounting standards up 17 percent to €520 million. And that was during a time when SAP added nearly 5,200 employees, to a workforce of 64,598.

In the March quarter, SAP

The old tier-based licensing scheme worked great for many years, but is rapidly outgrowing its usefulness, thanks to widespread virtualization, cheap CPWs, and cloud workloads. Some software vendors who play by the P-group rules have taken it on the chin, while others have jury-rigged complex rules to make ends meet, and managed service providers (MSPs) just roll their eyes. IBM apparently has taken notice of the problem, and the Power Systems team is working on some kind of fix, IT Jungle has learned.

Ordinarily it wouldn’t be news that IBM is working on a new licensing scheme. After all, Big

The first quarter started out pretty good for IBM, according to the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge. But as it progressed, Big Blue had sales executions with some big mainframe and software deals that pushed out more than $400 million in revenues. And with the Power7+ entry and midrange Power Systems launched in February and not shipping until the end of the quarter, sales of these machines stalled for the second quarter, too. Pushing the Systems and Technology Group to report a substantially larger pre-tax loss than it did in last year’s first quarter.

In the March quarter,

Just like any other company, IBM has to make decisions on which technologies to invest in. Of course IBM is in the business of selling technology, although it prefers to be known for selling solutions. As an IBM customer, you buy technology, or you can buy solutions if you prefer. In our IBM i community, where most everything is business oriented, the technology must prove to be useful. It must make business sense, so it’s interesting to take note of what technologies are most worthy of investment.

Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and Alison Butterill, IBM i product

No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks. Why so modest? Why not just get rid of teachers altogether? It is seldom presented so bluntly, but that’s the general thinking of a fledgling movement called Minimally Invasive Education, which prefers technology to teachers. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Given what educators are grappling with these days, the prospect of escaping the classroom may seem like a blessing.

We have been tossing educators into the fray for several thousand years with tolerable results. But the world is changing faster than the president’s commitment

Who’s the decision maker in your company when it comes to approving IT budgets and the new projects that get the green light? And more importantly, does that decision maker understand the Power Systems running the IBM i platform? For the past 10 years or so, there has been a behind-the-scenes, conference within a conference held in conjunction with the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition. It is called the IT Executive Conference (ITEC), and it needs to have a greater impact.

As far as I know, this is the only IBM i-specific conference for executives. Most of the attendees, which

It was a sea change in the personal computing industry when IBM, which lost billions of dollars in the commercial PC business that its brand helped establish, sold off that business to Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group at the end of 2004 for $1.25 billion. And it might be another sea change for the IT industry, with IBM out on the leading edge again, as it is apparently in discussions with Lenovo to sell off all or part of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo.

I know what you are thinking. IBM is the number three maker

With all the noise about the consumerization of IT, can we just turn down the volume on that a bit so we can actually hear ourselves think about what businesses really need? Let’s have a discussion about real business needs and what separates one computing system from another. The IBM i platform is designed for business. That’s not just a marketing slogan. It’s backed up with 25 years of experience in the business world–the real world.

As you most likely know, IBM is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the IBM i operating system. This is an on-going celebration that officially

It has been a year since IBM launched version 2.1 of its Web Query for IBM i follow-on to the ancient Query/400 ad-hoc query tool for the operating system we all love that runs on Power Systems. That 2.1 release split Web Query into Express and Standard Editions and shifted to per-core pricing from a very complex set of priced features you needed a PhD in IBM marketing to understand. (Sorry, I only have a master’s degree.)

Last week, IBM announced a Web Query for IBM i promotion deal for both Australia and New Zealand that gives customers who buy

If you have not yet gotten the message that IBM wants enterprise customers running distributed applications to give serious consideration to using its FlexSystem iron, a price cut announced last week will demonstrate it for you.

In announcement letter 313-031, IBM said that it was chopping prices for disk drives and flash drives used in both the Storwize V7000 disk array and in the FlexSystem V7000 enclosure that slides into the FlexSystem modular chassis announced last year. The price cuts range from 9.5 percent to 22.3 percent, depending on the device. But as you can see below, the pricing