• ChangeWave Plots a ‘Historic Collapse’ in IT Spending

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, here’s some more good news in the IT spending polling business and bad news for IT spending. ChangeWave, a market research collective founded during the dot-com bust to track tech trends and investing, has just finished up a survey of IT shops in the United States that shows companies were freaked out a few weeks ago enough to put a big damper on IT spending plans. How big? Bigger than the dot-com bust big. Take a look at the historical data that ChangeWave has gathered since 2001 in this article. ChangeWave polled some 1,926 IT organizations between

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• IBM Kills Off Power5+ System i Boxes

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As expected, IBM is taking the old model Power5+ System i machines that helped get the i platform back on track off the market, now that Power6-based machines give as good or better bang for the buck. Well, in most cases, and especially if you don’t think about any discounting going on out there in the reseller channel on Power5+ machines. Anyway, last week, IBM pulled the plug on the user-priced machines that finally came to market last year and gave the entry i platform a fighting chance against Windows-based machines among small and medium businesses. Specifically, the feature 8971

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• The Pressure Is On Server Resellers, Big Time

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While dominant IT suppliers IBM and Hewlett-Packard are still managing to hold their financials together despite the tense economic situation, they are doing this by and large because they have a vast channel of distributors and resellers into which they can pump their hardware and software. Server resellers have a lot of pressure on them to absorb gear, but vendors often help with financing to these resellers on the front end of a deal to get the equipment out of their factories and then help again on the other side of the reseller to finance equipment at the end user

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• Maintenance Expert ServIT Partners with Data Center Provider

  November 24, 2008 Dan Burger

  ServIT, a System i solution provider specializing in consulting, maintenance, and wholesale distribution, completed a partnership deal last week with Peak 10, a data center operator and managed services provider with a pocketful of high-profile clients across the United States. Peak 10 is particularly adept at managing regulatory compliance solutions for SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FDA, PCI, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLBA) requirements, according to the company. Tony Merendino, president of ServIT, described Peak 10 as “a valuable partner as well as a trusted IT advisor to the local business community.” In addition to the above-mentioned expertise, ServIT has more

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• WebSphere Marketeer Writes the Book on Marketing 2.0

  November 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A familiar IBMer has just finished writing a book about the new style of marketing that is enabled by recent Internet technologies, and that author is someone who is familiar to AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops: Sandy Carter, currently vice president of SOA and WebSphere marketing, strategy, and channels at IBM. The book she has penned (well, people don’t really pen books any more, do they?) is called The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market, and ANGELS, being a phrase created by an IBMer, is an acronym.

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• Lotus Foundations and Smart Cube i: Brothers or Clones?

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you a few weeks ago, IBM is apparently cooking up a server called the Smart Cube that is based on its Power 520 hardware, the i 6.1 or a kicker operating system, and a stack of application software. This machine, which may have been under development as the “Blue for Business” platform, which I have reported on for the past year, seems to have a sibling: the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance. Last week, IBM provided a preview of the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance, which is actually a kicker to an existing set of systems and application

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• IBM Starts Cutting Deals on Power Systems i for Q4

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I was talking to a downstream Power Systems reseller, one of the guys with a few hundred customers that he tends to with new systems, upgrades, software configuration, application tuning, and so on, to make his daily bread. By the sweat of his browser, as it were. And guess what he told me? He had no System i or Power Systems i deals at all in the pipeline for the remainder of the fourth quarter. None. Nadda. Zilch. Zip. By the way, it has been a long time since this has happened to this particular reseller. We’re talking

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• Layoffs–Possibly Including Frank Soltis–at IBM Rochester

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a posting on the Midrange-L mailing list, where a lot of the AS/400 intelligentsia hang out to talk and gripe, IBM apparently had some layoffs at the Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400 and its successors. And, if what long-time and staunch AS/400 enthusiast Neil Palmer said in the post is true, the chief architect of what used to be called the System i until last year is getting ready to leave the building. I have tried repeatedly this week to get some kind details on the layoffs that Palmer refers to in one post, but thus

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Souls of Old Machines

  November 17, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  In the world of Jewish mysticism, there is a concept of demonic possession by a creature called a dybbuk. A dybbuk is basically a soul that has somehow broken free of its original body and for one or another reason becomes a spiritual squatter in the body and mind of a living person. IBM is big on this idea, putting the soul of a System i into the body of a System p. It is also doing well with a similar soul transplant that gives a mainframe life on a processor complex that bears some resemblance to a Power

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• Power Systems GM Discusses Upcoming i Announcements in Chat

  November 17, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM Power Systems head honcho Ross Mauri sat down for a one-hour “fireside” chat with members of the i community last week. The GM fielded a variety of questions, ranging from upcoming disk- and SAN-related enhancements for i-based blades (expected in 2009) to what are the platform’s hottest applications (virtualization and anything written in MySQL/PHP). Mauri was even asked to name his favorite operating system: IBM i, Linux, or AIX? The answer may surprise you. . . . Then again, it may not. Tuesday’s online forum was the first fireside chat for Mauri, who took the job as general manager

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