As has been rumored for nearly a year and suspected for the past five years by many of us, IBM has finally gone and done it and sold off its System x server business to Lenovo Group for $2.3 billion. The details of the deal are complex, and there is no guarantee that the U.S. government will approve it, but given the strong presence that Lenovo has in North Carolina by virtue of its acquisition of IBM’s PC business in late 2004, the odds favor the nod from Uncle Sam.

With that move, Lenovo becomes the number three shipper of

If Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development at IBM, had one wish it might be that application modernization would flourish in the IBM i community. Last week, he was the guest speaker at OCEAN user group meeting in Orange County, California. He agreed to talk with me on the topic of RPG Open Access, a technology that was introduced with much fanfare with the IBM i 7.1 release of the operating system. That was in 2010.

Rowe is a vocal proponent of modernizing RPG applications. He believes RPG OA will play an important role in application modernization

If you thought that all Ricoh did was make copiers, printers, and cameras, think again. Last week, the Japanese company announced an agreement to buy mindSHIFT Technologies, an American managed service provider (MSP) with a considerable IBM i hosting business.

Ricoh is well-known for its line of multi-function printers and–since its $725 million acquisition of IBM‘s InfoPrint division-product–production printers, too. But in addition to manufacturing things that print and scan, the $20-billion company also develops document management software and offers a range of IT services. And in Japan, it is an IBM server reseller that hawks Power Systems

For those of us who lived through those terrible days, it would be impossible not to reflect on the life of Martin Luther King as the nation again commemorates his birthday. But there are now two-plus generations who were not yet born when King was assassinated. They know him in sound bites, as a civil rights leader who had a dream. They perhaps notice that every year, shortly after Christmas, he is prominently mentioned in the media. But what happened 50 years ago is shrouded in the haze of history. Over time, legacies are encapsulated by granting a day off

Taking over the helm of a giant such as IBM is never easy, and like many company leaders, Ginni Rometty, who has been in charge of Big Blue for the past two years, took over just as massive change was sweeping the industry. The way infrastructure is built, bought, and sold is changing, and IBM is taking more than its share of hits at the moment. That could mean IBM is a canary in the coal mine, being affected by change ahead of its peers. Or that its strategy and products are misaligned to the market.

I don’t have enough

First, thanks for writing up the interview. It’s always interesting to see what IBM‘s marketing people believe versus what I see from a customer perspective.

Terri Virnig indicates that we can tell IBM is dedicated to investing in the platform because they posted a graphic indicating they would like to continue supporting the platform beyond 2020. However, I read the news, and I see continued layoffs of the development team behind IBM i. When I discuss new features with developers, I’m told about budget constraints and requests being bumped back into the OS release that comes after 7.2.

Ahead of its reporting of disappointing system sales last week and the announcement that it was selling off its X86 server business to Lenovo, IBM also announced a new partnership in China that will see a startup funded by a provincial government and other industrial players make its own variants of the Power processors for servers.

The startup, called Suzhou PowerCore, is a sister company to an existing Power chip licensee called China Core, or C*Core for short. The companies share the same CEO, Jiang Zheng, but they will operate separately. Suzhou PowerCore has joined IBM’s OpenPower Consortium and

Powerful cognitive computer systems are on the doorstep. You have to decide whether or not to let them in. These are computers modeled on the human brain, so there’s the possibility they will come in whether you invite them or not.

Sorry for the Fright Night introduction. This isn’t a Stanley Kubrick Space Odyssey. It’s IBM‘s annual innovation thriller titled Five in Five. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s a made for media prediction of what will come to pass during the next five-year span. But before we get to that, let me introduce the star

There ought to be a degree program, a certification, or a lifetime achievement award for user group members. This form of continuing education is undervalued. Maybe it’s because there’s no graduation and no diploma to hang on the wall. But if you think of all the knowledge gained and the professional contacts made, the value proposition looks pretty good. The IT business is an exciting, fast-paced profession. Ask anyone who has been associated with the OCEAN user group for all or even a part of its 25-year run. It’s been a continuing education experience, a valuable lesson in collaboration, and

If a new poll done by Gartner is any measure, it looks like chief information officers and their IT departments are going to feel the pressure to do more with less or the same in 2014.

Gartner had just finished up a survey of 2,339 CIOs from all around the globe as 2013 was coming to a close, and the results of the survey are problem familiar to all of you living in the IT trenches. The aggregate budget of the CIOs, who came from 77 different countries, represented more than $300 billion in IT spending, which is about a