• Middleware Makers Are Sued Over Server Patents

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we are all well aware, patent laws can be as much of a problem for innovation as they can be a boon for it. A patent is only as good as the clerk’s understanding of the technology field they are issuing patents for, and unfortunately, not everyone can be as smart as Albert Einstein, perhaps the smartest patent clerk in the world. This is how we get into the situation that we see from time to time in the information technology racket: a small and obscure company holds patents that seem to apply to a broad line of technologies,

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• Mike Borman Lands the CEO Job at Avocent

  July 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a name that you will recognize: Mike Borman. No, he’s not the Apollo astronaut and former chief executive officer at Eastern Air Lines, but rather the former general manager of the iSeries division at IBM and now the new chief executive officer at systems management product maker Avocent. Borman was named general manager of the iSeries division in July 2004, and took a bunch of heat at the COMMON midrange user group meeting that fall and made a series of commitments to listen to iSeries shops, improve the product line, and do a better job selling the box.

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• What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd. The midrange systems and now, server, market and its customer base has always been important. The midrange products from IBM

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• More Power7 Details Emerge, Thanks to Blue Waters Super

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers. And so it is with IBM‘s future Power7

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• IBM Drives Home a Strong Second Quarter Across the Board

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done. Mark Loughridge,

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• The X Factor: The IT Department Matters as Much as the CIO

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it–or a mix, if they use a mixed model–because these are the people who either cut

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• IT Jobs Grow in the U.S. Despite Economic Woes

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good. In fact, in terms of the increase in IT jobs in the United States, the news has been good for a while. The

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• BluePhoenix Says Business Is Steady, Sells Mainsoft Stake

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions is getting ready to report its financial results for the second quarter of 2008, and as is the tradition for public companies, BluePhoenix put out a statement going over preliminary results in conjunction with a big announcement that it was looking to sell its stake in Mainsoft, a maker of .NET and Java tools. The preliminary report was designed to calm down a jittery Wall Street. BluePhoenix, which is based in Herzliya, Israel, did most of its business in the mainframe market until last summer when it acquired ASNA, which has

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• IBM Opens Up the EGL Cafe, But Will People Stop By?

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I know, I know. The last thing in the world you want to hear about is the need to learn a new programming language. Or, if you are an IT manager, to pay in terms of time and money to get your programming staff trained on a new language. But this is what IBM is asking customers to do with Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), the heart of Web application development in its recently upgraded set of Rational tools. Half the battle of getting companies to even look at a programming language, much less using it, is to convince programmers that

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• IBM and New York State Kick in $1.64 Billion for Chips

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM‘s chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM’s birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable. For its part, IBM is going to spend $1.5 billion over the

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