I checked my math and feeds and speeds twice, and I did it again just to be sure. And I would be the first to admit that after many weeks of traveling, most recently at IBM‘s Edge2014 conference in Las Vegas where I got to raise a few pints with my steady IBM i compatriot Dan Burger and some good people at IBM, I might be so tired that I didn’t do the math right. But I think I got it right, and I think that at least as far as base configurations are concerned, the Power7+ machines from

The problem-solving approach to IT, with its emphasis on services, is the new face of IBM. It’s not exactly new, but the strategy of making this more than a slogan takes time as well as the enthusiastic buy-in of the business partner channel, which has always had a hardware-powered business model since the dawn of enterprise computing. I hear a lot of people mumbling that it takes hardware to run software, but business solutions are more closely associated with skills.

Skills matter more than the speeds and feeds of any system. On one level the system is a commodity.

As an IBM i professional, you feel safe knowing that your organization has entrusted its data to the most secure business server on the planet. You watch as other companies–Target, eBay, victims of Chinese hackers–scramble into spin-control mode following a breach, confident that will never happen at your shop. If this sounds familiar, you’ve succumbed to a dangerous condition known as “IBM i security bubble-itis.” Let us help you pop it.

The first step in overcoming this debilitating condition is admitting you have a problem. Like the security blanket your kid won’t give up, your mistaken faith in the inherent

In 1973, Karl von Frisch received a Nobel Prize for his work on honeybee communications. Among other accomplishments, he decoded the waggle dance, the method by which a honeybee tells others where it found pollen. Twenty-five years later, the Zigbee Alliance began promoting a data communications scheme inspired by the waggle dance. In 2003, Zigbee became an IEEE standard, and in 2006 it was revised and improved. Today it is a core technology for local Internet-of-Things networks, controllers, devices, and sensors installed by builders ranging from giant data service providers down to do-it-yourselfers.

Zigbee networks can share spectrum and

The IBM cloud game plan has a three-pronged strategy. It involves building its own private clouds and filling them with customers who appreciate the solid infrastructure and the services that IBM brings to the table. It is also developing a robust business model of being an infrastructure provider to business partners that are eager to create their own cloud business models. The third prong is a mix of private and public cloud options, operating systems, and virtualized infrastructure, which comes under the heading of hybrid cloud.

IBM i tends to be a niche in the big picture, just as we

Two thoughts:

The AS/400 (world’s single best brand dumped in the trash) wasn’t as integrated as IBM claimed. From a command line, why did I need to STRQSH to get a console for POSIX commands, or STRSQL to get a console for SQL commands? If I remember correctly, there are not any conflicts in command names. Yes, to a OS/400 newbie the king of Three Letter Acronyms would seem strange, but not any stranger than the operating system from AT&T extended by Berkeley CS students strung out on small pharma. SED? AWK? GREP? Are you kidding me? But maybe they

When it comes to global IT spending, any shift of a percentage or two means a shift of tens of billions of dollars up or down. The prognosticators at Gartner took their IT spending projections down a notch a few weeks ago, and now the economic forecasters at IDC have taken a look at the situation and have followed suit.

Specifically, the Worldwide Black Book now says that IT spending across the world will rise by 4.1 percent as measured in both constant currencies and in US dollars. IT spending worldwide across hardware, software, and services rose by 4.5 percent

There’s nothing heavier than the burden of a great legacy. Instead of continued expectations, the predominant bias is to push aside proven products for newer, flashier, must-be-better replacements. Magnetic tape storage is one of those products that proves what’s old is actually new. If you know someone who believes tape has reached the end of its capacity, bet them a cheeseburger and a beer that it hasn’t.

Few people know this better than Mark Lantz, manager of exploratory tape storage technologies at IBM‘s research facilities in Zurich, Switzerland. He will show you a deeply researched feasibility of tape roadmap

Are you a tactical IT shop, or a visionary one that has figured out not only how to implement cutting-edge technology, but convince your organization to keep plowing money into systems and software? If you want your company to make more money, a forthcoming survey from IBM suggests you need to have a vision.

At the Edge2014 event hosted by IBM’s Systems and Technology Group in Las Vegas last week, general manager Tom Rosamilia, who is familiar to the IBM i community as a former general manager running the Power Systems division before he was moved on up to the

Are we there yet? The year-long trek that determines whether the software market gained or lost in 2013 is over. And the trip gets two thumbs up for the gains made. However, IBM was locked out of the leader position in all of the software categories.

The worldwide software market grew 5.5 percent during 2013, rocking and rolling to a total market size of $369 billion, according to the numbers crunchers at IDC. According to the paid observers at IDC, Europe’s economic recovery and a better than predicted outcome in the US, lifted software revenue past its high water