• Big Blue Backs Off On IBM i Maintenance Price Hike

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well you lose some, and every now and then, you win some. Or more precisely, we all win some. Back in the February 25 issue of The Four Hundred, I told you about an announcement buried deep in Big Blue’s February 5 Power Systems announcements that had some pretty steep price increases for selected features of the IBM i operating system. Well, on March 11, IBM rescinded that price increase, after what I presume was a lot of complaints from customers, business partners, and wiseguys like me. As I explained nearly a month ago, these IBM price change announcement

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• Power Systems: The Secret To SMB Innovation?

  March 18, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Technological innovation is viewed today as a necessary ingredient for business success in many industries. Fail to keep up with pace of change, and your business will begin to stagnate and eventually be overtaken by more innovative competitors. In an online roundtable discussion last week that was, in and of itself, a symbol of innovation, IBM helped to share the innovation stories of two Power Systems shops that fall into the small and midsize business (SMB) category. Of course, the Power Systems server running the IBM i operating system isn’t the source for all technological innovation in the world. Some

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Clouds Gather Over The Server Business

  March 18, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Aggregate revenue in the server business didn’t grow last year. As we previously reported, based on Gartner data, it might not grow next year either. This is tough but tolerable for vendors with market breadth, but it is punishing for players with a tighter focus. Moreover, in an ironic twist worthy of an O. Henry plot line, the effort by vendors to boost cloud computing have exacerbated matters, draining funds that might otherwise be spent in customers’ glass houses. This is particularly so in the midrange, which, like Newport, once attracted The Four Hundred but now often

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• IT Job Market Slides In February, But Could Rebound In Summer

  March 18, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  What goes up, must come down. Sometimes this is good news, like in the case of gas prices or the Frisbee you stuck on the roof of your house last summer. But when you are talking about the job market, in particular the number of IT jobs available, down is not the direction you’d be hoping to see. It was just one month ago that the analysts at Janco Associates offered some hope to IT job seekers, with news of a spike in the number of new jobs for IT professionals in North America in the month of January. But

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• Reader Feedback On Sundry Recent Stories

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Feedback on Entry Power7+ Servers: Counting The Costs Of CPUs, IBM i, And SWMA Hey, TPM: You hit the head on the nail with the article on Power 7+ pricing. As you know, we perform hundreds of capacity plans and on the low end it is always the same questions we are trying to answer. 1. Do I need more than eight disk arms for performance? I would say that in 95 percent of the cases, the anwser is yes, which means the 710, 730, and the four-core 720 are not an option. 2. We also answer the question of:

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• IDC Says Server Sales Up As Shipments Go Down In Q4

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There has never been one server business, but rather many. Each new wave of technology that has come out over the past five decades is lingering on, in upgraded form, as new system architectures are introduced and enter the market like a tidal wave, toppling down what used to be conventional architectures. Sometimes, those conventional architectures become the waves, as happed with a spike in IBM mainframe sales in the final quarter of 2012. According to the box counters at IDC, System z mainframe sales (including a base z/OS operating system on newly shipped or upgraded machines) were up

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• IBM Lab To Show Off Software Goodies to CEOs, CMOs, And CFOs

  March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT vendors are always trying to impress CEOs and their CIO and CMO underlings because in the world of industrial giants, deals get done at the top-level, not at the bottom-level. Forget for a second that most revolutions in technology were either the wholesale creation of a new market, or came from grassroots movements that were never aimed at toppling incumbent technologies but ended up doing so for organic, rather than central planning, reasons. And thus, IBM‘s own marketeers are still stuck in this old world, where having advertisements and story placements in the New York Times and the

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• Work Smarter, Not Harder–Unless Told To Do Both

  March 18, 2013 Dan Burger

  From one extreme to the other. Last week the came the news that Ginny Rometty, IBM‘s CEO, banked more than $16 million in compensation for her work guiding Big Blue in 2012. Rometty is an exceptional achiever. IBM grooms exceptional achievers. The company is good at that and the rewards, as you can see, are generous. At the same time, we got a glimpse of what it means to be on the fast track and how it feels to be treated like human capital. You either make money for the company or you’re something that costs the company. Rometty,

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• IBM Social Business Message: Productivity Gains, Cultural Change

  March 18, 2013 Dan Burger

  If you’ve been watching IBM promote social business, you’ve probably noticed the volume and frequency has been turned up. If you’ve seen IBM i chief architect Steve Will or read his blog, you know he’s a big time social evangelist. Back in January, there was an event called Connect 2013–the rebranding of Lotusphere that had to be done after the Lotus brand was wiped from the new product slate. In the past several years, it has become a social media lovefest. Ten days ago, in an interview with Forbes, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty ranked the social network as

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• Entry Power7+ Servers: Counting The Costs Of CPUs, IBM i, And SWMA

  March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the pricing of configured systems in the new Power7+ entry models that were announced on February 5. There are some interesting and useful comments on the data I put together showing the cost and performance of configured Power 710+, 720+, 730+, and 740+ boxes, which you can read about here. I only looked at hardware pricing in last week’s issue, and this week I want to give you a sense of what the new machines cost when you load up IBM i and Software Maintenance tech

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