With the $2.3 billion sale of the System x division to Lenovo Group back in late January, IBM is selling off the underlying X86 hardware, chassis, switches, and other components of the PureSystems line to the Chinese PC maker and server wannabe. But don’t get confused. IBM has every intention of selling regular rack and tower Power Systems machines, will be making its own storage and Power nodes for the PureSystems machines, and will be OEMing the remaining hardware from Lenovo to continue selling PureSystems.

PureSystems will still be a significant platform for IBM going forward, but one that is

Obstacles and solutions are a large part of the IT professional’s career choice. Organizations assemble IT staffs to solve business problems. Traditionally, it’s been a man’s world, with women in a decidedly minority role. The IBM midrange community is no different. But last month at the Wisconsin Midrange Computing Professionals Association Technical Conference, a session called Women in IT put the gender topic in a new light.

The role of women in IT is changing. And it’s not changing because we’ve all sat around and waited for change to happen on its own accord. It’s changing because there are people

The prognosticators at Gartner keep a constant eye on the state of the global economy and revenues each quarter at all of the publicly traded IT suppliers. So they are constantly adjusting their projections for IT spending, and last week, the company did it again. Luckily for all of us, the news is thumbs up instead of thumbs down.

According to the IT spending models developed under the guidance of Richard Gordon, managing vice president at the company, global IT spending as measured in U.S. dollars will rise by 3.2 percent to $3.771 trillion. This is a tad bit higher

Although historians are much too stuffy to admit such things, it was the desire for sex that launched the Industrial Revolution. And contrary to accepted thinking, it all started about 200 years earlier than the dry retelling of history would have us believe. As earth-shaking occurrences go, it was surely unintended, a solution to a private problem that, one could say, went viral.

And although the event has been relegated to historic footnote status, it is worth recounting because it also spawned a notable oddity: a Luddite of royal lineage.

The year was 1589 and the Reverend William Lee was

IBM‘s Global Skills Initiative, a plan to transition the training and education associated with IBM hardware and software to a select group of IBM business partners, was launched last July with four partners and a goal of tripling the number of people receiving IBM training by the end of 2015. Since that time, the global rollout has one geography, Latin America, that is yet to be onboard, and the original four partners, Arrow Electronics, Avnet, Global Knowledge, and LearnQuest, has grown to five with the addition of Ingram Micro. IBM only added Ingram Micro

If the rumor mill is correct–and stories with concrete details that appear in the Wall Street Journal usually are–then it looks like IBM is one step closer to selling off its chip manufacturing business. And it looks like GlobalFoundries, the former chip-making arm of Advanced Micro Devices that is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, is the front-runner to acquire the business.

According to a report in the WSJ last week, Intel and GlobalFoundries are in discussions with Big Blue to acquire its chip making unit, IBM Microelectronics, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which is another

The economy in the United States is plugging along but not really zooming ahead if job creation is any measure of a real recovery. In March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the part of the Department of Labor that tracks employment statistics and comes up with the official unemployment rate, reckons that the economy added 192,000 net new workers. That is just shy of the 200,000 to 250,000 workers that the economy has to create to keep up with population growth.

According to the latest report from the BLS, the number of people who were unemployed in the United

Penton Media has discontinued its two digital publications for the IBM i community–iProDeveloper and Power IT Pro.

iProDeveloper was a website with technical content for developers on the IBM midrange systems known as the IBM i, System i, iSeries, and AS/400. Prior to the digital version of iProDeveloper, there was a printed magazine version previously titled System iNews, iSeries News, and News/400.

Power IT Pro was a website that expanded the IBM i technical content to include the Power Systems family that includes AIX and PureSystems.

Contributors to the two publications were informed of

There are IBM midrange companies that strategize and even prioritize plans for strengthening their IT workforces with the intention of improving business processes and solving business problems. If you attend an event like the Toronto User Group‘s annual two-day technical conference April 24 and 25, you find people who work for those companies learning to use IBM i and Power Systems like its 2014 instead of 1994. If you are sitting on the sidelines, 20 years of IT innovation is a long time to be out of the game.

We all recognize the challenges presented by budget cuts, diminished

IBM unveiled its latest crop of Fellows last week, eight men and three women who’s technical achievement brought them the honor. None of the newly minted Fellows worked directly with IBM i, Power Systems, or the Rochester, Minnesota lab, as many of the this year’s Fellows are leaders in analytics and related fields.

Thomas Watson created the IBM Fellows program 51 years ago to reward the exceptional achievement of scientists, engineers, and developers. Over that time, only 257 IBMers have received the distinction, and just 87 of them are still with the company. This year’s banner crop of Fellows has