• Notes/Domino Social Edition 9 To Arrive In March

  February 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  Notes/Domino Social Edition 9 has been talked about since Lotusphere 2012. There was a public beta version released in November last year. Its development cost is rumored to be as much as $100 million while spanning 18 to 24 months, depending on who’s spreading the rumors. Now IBM is committing to a March release date for the software, which is being billed as the biggest Notes/Domino release in years. And, being modern and all, it has the “Social Edition” tag on it. There’s no bigger burden, we’ve repeatedly seen, than the burden of great potential. In the race to be

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Take Another Bow, William Howard Taft And IBM Mainframes

  February 4, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  As 2012 ended, the brightest spot in IBM’s financial picture came from, of all things, the venerable mainframe. Sales jumped 56 percent as MIPS shipments soared 66 percent. But the picture wasn’t so simple: Only half this capacity could support IBM operating systems; the rest was confined to running Linux or taking a wash for those unfettered z engines. Meanwhile, in Washington, baseball fans were getting an upbeat surprise, too. The Nationals had named William Howard Taft as a mascot, reminding fans of a uniquely large and flatulent president who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In

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• IBM’s Social Media Addiction Intensifies

  February 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  When it comes to eating its own dog food, IBM can’t get enough of social media. Everyone at the Big Blue enterprise is expected to chow down. In turning social media into social business, Big Blue figures it is best to lead by example. Last week, IBM’s social technology soapbox Connect 2013, the conference formerly known as Lotusphere, was talking with their mouths full. Naturally, this was a good time to announce new software and cloud-based services. Warning: Buzz shields required beyond this point. The statistical bombardment is the first thing that hits you. IBM claims 61 percent of the

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• The IT Revolution May Be Over, But It’s Still A Jungle

  February 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

  A JPMorgan Chase analyst recently made headlines with a paper that noted the price of computer equipment and software is decreasing at the slowest rate in a generation, which is interpreted to reflect a notable downturn in IT industry innovation. With the heyday of rapid IT innovation and easy productivity gains behind us, the question now becomes: What drivers will emerge to shape the $4 trillion information economy? JPMorgan’s chief US economist Michael Feroli made interesting observations in his two-page paper US: is IT over?, which starts on page 13 of JPMorgan Chase’s recent Global Data Watch economic research

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• Pondering Possibilities With More Power7+ Machines Impending

  February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With new Power Systems and PureSystems machinery in the works and hopefully set to shake up the market and chase some of those server dollars that Intel is already counting on, now is a good time to stop and have a good THINK. Just like Tom Watson admonished us all to do soon after taking over what became International Business Machines nearly a century ago. If we were sitting in a bar together, we might even think and drink at the same time, as Watson himself did as a young man before he became a teetotaler. Here’s a funny story,

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• Pure Systems Customer Count Breaks 2,300 While Power Takeouts Continue

  January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Anything that makes Power Systems–and now PureSystems–stronger makes the IBM i platform that more viable for that more time because IBM’s interesting in any technology is precisely proportional to the amount of profits it can consistently extract from that technology. And so it was good news to the IBM i platform when Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer, during his conference call last week with Wall Street analysts going over the fourth quarter and full year financial results, dropped a statistic that Big Blue now had more than 2,300 PureSystems in over 70 countries who had bought its PureSystems modular, converged

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• Connect 2013 (Lotusphere) Opens; Streaming Video Available

  January 28, 2013 Dan Burger

  The IBM Connect 2013 conference broke from the gate on January 27 with a heavy emphasis on social business transformation and knowledge sharing. For 20 years, this annual Orlando, Florida, event was called Lotusphere, and although that name hasn’t quite yet been wiped from the slate, it no longer fits with IBM’s dissolution of its Lotus division and the ensuing rebranding that the company is doing. Unless you are a Lotus insider, a user, and a big fan, the Lotus brand is widely perceived to be out of touch with modern times. IBM is working feverishly to change that perception–which

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• Execs Say New ‘Digital’ Tech Tops The Priority List This Year

  January 28, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  A new year brings a new opportunity to look ahead at what we want to accomplish in the next 12 months. In the world of IT, there are always fires to put out and systems to maintain, but according to a recent survey by the analysts at Gartner, 2013 needs to be the year when CIOs take control of digital technologies such as mobile devices and applications, analytics, big data, social media, and the cloud. The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter in 2012 and included 2,053 CIOs representing more than $230 billion in CIO IT budgets and

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• Avnet Saw IT Budget Flush Spending As 2012 Came To A Close

  January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Not everybody saw IT spending tick upward as last year came to a close, but IT and electronics component distributor Avnet did. In its second quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in December, Avnet said that its overall sales were only up one-tenth of a point to just a hair under $6.7 billion, with net income dropping 6.5 percent to $137.5 million. But you can’t blame the Technology Solutions side of Avnet, which is a master distributor of server, storage, and networking gear as well as software and services for the data center. “Our overall Q2 results reflect a stronger than

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• IBM Italy Helps Push Power Systems Gear With Rebate Deals

  January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week in The Four Hundred, I told you about a deal that IBM was offering in Europe to Power Systems resellers who peddled ISV software on top of the systems. As it turns out, IBM Italy has another similar deal aimed at getting customers to upgrade to new Power Systems machines using Power7 processors, and in one special case, a Power6+ server. In announcement letter ZA132-1014, which was announced on January 15 and then amended on January 23 (when I actually saw it pop up in the increasingly crazy IBM announcement database), IBM is offering rebates to

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