If you want to blame someone, go ahead and blame people like me. Or, if it makes you feel any better, just blame me alone. For years, while I have praised the integrated nature of the AS/400 and its progeny, I have railed against the practice that IBM has had of bundling most of its software features on the platform and lumping it all together with a big, fat, single, hardware-software price tag that would give the wealthiest SMB shop a big sticker shock. Perhaps big enough to scare them off, even if a complete Windows stack cost the same

Language is a funny thing. As part of the ongoing merger of System i and System p product lines and the obliteration of separate marketing and sales divisions for these products in lieu of the single Power Systems division, which creates Power-based servers, and the Business Systems and Enterprise Systems divisions, which sell all of IBM‘s products to SMB and enterprise data centers, respectively, Big Blue is trying to control the language that its sales reps and business partners use as they pitch the new Power Systems products, pricing, and approach to OS/400 and i5/OS shops.

Language, as it

The performance statistics of the new Power Systems machines running the i 6.1 operating system (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) are starting to come out, helping customers who are looking at buying one of these new boxes and moving to the new operating system try to figure out what throughput the new systems have. Performance benchmarks on real-world workloads have been pretty thin for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform for a number of years, and thus far IBM is sticking to the relatively small number of benchmarks plus its own Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) ratings to help customers gauge relative

It has become an article of faith that competitiveness is inherently good, historically inevitable, and the fountainhead of economic dominance. It’s rare that business-related nouns appear in print without their default companion adjective “competitive.” The job market, global markets, wages, and prices all share the same pugnacious descriptor. As any first-year business student will attest: in order to be successful, companies must pursue competitive advantage by developing competitive solutions and executing competitive strategies.

It’s a word that describes everything and explains nothing.

With the emergence of India and China, and the maturation of the European Union, old economic relationships no

Seeking to capitalize on the sunsetting of Hewlett-Packard‘s PA-RISC Superdome and HP 9000 machines and to convert the vast base of UltraSparc-II and UltraSparc-III machinery with the Sun Microsystems brand on it, IBM has launched a frequent buyers club marketing program called Power Rewards to try to convert the HP-UX and Solaris bases to Power6-based gear running AIX and/or Linux. The deal offers customers migrations services of a specified cash value based on a point scoring system that is tied to the Sun and HP iron being replaced.

Why can’t IBM just say it is giving away migration services

While you might be interested in creating new PHP applications and running them on a System i or Power Systems machine with OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, or i 6.1, the odds are that as an IBM midrange shop, you have lots of green screen applications sitting around that need to be enabled to run on the Web. There are plenty of ways to take 5250 applications to deploy them on the Web, from IBM as well as third-party tool suppliers, and now there is one more being supplied by Zend Technologies, the creator of the open source PHP programming

Al Barsa, the recently deceased advocate of the AS/400 platform who passed away at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month, is being honored by the user group through the establishment of a scholarship that bears his name.

COMMON’s Education Foundation, a working group within the organization focused on educational issues, has created the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship to “honor of Al’s hard work and community service.” The annual award will consist of a conference registration and plaque, and will go to a person “who exemplifies Al’s commitment and dedication to the i community.” The

Under the best of circumstances, when hardware and software technology changes are modest, server product transitions can still be problematic. But sometimes, the changes are quite large, and this causes issues. Such was the case in the transition IBM did in 1993 and 1994 to the CISC-based AS/400 3XX, in 1995 with the jump to PowerPC chips with the AS/400 5XX boxes, in 2002 and 2003 with the Power4 iSeries 8XX machines, and now in 2007 and 2008 as IBM converges the System i and System p lines into the single Power Systems line.

Resellers like to have transitions over

A global economy brings with it a great opportunity to sell collaboration software, particularly to the small to mid size businesses in the United States. If you don’t believe it, just ask the collaboration software folks at IBM. They will help you connect the dots. Last week at the at the U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Small Business Week conference in Washington, D.C., Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM online collaboration services, outlined the challenges and opportunities for growth that small and mid size businesses (SMBs) will be facing in the next decade.

“Some of the little known facts

Whenever there is an economic slowdown, not every sector of the IT space sees decreased spending. Some areas seem to be immune to calls from the boardroom to cut spending because these technologies help the company retain customers, provide better or cheaper products or services, or even boost sales. And so it seems to be with both customer relationship management (CRM) and security software sales, according to the analysts at Gartner.

CRM is, of course, a decade-old extension of ERP systems that aims to keep better track of customers and allow companies to up-sell and cross-sell products and services