The AS/400, in its current incarnation as the Power Systems server platform running the i 6.1 operating system and the DB2 for i integrated database, turns 21 this week. I think that means it can finally buy hard liquor and have a stiff drink, which is something that such a venerable platform as the AS/400 certainly deserves. I think it is safe to say that you old timers, the AS/400 faithful who predate whippersnappers like me (with only 20 years in the market) all need a good stiff drink, with the global economy in the state that it is in

The Power Systems i platform is going into the clouds. As part of its CloudBurst cloud infrastructure launch last week, IBM said that it will eventually build cloud setups, both for sale by IBM to run inside corporate data centers as well as those it runs with rented capacity, based on its X64, Power, and mainframe iron. As you might expect, given the buying proclivities of the relatively few cloud customers today, IBM’s CloudBurst products are starting out on X64 iron.

Everybody in the server racket wants to make a big deal about cloud computing these days, but the cloud

Does today’s Power Systems server provide a viable and healthy platform on which companies should bet their business? Companies around the world have been asking themselves this question since the platform was born more than 30 years ago when the System/38 debuted. Now, a group of AS/400 vendors and customers in Japan, not content to rely on IBM to promote the platform, are taking matters into their own hands and promoting the platform themselves through a movement they call the IBM i Manifest.

The roots of the IBM i Manifest, or iManifest, go back more than a year, when a

The iManifest coming out of a group of business partners is Japan, which you can read about elsewhere in this edition of The Four Hundred, has stirred up a lot of thought and talk in the AS/400 market (yes, I said it that way on purpose) concerning who is to be responsible for the safeguarding of the present and the future of the AS/400 platform. This is all healthy and good, but it doesn’t solve the central problem the AS/400 faces: It has no advocate inside of IBM.

As we know all too well, IBM has made many, many

COMMON Europe, the European affiliation of midrange user groups for i communities in various countries, has closed out its annual Top Concerns survey and has some initial results that it wants to share with readers of The Four Hundred. The Top Concerns survey ran from the beginning of April through the end of May and was designed to get a sense of the issues that i shops all over the world–not just in Europe–are concerned with in these trying days.

For all of the readers of The Four Hundred who saw the solicitations to participate in the survey

TFH Flashback

Editor’s Note: This is the first-page essay from the pilot edition of The Four Hundred, which was written by Hesh Wiener, my mentor and the original publisher of the newsletter. The first edition of The Four Hundred was published nine months after the launch of the AS/400 in June 1988, and was a joint production between Technology News of America, Hesh’s company and my employer way back then, and the Reed Elsevier publishing giant. The newsletter actually got its start in England first and was rolled out in the United States and Canada a few months

In normal times, the server market is a leading indicator of sorts for the economy. But we do not live in normal times, either with respect to the global economy in general or to the server space in particular. The economy has been on the rocks since late 2007, and the economic meltdown last summer certainly has put a damper on IT spending, especially at large enterprises. But a far greater problem, in terms of server revenues, might be the mainstreaming of virtualization and the advent of cloud computing, both of which allow companies to support growing workloads with a

Nationalism creeps into the computer business from funny angles. Who made the processors, memory, and disk drives in computers used to matter back in the 1970s and 1980s, and then when we moved to more global manufacturing in the 1990s, the name on the label of the machine and where the sales office was seemed to matter more, with the possible exception of supercomputing, where national security issues hold sway. With so much of the tech support now outsourced to India, and unemployment running high, support is now a hot button politically, and we all know how Big Blue doesn’t

IBM‘s Lotus Symphony has been a shiny new car with not enough gas in the tank. Built to be effective–and very cost effective–but missing a key ingredient. Things have changed. And anyone who is angry as hell and doesn’t want to pay the licensing fees for Microsoft Office should be happy this day has arrived.

It’s been a year since IBM introduced its free office productivity software called Lotus Symphony. The ensuing reaction was mild excitement after discovering what it could do, but more like a murmur after discovering what it could not do. The most glaring deficiency was

Industry leaders like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle are not what you would call vertically challenged. Their sales and marketing strategies are big on vertical industries, and they make the most of selling hardware, software, and services that are customized for specific congregations based on similar business intentions and geographies.

You might remember a few years ago when IBM introduced the Vertical Industry Program to its System i independent software vendor community. VIP was designed to solve precise customer needs by teaming software vendors, resellers, and system integration experts in a plan aimed at improving integration and implementation–two open