With new Power Systems and PureSystems machinery in the works and hopefully set to shake up the market and chase some of those server dollars that Intel is already counting on, now is a good time to stop and have a good THINK. Just like Tom Watson admonished us all to do soon after taking over what became International Business Machines nearly a century ago. If we were sitting in a bar together, we might even think and drink at the same time, as Watson himself did as a young man before he became a teetotaler.

Here’s a funny story,

A JPMorgan Chase analyst recently made headlines with a paper that noted the price of computer equipment and software is decreasing at the slowest rate in a generation, which is interpreted to reflect a notable downturn in IT industry innovation. With the heyday of rapid IT innovation and easy productivity gains behind us, the question now becomes: What drivers will emerge to shape the $4 trillion information economy?

JPMorgan’s chief US economist Michael Feroli made interesting observations in his two-page paper US: is IT over?, which starts on page 13 of JPMorgan Chase’s recent Global Data Watch economic research

When it comes to eating its own dog food, IBM can’t get enough of social media. Everyone at the Big Blue enterprise is expected to chow down. In turning social media into social business, Big Blue figures it is best to lead by example. Last week, IBM’s social technology soapbox Connect 2013, the conference formerly known as Lotusphere, was talking with their mouths full. Naturally, this was a good time to announce new software and cloud-based services. Warning: Buzz shields required beyond this point.

The statistical bombardment is the first thing that hits you.

IBM claims 61 percent of the

As 2012 ended, the brightest spot in IBM’s financial picture came from, of all things, the venerable mainframe. Sales jumped 56 percent as MIPS shipments soared 66 percent. But the picture wasn’t so simple: Only half this capacity could support IBM operating systems; the rest was confined to running Linux or taking a wash for those unfettered z engines. Meanwhile, in Washington, baseball fans were getting an upbeat surprise, too. The Nationals had named William Howard Taft as a mascot, reminding fans of a uniquely large and flatulent president who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

In

Notes/Domino Social Edition 9 has been talked about since Lotusphere 2012. There was a public beta version released in November last year. Its development cost is rumored to be as much as $100 million while spanning 18 to 24 months, depending on who’s spreading the rumors. Now IBM is committing to a March release date for the software, which is being billed as the biggest Notes/Domino release in years. And, being modern and all, it has the “Social Edition” tag on it.

There’s no bigger burden, we’ve repeatedly seen, than the burden of great potential.

In the race to be

For 17 years, Evolving Solutions has met the AIX and System x needs of its customers in the Upper Midwest. Many of its customers also ran IBM i gear, but Evolving didn’t have the expertise to help them. However, with the recent hire of a former IBMer out of the Rochester, Minnesota, lab, Evolving has seen the light and begun an IBM i practice.

Evolving Solutions is a full service IT provider based in Hamel, Minnesota, that caters to the needs of mid-size and large companies ($500 million to $5 billion) in the five-state region. Areas of expertise include high

Big Blue has announced its first big sale for the new Power 770+ servers announced last October in Europe, and the deal was done at SLIB, a software maker and service provider that specializes in for securities order, clearing, settlement, and risk analysis, among other things.

SLIB, which is based on Paris and which was founded 25 years ago, has over 100 employees and creates software it sells to broker-dealers and a back-end system to run its securities trading platform as a service. Interestingly enough, its securities trading platform, which processed some 15 million stock orders in 2012 for

Supply chain and warehouse management software maker Manhattan Associates continues to do well in a cut-throat market, and to do so with organic growth and good, old-fashioned software development.

In the fourth quarter ended in December, the company’s revenues were $95.4 million, up 14.2 percent compared to the year-ago period, with net income rising an even faster 18.5 percent to $12.5 million. That’s a very respectable 13 percent of revenue dropping from the top to the bottom line.

During Q4, software license sales at Manhattan Associates actually fell by 13.9 percent to $14.4 million, but services revenues more than compensated

We know, as The Four Hundred reported last week that IBM is getting set to launch new Power Systems based on the Power7+ processors on February 5. And it looks like Big Blue is going to be making some PureSystems announcements a week later.

See for yourself:

I have no idea what the announcement is about, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the two-socket Flex p260+ server node for the PureSystems family was given a Power7+ processor back in November then it stands to reason that IBM will put the Power7+ processor soon into the

There’s no need to review why your company has to get up to speed on social business. Get on the train or get left at the platform. We’ve all heard the lecture. And it must have sunk in because according to the gurus at Gartner, enterprise social networks are fast-becoming the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding, or acting on information relevant to carrying out work.

So everyone is staying on trend and ready to reap the rewards. Good news, right? Now here’s the catch: Gartner estimates that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve