I have been shooting my mouth off about the issues facing the Power Systems i for the past month, and now it is time to let IBM have the stage for a bit while I catch my breath. Over the holiday, Big Blue posted a white paper outlining the strategy and roadmap for the i product line, which our intrepid reporter, Alex Woodie, spotted before IBM even let the trade press know it existed. This white paper has some tidbits of information that are new, which why I bring it up.

The 14-page white paper, which you can read here

Carol Woodbury, the former chief security architect of the OS/400 operating system and co-founder of SkyView Partners, and John Vanderwall, co-founder of SkyView and up until now its chief executive officer, have brought in some outside help to grow the company as it chases the burgeoning opportunity for security and compliance tools and services both inside the Power Systems i market and outside of it.

As 2009 was unwinding, SkyView announced that Tom Coccione, who has 22 years of experience in the IT racket, including with 13 years of selling midrange gear at IBM, has been tapped to

First of all, there is no crime scene investigation. You’ve been watching too much television. In this case, CSI is an abbreviation for COMMON Session of Interest. I was poking around on the COMMON Annual Meeting Web site last Thursday and followed a trail to the preliminary online session guide. That hardly qualifies me as a special agent, but if you are the investigative type, I recommend you check out what’s being presented at the conference in early May.

For those who have never attended COMMON, the first thing you need to know is that it has the widest variety

It’s the time of year when we reset the clock. No matter our failings and excesses of the prior year, January 1st brings with it a hopeful cleansing. Optimism abounds. This year I’m going to _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (fill in the blank): exercise more, lose weight, read the classics, write the great American novel, take tango lessons, run a marathon. Everything is possible again. Like Charlie Brown preparing to kick the Lucy-held football, we approach even the longest odds with great confidence. At least until March.

Hope appears to be a uniquely human attribute,

Interested in setting up an executive-level briefing to learn more about the IBM Power Systems server? One option is to arrange a trip to IBM’s facility in Rochester, Minnesota, where last Thursday it was snowing with a wind chill of -20 degrees Fahrenheit. But if sub-Arctic travel isn’t your cup of tea, or your sled dogs are down with the flu, you now have the option to receive briefings remotely at IBM’s Virtual Briefing Center Web site, which was launched last week.

IBM’s System and Technology Group (STG) put its Web skills to work with the new Virtual Briefing Center

Consolidation doesn’t just hit IT vendors. It hits the companies that watch the IT vendors, too. In early December, IT consultancy Gartner announced that it was acquiring application software market expert AMR Research for $64 million in cash, and quickly followed that last week by snapping up IT consultancy Burton Group for $56 million. None of this will matter all that much to IBM midrange shops.

However, the fact that Bruce Richardson, who was the chief research officer at AMR and arguably the smartest person following the enterprise application space, has joined application software giant Infor probably will have an

This is one that you could have seen coming a million miles away. With only two master resellers in the global server racket, it was only a matter of time before either Arrow Electronics or Avnet started distributing the “California” Unified Computing System converged blade servers from Cisco Systems.

While The Four Hundred was on holiday in December, Avnet announced that its Technology Solutions group, the part of the company that peddles servers, storage, networking gear, and such, had inked a distribution agreement with Cisco that allows Avnet and its downstream channel partners so certified to push the California

If you are a midrange server distributor looking for something to sell in a tough economic climate, then clone memory for Power5 and Power6 systems might be just the thing. That is certainly what Dataram is thinking as it pumps up its channel sales efforts.

Last April, as reported in The Four Hundred, Dataram bought its rival in the clone memory space, MMB, and in June the company started more aggressively peddling alternatives to IBM-branded memory for selected entry and midrange Power6-based servers. But as everyone in the AS/400 market knows, it is hard to get coverage because

Well, Wall Street and the Obama Administration got a little splash of cold water on their faces last Friday as the Department of Labor said that the U.S. economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December.

While the economy is certainly in better shape in terms of monthly job losses than it was in December 2008, when the employers removed a stunning 760,000 people from their payrolls as the economic meltdown was heating up, the expectation after a pretty good jobs report for last November, when the economy only shed 11,000 jobs, was that December would be about the same, with

Robert Half Technology, an IT compensation and headhunting consultancy, says that chief information officers are seeing IT work pile up and they are gearing up to do some hiring this year.

RHT did a survey of 1,400 CIOs in December at companies located in the United States with 100 employees or more, and 10 percent of them said they were very understaffed and another 33 percent said they were somewhat understaffed. Some 53 percent said they had the right number of IT employees, and only 3 percent said they had too many people.

“Many companies have cut technology staff