Companies can save millions of dollars while protecting themselves from application downtime by installing and running the Oracle EnterpriseOne ERP application on IBM i OS-based Power Systems servers instead of commodity X64 servers running either Windows and SQL Server or Linux and the Oracle database, according to a report issued this summer by International Technology Group, and posted to the IBM i Web site.

In its June 2009 status report, titled Value Proposition for IBM Power Servers and i: Comparing Costs for EnterpriseOne Deployments, ITG tallies up how much it would cost to configure and run EnterpriseOne on each

As part of IBM‘s Dynamic Infrastructure announcement blast on October 20 that we told you about in last week’s issues of The Four Hundred and Four Hundred Stuff, and which we continue to chew through in this week’s newsletter, Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division, put out a short statement on the IBM i site that encapsulated the upcoming i 7.1 release and the future Power7-based servers.

It is something of an annual ritual for the general manager to re-up the commitment for the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i platform. Since the

The U.S. economy may look like it is coming out of the Great Recession, at least according to the economists who work for Uncle Sam, who said last Thursday that gross domestic product in the States rose by a 3.5 annualized rate in the third quarter. That is better than the 2.7, 5.4, 6.4, and 0.70 percent declines that mark the trough of the Great Recession in the prior four quarters, for sure. But very few people–including economists and server makers–think the recession is really over. And hence, they wheel and deal.

Just like IBM is doing with the–inhale now–Power

IBM wants to be your mashup company. Of course, it helps if you know what IBM means by mashup. It also helps if you prefer to pay for development and testing services sold by Amazon. Try not to let the free starter services offered by Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Bing distract you. IBM might be onto something good. And if you have to pay a little extra, well, what’s new about that? But I’m getting ahead of the story. So, let’s start at the end.

Mashup is the current term of endearment for a Web site that

Who’s going to tell the story of what the IBM i can do? You can bet your database it’s not going to be IBM. Platform-specific marketing is not the game plan at Big Blue. If you want i-centricity, you better look someplace else. That’s brought us to iManifest, a plan in search of an organization, a structure, to help it fly. It’s already off the ground in Japan, and last week the fledgling efforts in the United States got wings with the addition of Frank Soltis to the board of directors.

Soltis is just the kind of high-profile person who

As part of the October 20 Dynamic Infrastructure announcements, IBM made a number of important changes to the BladeCenter blade servers, and many of these tweaks impact i shops that have or are planning to move to blade form factors.

The first change is that the preconfigured i Edition for BladeCenter S now has a version that includes the RAID SAS switch module for local disk storage for the JS12 blade in the configuration. As with the prior i Edition, the i 6.1 operating system is preconfigured on a JS12 blade server. The original i Edition of the blade bundle,

Remember the Smart Cube appliances for small business? Whatever happened to those? IBM launched these Power and X64 server appliances with some (but not a lot of fanfare) in the United States this past May running the i 6.1 and SUSE Linux 10 SP2, and then we never really heard much about these appliances again. As part of the Dynamic Infrastructure announcement blitz on October 20, IBM updated the software stacks at the heart of these appliances.

The most important update in the stack is that the Smart Business Software Pack for i V1.2.0, which runs on the Power version

IBM told employees of its Systems and Technology Group in an internal memo last Friday that Bob Moffat, who has been linked to an insider trading scandal that erupted two weeks ago in New York, has left the company.

Big Blue did not elaborate much on the situation, as has been the case since the insider trading scandal centered on two hedge funds–Galleon Group and New Castle Group–came to light on October 16. That Friday, Moffat, who was previously senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, was arrested by the FBI and charged by the

With Penn State only being established in 1855, and there not being much ivy growing on the buildings and the scent of corn and cows all around, I wouldn’t exactly call myself old school. But I guess I am, since I most definitely believe that when companies buy back their shares to prop up their earning per share numbers, this is a load of cow hockey. Particularly when the money could be used for a lot of other things, such as paying better wages, building better products, or maybe doing a little marketing.

IBM is at it again, moving huge

Application software powerhouse SAP didn’t do as badly in the third quarter as some had expected, but the company’s revenue and profit picture and sentiments show just how hard it is to get big IT projects done in this tough–and perhaps improving–economy.

For the third quarter ended in September, the German company booked €2.51 billion in sales, down 9 percent from the year-ago quarter, and software license sales fell a staggering 31 percent to €525 million. Services revenues (including software support and subscription-based software sales) declined only 3 percent for SAP in Q3, to €1.94 billion. Within that broad services