The good news is that the Power Systems division of IBM‘s Systems Group turned in its third consecutive quarter of revenue growth, something that the Power community of customers, resellers, and software developers most certainly want to see. The bad news is that the rising U.S. dollar compared to other foreign currencies means that overseas sales translate into fewer greenbacks when sales are brought back to IBM’s New York headquarters, masking that growth.

IBM does not report revenue figures for the its Power Systems and System z server lines separately in its financial presentations, but chief financial officer Martin

Rimini Street this month was ordered to pay Oracle $52.8 million in penalties for infringing on its copyrights for JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle database software. Despite that, the third-party provider of maintenance and support claimed a moral victory over Oracle, and praised the court for essentially declaring its business model legal.

After years of legal wrangling, the jury finally heard arguments from both companies in Oracle v. Rimini Street during a trial that started in late September and continued into early October. The jury was asked to determine whether Rimini had violated Oracle’s copyrights while servicing the ERP,

None of us in the IBM i community can do well by driving down the road at dawn without the headlights on, and without market research, we can’t tell where we are at and where we are going. Back in the early days of The Four Hundred, when having a midrange system at all made you cutting edge, rich data about the customers using these systems was available, for the clever at least.

We were among the clever, but we were dependent on other organizations to do the demographics and survey work that brought us those rich datasets, and

“Screw it,” said Archimedes of Syracuse, refusing to surrender to the gravity of the situation. Around 250 B.C., he developed a water pump that converted torque to lift. It was a helix inside a cylinder, a progenitor of propellers and augers. Archimedes also devised ingenious ways to calculate volume and mass. Archimedes’ two principal pursuits, applied physics and applied math, are as important today as ever, particularly for IBM’s current passion, the Internet of Things.

But IBM’s IoT prowess, like Archimedes’ “eureka,” may be apocryphal; it remains, at best, unproven.

The “eureka” story has been around a long

The day will come. You’ll be better off if you start preparing now. Skills replacement is something you have to plan for. Reacting to skills lost through retirement or other avenues is a too little, too late scenario. You build a skills pipeline by bringing people into your organization and you move them along through the company. Aiding that effort is the IBM Power System Academic Initiative, which has been making some notable progress lately.

Just a little more than a week ago, the Academic Initiative (AI) began promoting its new RPG course curriculum, a long overdue effort to