• The i Cloud Wasn’t Built In A Day

  October 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM is building an IBM i-based cloud. You could say it’s already built, but it is an ongoing project. As good as the cloud services for IBM i are, there’s always work to be done to make it better. Taking a step in that direction, IBM hosted the IBM i Cloud Summit earlier this month to bring together a group of managed service providers (MSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and business partners who are all, along with IBM, the stakeholders in the i cloud. The fact that there even is an IBM i Cloud Summit is an indication that this

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• Power Systems Sales Hammered Down In Q3

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What happens–or doesn’t happen–in China has a much larger effect on IBM i shops in the rest of the world than perhaps any of us might have anticipated. The return to profitability for IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group in the second quarter was short-lived and the group was pushed into a loss in the third quarter by a freeze on spending in China. Economic growth in the Middle Kingdom is the weakest it has been since 2000, and the government of President Xi Jinping has been working since May to put together reforms and a stimulus package. Those reforms

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• As I See It: Reading the IT Leaves

  October 21, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Economic activity is notoriously difficult to predict because it depends on the daily decisions of millions of individuals who themselves are difficult to predict. Behavior can often be capricious, and the money guys who manipulate markets are even more uncomfortable with uncertainty than a nun opening an attachment from Carlos Danger. Consequently, any time the needle moves in the wrong direction, hand wringing and consternation are sure to follow. So when Gartner reported that IT spending would fall $74 billion below predictions, the sky wasn’t exactly falling, but it teetered ominously. Granted, $74 billion is not pocket change, but the

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• Butterill Brings Crowd To OCEAN Meeting

  October 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  A week after IBM i Technology Refresh 7 was announced, Alison Butterill, product offering manager for IBM i, showed up at the OCEAN user group meeting with plenty to talk about. Butterill, who travels like the wind except the wind has trouble keeping up, was asking a group of IBM midrange executives, in a roundtable discussion with software vendors, how many knew about TR7. Very few acknowledgements were signaled. That led to a question about how many in this group were running IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems. Again, very little response in the affirmative. How about 6.1? The

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• Successful CIOs Have Machiavellian Tendencies, Says New E-Book

  October 21, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics or advancing one’s career. These aren’t the skills you’d expect to see listed on the average resume, but if you’re looking to rise to the top, especially if you’re gunning for a CIO spot, maybe they should be. A new e-book from Gartner vice president and fellow, Tina Nunno, takes a look at some new leadership styles for CIOs and IT leaders that can help ensure their own success and that of their teams. The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing: A Machiavellian Strategy for Successful IT Leadership examines the role of CIOs, who are

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• IBM Peddles Another 2,000 PureSystems Machines

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The ramp of IBM‘s PureSystems converged machines continues apace, with the company growing its installed base of unique systems by 25 percent in the third quarter ended in September. “PureSystems continues to gain momentum,” said Mark Loughridge, IBM’s chief financial officer, on a call with Wall Street analysts going over the third quarter financial result for IBM. “In the major markets, we grew more than 30 percent sequentially. Globally, we shipped over 2,000 systems in third quarter, with over 8,000 total shipments since announcement.” Depending on who I ask, and when I ask them, a PureSystems system is a

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• Big Blue PowerVC, SmartCloud Entry Provisioning For IBM i

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM put out a new tool called PowerVC, which is short for Virtualization Center and which is a new management tool to set up and manage virtual machines on top of the PowerVM hypervisor. Earlier this year, IBM committed to porting the KVM hypervisor to Power processors and also making the OpenStack cloud controller work in conjunction with the Power Systems, and PowerVC is one of several new products that are coming to market based on these efforts. In announcement letter 213-409, you will see that what IBM has done is

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• Avnet’s Madden An IBM i Guy

  October 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  Applications and solutions were the focal point of IBM when Tony Madden began his career. As he grew up, professionally speaking, his best friend was the AS/400. After 20-plus years with IBM helping to establish the AS/400 and later the iSeries as the quintessential midrange computer, Madden joined Avnet, where he is currently the partner representative, the conduit, between Avnet and IBM on a global basis. Avnet is IBM’s number one distributor and IBM is Avnet’s number one supplier. Together they put IBM products in more than 30 countries. When IT gurus and industry pundits talk about the new

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• Integrated Systems Drove $1.2 Billion In Sales In Q2, Says IDC

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It isn’t just vendors that are talking about integrated systems that converge servers, networking, and storage into a single system. It looks like customers are doing some buying, too. According to the latest market research by IDC, sales of integrated infrastructure platforms like IBM’s PureSystems machines drove $1.32 billion in revenues in the second quarter, up 50.2 percent from the year-ago period. IDC has just started tracking sales of integrated infrastructure and integrated platform sales, the latter having a higher software component and usually being tuned for specific workloads. In the IBM lineup, the former is technically called a

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• Little Linux Pricing On Big Power Systems Iron

  October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you haven’t noticed, IBM thinks that getting customers to put their Linux workloads onto Power Systems is going to reverse the sales decline for the platform. That decline has more to do with all flavors of Unix falling out of favor compared to Windows and Linux in the data centers of the world with the exception of very large workloads, usually databases, and the relatively high prices that Unix system vendors charge for their iron. In a way, Unix is the new proprietary platform and Linux is the lower-priced upstart, echoing the situation when Unix first became tame

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