It is the new year, and Big Blue is prepping for the Power8 system launch as well as updates to the IBM i and sometime around the middle of the year. IBM likes to give customers plenty of warning when there is a maintenance price hike or when it will be withdrawing certain processors and features from the market, and last week it fired off the first announcement of 2014 that shows the company is gearing up for Power8.

Expect more announcements, perhaps better deals to encourage customers to move up to Power7+ machines rather than wait for the Power8

Key Information Systems, the IBM midrange platform reseller and systems integrator, has flipped the switch on its new data center featuring Power Systems as the key component in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. This is a natural progression from the acquisition of ISWest in August. The Key Cloud is designed to assist current and prospective customers, particularly those with Power System iron with hosted options and managed services for at least some of their enterprise IT requirements.

The idea that many organizations no longer require the physical, on-premise presence of computer hardware, at least not to the

There are old RPG applications that just run and run. Minimal maintenance is required and the people who depend on these apps couldn’t be happier. But, you may have heard, this bliss is not universal. More often, application maintenance gets sloppy as the fingerprints of many coders, some perhaps with dubious credentials, takes a toll. Add a growing demand that applications do more and rely on data from multiple systems. New demands and old apps make for an odd couple.

Talk with an RPG programmer who deals with old code in a high maintenance circumstance and one that requires old

Bring Your Own Device is turning business computing inside out. Corporate support squads are now obliged to cope with free range users’ diverse machines. Gadgets running iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Chrome can give support personnel acute headaches, but they aren’t the most nefarious ones. The worst annoyances come from weakly managed Windows, which becomes infested by browser cooties like the Ask Toolbar, smuggled in during Java updates, or the McAfee Siteadvisor, subversively installed when Flash is patched. In the BYOD looking glass world, Windows can be less practical than any of the mobile operating systems.

A key

The end of 2013 brought some significant milestones for Oracle‘s JD Edwards customers. Specifically, JDE World and EnterpriseOne shops that are running older releases can no longer get mainstream tech support from Oracle. If you’re one of those shops and you’re running your applications on IBM i, you’ve undoubtedly heard all about this from Oracle, in no uncertain terms.

Among ERP vendors, nobody is as active as Oracle in policing its users and enforcing licensing agreements. Whether it is signing a new enterprise software contract or negotiating a renewal, “aggressive” is a word that has been used to describe

It has been a long time since the Power 795 was first introduced, and the machine is getting a bit long in the tooth with the Power8 systems looming for initial delivery sometime around the middle of this year. But IBM needs to keep trying to push these high-end, and presumably very profitable machines. Last November, IBM cut the prices on processors and main memory for the Power 795, and now the company is offering new SAS controllers aimed at grafting flash storage and recent LTO tape drives onto the big bad boxes.

In announcement letter 113-010, IBM is

IBM’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations wants to peddle more Power iron, and it is working with the reseller and software application vendor community to give business partners and systems integrators a piece of the action if they work with solution providers to close deals.

Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1004, the 2014 Power ISV Solution Connection Program is giving said business partner and system integrator companies rebates that range from $500 to $3,000. Here is what the rebate schedule looks like:

As you can see, the bigger the box, the bigger the rebate. Moreover, you will notice that

With celebratory back-slapping for its fast-growing cloud business, SAP delivered good news during its preliminary Q4 and 2013 year financial report.

Based on the unaudited numbers, the company increased its annual software and cloud subscription revenue by 10 percent to €5.21 billion. The complete software and software-related service revenue grew 11 percent to €13.94 billion. By SAP’s reckoning, which seems a little over zealous, this marks the fourth year in a row that SAP has posted double-digit growth.

Overall, SAP software revenue slipped 2 percent to €1.9 billion in Q4 compared to the prior year’s quarter. Those decline is driven

If patents were money, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office would be rolling in it. But wait. . . . Patents are money, in a way, and they are just as surreal and real as Bitcoin. You make some intellectual investment and you get the right to commercialize an invention and prevent others from doing so.

Last year, the USPTO issued a whopping 277,835 utility patents, a record number for the U.S. government. Utility patents cover machines or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or physical in nature, while design patents cover the shape of objects and their ornamentation. For many

The midrange Storwize V5000 disk and flash arrays were just announced last November, aimed at small and midrange shops who need more than a V3700 but don’t need a full-on V7000. And IBM is already tweaking pricing on some of its features.

In particular, in announcement letter 314-002, you can see that IBM has cut tags on nine different feature codes relating to the Storwize software for this V5000 machine. IBM doesn’t ever tell you the description of the features with the price changes, which is maddening. But that’s why you have me. So, here is the chart of