As The Four Hundred has already told you, it looks like IBM is going to be moving the launch of Power8-based systems up a bit to try to blunt the attack by Intel‘s latest Xeon E5 and E7 processors, which have been refreshed last September and this February, respectively. We have heard rumors to expect the Power8 systems launch in late April or early May. New data is pointing to that time, and other rumors we have heard are suggesting IBM will do the launch in a different part of the market than it did with the Power7 and

When IT budgets are constrained and IT staffing is obligated to maintain existing infrastructure, the adoption of new technologies often relies on long-term and sometimes short-term cost savings. These are spelled out as return on investment (ROI) and often have implementations that are outsourced to software vendors, systems integrators, and consultants who can get the job done quickly and with as little disruption to the day-to-day business processes as possible. Trevor Perry spends most of his time in that tricky environment with one foot on the dock and the other in the canoe.

Perry has application modernization skills, whereas most

Just five years ago, the IBM midrange community–at least the 90 percent that operate businesses in the SMB market–responded to emerging technologies with a great deal of detachment. They stayed entrenched in tradition with little concern about living in a silo. They had their integration struggles and did their application maintenance, but figured they were still years away from needing an overhaul. And although each company is different, this generalization applies more than it doesn’t.

Have things changed all that much in five years? Are IBM i shops approaching the challenges posed by new technologies with the same detachment or

It was high noon at the SXSW corral. Ed Snowden, seated before an enlarged image of the constitution (ours, not Russia’s) called out the tech community. Of course it’s hard to sound intimidating when you’re calling people out from an undisclosed location through seven proxies. But in a time when speaking the truth is considered seditious, extreme caution has become de rigueur.

Snowden’s message was simple, although the telling of it is fraught with complexities. His famous/infamous (chose your modifier) revelations about the NSA’s drift toward global Big Brotherhood have been met with applause and condemnation. Hero/traitor, courageous/cowardly: how software

Enterprise IT tool vendor Micro Focus recently did a survey that found mainframe shops around the world had an average of $11 million in application debt, and that the backlog of unfinished and un-started IT projects had increased nearly 30 percent in the last two years. While the survey didn’t look into the IT debt situation at IBM i shops, the numbers can’t be far behind.

The idea of application debt is an interesting one. The analyst firm Gartner first coined the phrase a few years ago to refer to the amount of resources it would take for an organization

What keeps CIOs up at night? Not surprisingly, it’s the same thing that keeps a lot of IT professionals up at night. Sleep only comes easily because you have worked 18 hours in a row trying to solve problems and implement solutions.

The answers, in this case, were provided during an IBM hosted audio-visual presentation billed as a Powercast. That’s Power as in Power Systems. This was the first Powercast, but won’t be the last.

The message delivery method was a virtual roundtable featuring three professionals: an innovative CIO of an organization that is technology savvy, a director of a

Take a bow Tim Rowe. Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management, just had a baby. Its name is the Modernize IBM i Applications from the Database up to the User Interface and Everything in Between Redbook. If you think the title is long, you should see the list of authors. A dozen names made the cover. It was released last week in draft Redbook form, which means it is still be edited and comments are being solicited.

When it is released with full Redbook status, it will be the biggest Redbook in IBM

The OpenPower Foundation, formerly known as the OpenPower Consortium and dedicated to the advancement and opening up of the technology related to the Power8 and future Power processors, has three new and publicly announced members. They include Micron Technology, Altera, and Servergy.

As far as I know, the OpenPower Foundation had 14 paid members as of last week, when I talked to IBM about the effort, and presumably this included those three companies mentioned above. (I talked to Big Blue before these announcements, but their paperwork was done). I have been told that there are over 100

As we have pointed out a number of times now, IBM is gradually building an arsenal of application software and related services to make up for the fact that it ceded the market for ERP, supply chain, and customer relationship management to others in the 1990s and 2000s. IBM has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring companies with expertise in analytics, security, sales, and marketing and it is now moving into counterfraud applications.

The Smart Counter Fraud effort brings together experts from its Software Group, Global Services, and IBM Research units to take on fraud and various kinds of

As you all know well, the IBM i platform exists in a sea of hostile Windows Server waters. In many IBM i shops, Windows is the other application and database platform, and sometimes it is running the application layer for code that uses DB2 for i as its main database. So maybe it is not hostile, but cooperative.

No matter. The fact is, Windows Server is part of the IT budget, and as long as IBM sells System x servers and as long as IBM i shops buy them, then any deal IBM gives for the Windows platform leaves more