The language may change from time to time in the computer industry, but the problems do not. Vice presidents of data processing are now chief information officers. Instead of trying to create massive systems to deal with telemetry from an array of radar stations, as IBM did with the SAGE project in the 1950s and what at the time was the most ambitious computer ever built (with over 60,000 vacuum tubes and an estimated cost of between $8 billion and $12 billion when it was completed in 1963), we have the Googleplex of well over 1 million servers that spans

Five C-level executives sit down to have a conversation about implementing mobile computing. Each one has his or her unique experiences. Some are under way with mobile projects, some are yet to begin, but have made mobile a priority. All are eager to share stories and compare notes on what has worked and what has not. And all of them come from companies that run their businesses on IBM i.

One of them was responsible for bringing the group together to discuss mobile strategies, mobile device management, mobile application development, security, and the assorted and sundry challenges that can cause

Jim Sloan, the one-man development dynamo who has been writing IBM i utilities since the days of the System/38, has sold his company, Jim Sloan Inc., to a new group of owners. For now, the former IBMer will stay on as consultant to the new company, which will continue to expand and sell the popular group of utilities.

The new ownership of TAA Tools was announced via a note on the company’s website. Sloan has agreed to stay on as a consultant, but the company has two new owner/developers to help build the product set: David Dykstal and Sue

In February, Oracle became just about the last enterprise computing heavyweight to get into mobile device management (MDM). Oracle’s entry came by way of its acquisition last year of Bitzer Mobile, a company with technologies to sequester data and applications on mobile clients. Oracle’s strategic effort to support sensor-laden smart clients amounts to a major reversal.

Historically, Oracle touted, to little avail, thin, insensate clients, as did its sinking Sun. Oracle will undoubtedly find that the MDM business is incredibly demanding and viciously competitive. It’s not just Oracle. MDM is tough for every player, including IBM.

Folio: Shakespeare’s

As if CIOs, IT directors, and IT professionals of whatever title weren’t already under the gun for grinding out cost reductions throughout their businesses, welcome to the strategic enabler responsibilities. That’s good news if you have the financial and human resources to get the job accomplished, but bad news if you don’t. IBM i shops have a reputation for running with less total cost of ownership than AIX and Unix. There’s satisfaction in that, but what about that strategic enabler thing?

If you haven’t heard about IBM’s Institute for Business Value, that won’t be true for long. The IBV

Despite all of the software wizardry that storage array makers have come up with to help customers make better use of the capacity in their devices, revenues rose modestly in the fourth quarter. The revenue gains were driven by what can be now thought of as a decent uptick in aggregate capacity shipments, but to be perfectly clear the growth does not approach what seemed to be normal for almost two decades.

In the quarter ended in December, the analysts at IDC reckon that the world’s companies, institutions, and governments consumed a whopping 10.2 exabytes of capacity across all types

As we reported in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, IBM‘s $2.3 billion deal to sell of its System x server division to Lenovo Group touched off a protest in Big Blue’s factory in Shenzhen, an industrial area outside of Hong Kong.

The Shenzhen facility is important to Power Systems shops for a number of reasons. First, the factory doesn’t just make X86-based servers. For the past several years, it has been used as a staging area to refurbish Power-based systems and, while IBM doesn’t like to talk about it much, the factory also manufactures low-end Power

I wonder if Watson saw this coming?

We all know Watson, the cognitive computing in a can with a resume that includes TV star and all-time Jeopardy! king of the hill; medical advisor at the Cleveland Clinic, MD, Anderson Cancer Center, WellPoint, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; and high profile shopping assistant with clients such as The North Face, MD Buyline, Welltok, Travelocity, and Kayak.

IBM has placed a $1 billion bet on the hotshot Watson, believing the cognitive capabilities will fit comfortably inside a set of products that within “the next 20 years will change computing as we

IBM has its ongoing Global Skills Initiative. COMMON has its Annual Meeting and Exposition. You’ll find high-quality educational opportunities at each, but time and your training budget may not be on your side. For less time away from the office and a lower cost of registration, travel, and lodging–at least if you live in one of the New England states–the Northeast User Group Conference (NEUGC) is a training and education gold mine. It’s scheduled for April 7 through 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts.

The IBM i running on Power Systems is a modern marvel compared to its predecessor machines: the IBM

Resellers pushing new Flex System nodes to customers with BladeCenter blade server machines using Power-based nodes can get a deal from IBM to help cushion the blow migrating to Power-based Flex System nodes. The deal is being offered to resellers across Europe, but there is a bug in Big Blue’s announcement system and it is only showing up for resellers in Italy as we go to press. IBM is advertising this deal in websites and marketing campaigns, and resellers are supposed to pass the rebate down to the solution providers, who in turn pass it on to end user customers.