With the Power Systems division in a secular revenue decline, as Wall Street calls such things, following down the Unix market and Intel having completely revamped its Xeon E5 and E7 chips with “Ivy Bridge” updates, IBM can’t afford to wait a day longer than necessary to get the Power8 processors into the field to counter the push that the Intel marketing machine will bring to bear on Unix and proprietary platforms. So it is not a surprise, then, that the word on the street is that the Power8 chip will appear in machines sooner rather than later this year.

Technology readiness levels assess and evaluate when implementation success exceeds implementation risk. One component of that assessment is the skill level of those doing the implementing and on-going maintenance of the technology. The IBM midrange computer is a good example. The system has been advanced and enhanced in many areas. We have application modernization, database modernization, storage modernization, and the technology roadmap goes on. What about skills modernization?

It is an issue that does not go away. Investing in the system means investing in the skills.

IBM has two programs designed to handle the ongoing need for new skills and

The box counters at Gartner gave their assessment of the state of the systems business in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, and this week we turn to the market data from IDC to get a slightly different view of the same system landscape.

The most jarring thing about the modern systems market–and something that is making it difficult for all server makers to meet their price points and profit margins–is how sales of rack and modular machines to hyperscale datacenters continues to ramp on public clouds and public Internet application providers such as Google, Facebook,

There is a great deal implied in the classic cartoon greeting attributed to extraterrestrials: “Take me to your leader.” Notably, that such a person exists, and that he or she is empowered to speak for the rest of the community. It exposes a hierarchical bias that assigns power and decision-making to a single individual. And it presumes that the only decision that matters is the one at the top.

And so it has been for most of recorded history. Whether in the statehouse or the workplace, hierarchy has been the unquestioned leadership model favored by dominant cultures since humans began

The number of organizations adopting cloud-based ERP dropped in 2013 after three years of steady increases, according to Panorama Consulting‘s annual global survey of ERP deployments. While the numbers are just a snapshot of a complex and dynamic market, they indicate that customers may not be as interested in cloud-based ERP if they won’t reap big cost savings (which Panorama says they won’t).

Here are the raw numbers from Panorama. In last year’s report on 172 ERP deployments around the world, Panorama reported that 61 percent of them were of the traditional, on-premise variety, 14 percent were deployed as

The rumor mill is going round and round with talk about IBM‘s layoffs during the first quarter. The chatter as last week was coming to a close is that the layoffs are going to hit the Systems and Technology Group pretty hard and that there were protests at an IBM manufacturing plant in China.

It is not hard to figure out that Systems and Technology Group would be taking some hits, with sales and pretax earnings down in the fourth quarter. As we previously reported, sales at IBM’s hardware unit were down 26.1 percent to $4.26 billion in

When supply chain integration with trading partners works like it’s supposed to significant advantages become readily apparent. With more than 15,000 companies operating from 54 countries, 1WorldSync is a significant product information network and data synchronization platform. Its choice to form a partnership with LANSA, a provider of business process integration and data synchronization software, dates back to 2001.

Obviously they have found success working with one another in the arena that’s known as multi-channel commerce, where companies increasingly depend on mobile/social engagements and trusted product content.

In this partnership, 1WorldSync handles the technology that provides trusted data and

I have no idea when this deal was announced by IBM, but considering how hard the company is pushing the Storwize V7000 disk arrays these days, I thought I should point it out to you just in case you are shopping for one of these puppies for your rack system or even your PureFlex setup if you are going that route.

IBM has thousands of customers who are using the Storwize family of arrays, one of the many storage products that the company bought rather than developed itself. Among many features, the Storwize V7000 arrays have a Real-Time Compression

SAP, the worldwide leader in ERP market share with almost double the market share of runner-up Oracle, is naturally enjoying its dominant position and is confidently forecasting large revenue gains in the upcoming several years. Executives at SAP have raised the revenue bar to $30 billion by 2017.

In January, the company reported $22.7 billion in revenue during its most recent fiscal year. That was an 8 percent increase over the previous year. SAP’s market share stands at 25 percent. Oracle, its chief competitor has a 13 percent market share. Inforand Sage claim 6 percent each, and

Whether or not moving applications to the cloud actually saves money or not is one of those arguments that is not going to go away any time soon. And like most things, the true answer to the question is: Well, that depends.

Frustrated by that answer, the analysts at Computer Economics got on the horn and found some companies that have moved their applications–lock, stock, and barrel–from on premises to a variety of software as a service (SaaS) alternatives. The company did detailed interviews on seven customers, including two manufacturers, a life sciences organization, a wholesale distributor, a systems integrator,