IBM News

AiX Most Secure UNIX & MacOSX is the least secure

“Me Sad!” as my rough and tumble nephew in Colorado would say.

Well I am kind of sad and kind of happy in that AiX, which is an IBM product, is the most secure. I would have thought OpenBSD would have been the top pick.

LINK :: OSNews - IBM: ‘AIX Most Secure, Mac OS X Least Secure’

“It’s time for another security report. You know, those reports that tally vulnerabilities, and then plot or graph them in such a way that their benefactors or clients come out most favourably. Ok, that might be a bit cynical, but fact remains that there is usually something wrong with such reports. The one that’s making its rounds across the internet today is certainly one of them. According to IBM, AIX is the most secure operating system, and Mac OS X the least secure. Not only is the report rather slim on details when it comes to operating system vulnerabilities, it seems like most websites reporting on this story have misunderstood what it was about.”

IBM Closes 2008 on a High, i Sales Unclear - IT Jungle

LINK :: IBM Closes 2008 on a High, i Sales Unclear - IT Jungle

Wall Street got a chance to catch its breath a little yesterday after the market closed when IBM announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, a quarter that was impacted by the economic crisis last summer and fall but one in which Big Blue nonetheless was able to pull out of the fire profit-wise by cutting costs. More importantly, perhaps, IBM’s top brass reaffirmed that they were on track, despite the state of the global economy, to meet aggressive profit targets.

In the fourth quarter, which bore the brunt of the economic meltdown and which saw 1.53 million layoffs of full-time workers in the United States, IBM did see a decline in sales. But aggressive cost cutting and margin management allowed the company to actually beat the estimates Wall Street was making about IBM’s possible profits in the quarter. (As if we trust even a tenth of what Wall Street says these days.) IBM’s sales worldwide actually declined by 6.4 percent to just a hair over $27 billion, but despite that decline, IBM held gross margins and actually boosted net income by 12 percent to $4.43 billion. And because IBM buys back buckets of its own shares each quarter “to return value to its shareholders,” er, to financially engineer its earnings per share growth, IBM was still able to show a 17.1 percent increase in EPS to $3.28 in the quarter. While not a miracle, this is nonetheless a fine piece of piloting in some pretty rough waters. No question about that.

IBM Confrence & Events Schedule

LINK :: IBM 2009 Confrences and Events

Again thanks, Joe

Why isn’t IBM building things like this for the IBM i?

We need sales to go up, we need exposure to go up, we need education to go up and we need CIOs to know that the IBM i is the most reliable, dependable and most ROI system on the planet! Yet if you were to look at what IBM is doing to get that word out you would think they were the ones needing the education. IBM built this little video for Lotus and Mobile Collaboration. It make sense and it’s easy to understand. WHY WHY IBM can’t you seem to do this for the POWER Platform?

LINK TO VIDEO

IBM Smart Cubes - I would like to demo one and review it

The Smart Cube from IBM has been getting lots of talk around the web, just not much from IBM? I want to see some real details and when I go to IBM’s web site and search for “Smart Cube”, I get nothing. Once again IBM DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MARKET ANYTHING THEY SELL!

IBM has become one of the most frsutrating companies to deal with from a product and delivery stand point.

The only press release I can find is missing :: LINK HERE

Thank goodness for the ITJungle, as they seem to have more details about the product than IBM does at this time.

Links to all the details I can find:

LINK :: Is the Smart Cube the New i?

LINK :: A Little More Detail on the Smart Cube and Its Market

LINK :: IBM Press Release - IBM Launches “Smart Business”  New Computing Paradigm for SMBs in India; Ready-to-Use IT 

“These Power-based machines are not, I have learned, going to get the nifty new boxes that the Lotus Foundations X64 appliance that was (announced a few weeks ago are getting, but will be in the same tower boxes that a regular Power Systems machine uses. The Power versions of the Smart Cube will be made in Rochester, Minnesota, and in Dublin, Ireland, which is where entry Power Systems machines and earlier AS/400, iSeries, and System i boxes were also manufactured. So it is important to realize that, as far as I know, these Power-based appliances are not being made in China. However, the Lotus Foundations and very similar Smart Cube X64 appliances are made in China, and that probably gives them a distinct manufacturing cost advantage.”

IBM buys another software company

This should go under my “what bad ecconomy” section too, but it’s not. IBM, the big blue giant has purchased Transitive Software. I will  let the IT Jungle explain:

Link :: IBM’s Transitive Buy Presents Interesting Server Options

“Here’s a story you’ve heard a bunch of times: IBM liked the software so much, it bought the company. And so the story ran again last week, when Big Blue bought software emulation specialist Transitive for an undisclosed sum of money. Transitive makes a bit of software called QuickTransit, which allows applications created for one chip to be encapsulated, and run on completely different architectures.” - IT Jungle

The Father of the now IBM i, Frank Soltis, is not working at IBM anymore

Frank Soltis, the father of the IBM AS/400 in 1988, is rumored to not be working at IBM anymore. Let go or whatever, it’s hard news for a person like me to stomach. It’s pretty sad really. Frank has always been that rock star engineer who quantified the IBM i. He was the corner stone and in person a super nice guy.

There is think Thread in the Midrange.com Site and it’s an opinion, one which I agree with parts of but is not my writting.

While I don’t have anymore details than that I can’t seem to find anything further. Seems I am kind of breaking news here. So if anyone has any details and would like to share them I am going to be putting out feelers for what has happened to Frank. He’s not going to be at IBM anymore which scares me as an IBM i person, but maybe IBM is going to fix the problems with marketing now that he is gone….probabaly not.

More to come….

IBM Get your i act together please

I was riding home from work in my car and on the radio came an IBM i ad, or maybe I should say a System i ad. It was one of the IBM Drive-Thru commercials that I truly do like, but in the end they were still selling the System i Express? IBM if you plan of anyone taking you seriously in the IBM i space and you want to have the right to complain that some people still use the term AS/40, then you have to be organized enought to all be on the same marketing page and not contenue to call a system you renamed over 9 months ago what you used to call it. I closed my eyes and was sad for a second becasue I knew IBM has still no clue how to market anything they own.

IT Jungle - IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

LINK :: IT Jungle - IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

“Well, the rumor going around that IBM is doubling up the processor core counts on its Power Systems servers, which are based on the company’s dual-core Power6 processors, turns out to be true. Last Tuesday, IBM announced that it has doubled up the cores in the Power 570 to a maximum of 32, and now is also offering a 16-core box called the Power 560 that slides in underneath it in the product line. As expected, IBM also doubled the core count on entry Power 520 and midrange Power 550 machines when running the i 6.1 (formerly OS/400 and i5/OS) operating system to four and eight cores, respectively, bringing the i variants to parity with AIX and Linux boxes that shipped in April.” - IT Jungle

This is good news, more power is always good. Companies who need more CPU and more capacity are probably really happy today. This is what a midrange system today should look like and for those shops that upgraded recently to the new POWER 570, sorry, but if you wanted the best and fastest hardware you should have waited until tomorrow to purchase….

Chris Maxcer - Takes IBM to task about POWER SYSTEM and Sales Numbers

I support Chris 100%. He is dead on the money and frankly I am even more tired of IBM’s antics than he is. See while Chris is a journalist and a technology reporter, I on the other hand am a self professed blogger, IBM biggot, and i5OS lover who knows that while IBM say it’s going to move to POWER and the System i is going away along with the System p, they are in fact worse at changing the name and the brand than we all are. Shame on you IBM for not doing the right thing, shame on you for not moving forward, and shame on you for still using the names you refuse to let us all use.

LINK :: Chris Maxcer - Feeling Good About i–But the p Will Get the Report Tomorrow