The mystery is finally over. Last Wednesday, at the Town Hall meeting at the COMMON user group conference and expo, IBM‘s executives finally and formally did away with the System i and System p brands and changed the name of the i5/OS operating system for what is very likely to be the last time. I said “very likely” because this is Big Blue, after all.

Many of us had a hunch that this rebranding of the box and possibly the operating system has been in the works for some time, of course. Last month, in an article called Bye

As part of the consolidation of the Power-based System i and System p servers last week and the rebranding of the i5/OS operating system to simply i, or i for Business or IBM i 6.l if you can’t stand a single letter product name, Big Blue also announced repacked versions of the entry System p 520 and midrange System p 550 servers that came out at the end of January running AIX and Linux. These are now simply the Power 520 and the Power 550.

IBM also did the smart thing and got a single-socket Power6 blade server, the JS12,

If there is one thing that a system vendor doesn’t want–particularly one selling a premium product at a premium price–it is to leave the impression with current and prospective customers that it is not listening to them. The reliability of the AS/400 and follow-on platforms is legendary, and in manufacturing quality and tech support circles, the IBM Rochester Labs where the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now the Power Systems-i 6.1 combo are developed and supported is also legendary.

At the COMMON user conference last week in Nashville, Tennessee, IBM wanted to make it clear that most of the changes

You’re not alone if you’ve become skeptical about the near term prospects for banks that have overpaid for assets. The banks are having trouble selling these assets because they can’t find trusting buyers. With so many people asking hard questions about bankers and financiers, this nosy, impolite attitude is becoming infectious. It is even spreading into other areas, such as information technology. Some customers are subjecting vendors’ claims about value to serious examination, and while this prudence might be practical, it isn’t pretty.

We are not only in a bear market for many kinds of securities, we seem to be

The AS/400 is dead. Long live the AS/400. This phrase as associated with my favorite “midrange system” has changed over the years to meet the many successor systems that IBM has put forth to replace our good ole AS/400. In fact, even before the litany of replacement systems, the AS/400 itself was involved in a replacement act of its own when it was brought forth to succeed both the System/38 and the System/36. As we in this “AS/400 community” well know, nothing was and nothing will ever be as revolutionary to the world of computing as the System/38 in its

Even with the confusion and consternation going on in the economies of the world, many of the chief information officers responsible for the corporate computing purses say that their IT budgets for 2008 are holding, albeit at a lower growth rate than we have seen in prior years. The analysts at Gartner, who want to get their piece of the $1.2 trillion global IT pie as well, recently polled 1,011 CIOs to take the pulse on IT spending.

The survey, which Gartner conducted in the first quarter of 2008, shows that 62 percent of CIOs say their budgets will

Without the System i, what will become of COMMON, the largest user group dedicated to the OS/400 and i5/OS–and now the i for Business–operating system? It’s well beyond a pretty safe bet that COMMON won’t disappear. It’s a certainty. After all, it’s only the System i brand that’s been erased. The newly rechristened i 6.1 (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) runs on Power Systems servers, along with Linux and AIX, so nothing changes as far as COMMON is concerned, right? Not exactly.

Randy Dufault, the president of COMMON, says there have been and will continue to be evolutionary changes

In late January, when IBM announced delivered i5/OS V6R1 for the System i platform, now known as i 6.1 for the Power Systems platform, the company also announced that it would support that operating system on the four-core Power6-based JS22 blade server for the BladeCenter chassis. This was great, except for one thing: IBM put the JS22 in the P20 software tier.

As you might imagine, despite the substantial computing performance embodied in the JS22 blade, which has four 4.7 GHz Power6 cores and which I estimate to have between 3,800 CPWs and 14,500 CPWs of OS/400, i5/OS, and i

Given the shaky state of the economy in the United States and IBM‘s dependence on services contracts and sales to the Federal government, any kind of interruption on the flow of deals is something that Big Blue wants to avoid. But for a couple of days last week, IBM was barred from bidding on contracts with Uncle Sam.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which was echoed later by a press release put out by IBM and elaborated on not at all by a separate statement that the company sent to its PartnerWorld partners, the

To many, the true promise of the Internet is not email, Web pages, and blogs, but an all-encompassing virtual world experience that allows people, corporations, and other kids of organizations to interact despite their physically dispersed bodies. This is what the Second Life virtual reality created by Linden Lab is all about. But imagine if you could create your own virtual world for your own purposes and not have to play in The World already created by Linden Lab?

That is what the partnership between Linden Lab and IBM announced last week for the Second Life Grid is all about.