The news that IBM is selling its X86 business travelled like a flash of lightning. Then comes the thunder, which lasts longer and speaks louder. The thunder is the interpretation, the explanation, and the ramifications of the X86 decision. IBM, no doubt, puts considerable effort into making major business decisions like this one and then an equal amount of effort into making the decisions sound good to as many people as possible.

And why not? We’d all be happier if we saw only good in everything, right? What good can come from questioning the decisions of IBM executives? The cards

There may have been some uncertainty about the future of IBM‘s X86-based server business throughout 2013, but customers wanting converged systems, which bring servers, storage, networking, and a unified management framework all together, took it in stride. The PureSystems installations have continued a-pace, says Big Blue.

To be specific, the installed base of PureSystems iron numbered more than 10,000 units as 2013 came to a close, which is up from the more than 8,000 units that IBM had at the end of the third quarter of last year. I also got some much-needed clarification on what, precisely, IBM is

Even though we don’t talk about it much, there are companies throwing in the towel and looking for IT solutions that do not include IBM i, Power Systems, or IBM. One of the companies with a track record of working in the IBM i migration business is Infinite Corporation, which last week introduced a new cloud-based migration plan called Infinite i. It will compete head-to-head with IBM i-based clouds.

Infinite has built its business on IBM i migrations and the integration of legacy applications with other platforms. In the past, this has involved existing on-premise systems, but cloud

IBM is a modern day Titan. In Greek mythology, the Titans were children of Uranus who preceded the Olympian Gods. If an observer were to pick one Titan to compare to IBM, it would be Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturn. Cronus ate five of his children in an effort to preserve his power, the way IBM has eaten the compatible mainframes and Power and mainframe emulators its technology spawned. A sixth child of Cronus, Zeus, eluded that fate, as the PC did in IBM’s case. In the end, Zeus deposed Cronus.

Cronus: Peter Paul Reubens painted Cronus eating

Organizations that initially move strongly toward adopting software as a service (SaaS) offerings to save money often find that it also leads to competitive advantage in the areas of collaboration and data analytics, according to a new IBM study on SaaS usage trends.

Through its Center of Applied Insights, IBM studied the SaaS usage trends of 800 organizations around the world to see how the use of SaaS was affecting their business performance. IBM says it found a correlation between companies that have the most widespread use of SaaS applications and the ability of an organization to use SaaS for

Sorry, you are stuck in a green screen world because you let yourselves be duped that the PC and Unix way were the wave of the future. Green screen created by DDS was quite innovative in its day and it made interactive programming simple for IBM shops–20 or 30 years ago–with RPG when other companies struggled and could not create anything close to this one-time elegant and always simple user interface provided by the notion of a display file.

IBM had a winner and chose to hang its hat on Java and PHP and tools for application development, and so

A smarter planet begins with energy management, whether it is measured throughout a data center or on a single server and all of its peripherals. Shocking electric bills are bringing this to the attention of the accounting department on a monthly basis. The utility companies are getting a 12 percent raise this year, based on a national average, and you probably aren’t. So add this to your list of reasons why it is a bad business decision to compare servers and all your IT gear simply on out-of-the-box pricing.

There have been significant improvements in processor energy efficiency, and certain

Let’s have some fun. I was feeling goofy the other day and as we all often do when we are feeling goofy, I asked Google a direct question. In this case, I didn’t finish the sentence, because I wanted to see what the zeitgeist out there was asking. You can do this by letting Google do the autofill.

At some point in the near future, we will just have a Watson interface for this and all the fun will be gone. But by that time, I will be living a self-sustaining life on a small farm in the mountains somewhere,

What great feats of IBM i innovation have you been party to lately? If you have a story worth sharing with the rest of the IBM i universe, you have a few days left to submit it for your chance at glory and a COMMON/IBM Power Systems Innovation Award. The deadline is February 10.

Every spring, an Innovation Award is bestowed upon one worthy IBM i shop at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition event. This year, February 10 is the deadline for submitting your application for the 2014 COMMON conference, which is taking place the first week in

Power Systems At The Center Of Texas A&M Research

This is the kind of deal we expect to see more of now that IBM has made it clear to the world that it wants to focus more on its own Power platforms and less on the X86 platforms based on processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. That said, the deal also shows how hard it is to just peddle Power-based machines.

Under a broad arrangement with Texas A&M, the ag school that is also the largest research institution in the state, IBM is installing lots of Power-based gear