There have been worse years in the Power Systems business than 2015, and in fact, 2014 was one of them. In its latest financial reports, IBM said that that it has turned in four quarters of revenue growth for the Power server unit, no doubt helped by an uptake of Power8 systems as customers do their inevitable upgrades. As the year wound down, IBM was running on its entry and high-end cylinders, the first time in a while when that happened.

IBM Systems, the hardware unit of the company that sells servers and storage and is responsible for operating system

If there’s one thing that the average IBM i shop with a typical business forecast doesn’t need, it’s more CPW. The latest generation of Power8 servers offer more than enough computational oomph to get the job done, which raises the question: What should one do with those spare CPWs? With some forward thinking, the average IBM i shop maybe doesn’t have to be so average anymore.

There is no doubt there’s a power glut of Power8 iron in IBM‘s IBM i market. Each Power8 chip has roughly 50 percent more computational power per core than the Power7 chip launched

The portal piece of modernization projects seldom gets top billing. All eyes are on the graphical user interface and efforts to scour the green screen out of sight from those who believe it is the work of the devil. But dagnabbit, it’s the portal that unifies information and applications from a galaxy of diverse sources and displays it in an orderly fashion. It’s the key to proprietary information that’s shared among authorized users.

“We see a lot of B2B companies building portals,” says Marcel Sarrasin, vice president of marketing at Quadrant Software, the parent company of BCD Software, one of

The great temple of Apollo stands at Delphi on Mt. Parnassus. Centuries ago, an elder priestess at this temple, yclept Pythia, was an oracle, offering prophecies to those able to correctly interpret her words. Today, Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway is IBM’s largest shareholder, is called the Oracle of Omaha. Buffett looks the part, resembling a benign grandma. He has more money than all of Greece, although right now plenty of people enjoy that distinction. Like Pythia the Oracle, Buffett can be baffling; less gifted people cannot understand why Buffett is up to his ears in IBM

If there is a demand for managed services in the IBM midrange market, you can begin measuring it 20 years ago. It’s not a new thing, but some of the services are new. For many companies, those contracting for managed services as well as those that provide the services, the managed services relationship has been long established. Usually it’s based on a disaster recovery service. But what about the new demand?

We’ve written about this before in IT Jungle articles. When will the managed services business become more than the disaster recovery business? It already has. Nearly every managed service