As the largest provider of goods and services for enterprise data centers and midrange data closets, it usually takes a long time for IBM to shift steer its vastness toward a new opportunity. But when the economy is heading for the rocks, it is surprising how quickly Big Blue moves these days compared to the IBM Company of old. Rather than try to remold the world in its own image, IBM is more interested in trying to take advantage of the world as it is transforming itself.

Nothing has made this more clear to me than the whole Smarter Planet

In the computer racket, sometimes you can learn as much from what IT vendors choose to say as you can from what they don’t choose to say. All I know for sure, in my two decades of watching this complex industry, is that you have to look at as much data as you can stomach if you want to try to come out with something that even remotely approximates the truth. And so it is with the updated Power6+ lineup that came out in late April from IBM.

The first thing I noticed in looking at the announcements was

I’ll admit it. I like hardware, and I like to learn about new hardware features first. But in an increasingly virtualized computing environment, many of the cooler functions are not, strictly speaking, being implemented in hardware, but rather deep in the hypervisor and system microcode. And so it is with one neat–and little discussed–feature that was just announced by IBM for logical partitions on Power-based servers called active memory sharing.

The PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has been able to carve up as well as gang up chunks of processing, memory, and I/O capacity into logical servers long since before it

When Chief Pontiac worked out a settlement with his British adversaries in 1766 and retired to what is now southwestern Illinois, he thought his place in history was secure. Three years later, he was murdered by a Peoria. Today Peoria means Caterpillar, not Native Americans, and Pontiac’s name has faded, like the eponymous brand of GM automobiles. But no Pontiac suffered the ignominy of Windows Live OneCare computer security software, which, gelded and code-named Morro, will be given away, if it can be, by Microsoft, a company that just ceased making money.

Chief Pontiac: Survived years

A Gartner survey released last week found that CIOs around the world reduced their IT spending by an average of nearly 5 percent during the first quarter of the year. Many organizations slashed spending even more, particularly in the telecommunications and professional services sectors, where IT spending was down more than 10 percent. The good news is that most organizations do not foresee any more drops in IT spending for the rest of the year, Gartner says.

About 900 IT chiefs from organizations all over the world participated in Gartner’s survey, which was conducted from the beginning of March through

The global server sales and shipment statistics from IDC and Gartner that we reported on in the past two issues of The Four Hundred show just how bad the impact of the economic meltdown has been on server makers. Subsequent data released by these two companies shows that if the global server market was awful in Q1, then it was terrible in Europe and downright shocking in Australia.

To recap the server picture on a global basis: Gartner says that server sales fell by 24 percent to $10.1 billion, and shipments fell by 24.2 percent to 1.72 million boxes, while

The difference between the X64 version of the Smart Cube appliance server being peddled by IBM‘s System and Technology Group and the Lotus Foundations appliance being sold by the Software Group is a subtle one. Unless you are talking about channels. Then, at least for now, there is a big difference.

Last week, IBM said that in the first five months of 2009 more than 1,000 partners who had been peddling various Microsoft applications for small and medium businesses have inked deals with Big Blue to distribute the Lotus Foundations appliances.

The Lotus Foundations appliances came out last November

The IT sales channel, through which the majority of server, storage, and software products actually travel from factories to end user customers, is hoping that the worst of the economic meltdown is over.

Just prior to a meeting of members held last week in London and just after a meeting held in New York in mid-May, the Global Technology Distribution Council, called the bottom of the market, at least in the United States. The GTDC is an industry association representing some of the biggest names in IT distribution–Arrow Electronics, Avnet, Bell Micro, Ingram Micro,

When you have 100,000 business partners, you don’t want them all talking at once. Or maybe you do. Later this month, IBM will test that theory as it rolls out a social networking site with high expectations that it will accelerate technology mashups and facilitate sales to the advantage of everyone involved.

Although it sounds like a good idea, as we all know the proof is in the puddin’. In other words, a partner will have to taste it before digging in. And then 99,999 other partners will have to do the same.

That seems like a pretty big number,

During a recent conversation with Bob Tipton, I picked up a couple of tips about how certain companies and certain individuals are open to innovation. It doesn’t just happen like magic. There are steps, tools, and approaches that can be learned. You can learn to be innovative. There’s a necessary attitude, a desire, and an atmosphere that is conducive to innovation, but by and large the process is not like spontaneous combustion. It’s planned.

As a reward for innovation within the IBM business partner ranks, Big Blue has the Beacon Awards. It’s an annual recognition, within its PartnerWorld program,