Archive for August, 2006

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Clever IBM Videos

Bob Hoey, IBM worldwide vice president of sales, zSeries, makes his comical sales pitch for IBM mainframes.
Mainframe - The Art of the Sale, Lesson One

The other commercials are similar…
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6 Comments » - Posted in General, Humour, People, Mainframe by Greg

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Google Office vs. Lotus Notes

There has been a lot of mainstream press[1][2][3] about Google’s foray into the Office Suite space. They gush about word processing and spreadsheets and Microsoft’s falling behind, the real release is “Google Apps for Your Domain” which targets, not the core of the office suite, but the productivity tools at the periphery such as […]

6 Comments » - Posted in General, News by Greg

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Internet Security Systems falls prey to IBM acquisition fervor

IBM has purchased Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISSX), an IBM partner since 1999, for $1.3 Billion.  ISS started in 1994 with one product, Internet Scanner, and has grown to a suite of security offerings including the ISS X-Force Intelligence Service credited with discovering a number of Microsoft security vulnerabilities in recent months.  This is IBM’s […]

14 Comments » - Posted in General, Acquisitions, Interviews, Tivoli, Strategy by Greg

Friday, August 18th, 2006

Why I Hate HP

OK, I don’t really hate HP.  Congratulations HP on your turn-around.  And your laser printers work great (not the low-end “Personal LaserJets” though… they stink).  But man am I tired of the all the press over HP soon passing IBM in terms of revenue.  A scan of headlines reveals:

Reviving HP has IBM in its sights
With strong results, […]

18 Comments » - Posted in Performance, News by Greg

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

IBM 1986 Commercial - Who’s Got Time to Learn Computers

I know this isn’t really relevant and doesn’t help to understand IBM today, but I think it’s fun. It’s a commercial from the 1980s titled “Computers… who’s got time to figure out how to use ‘em”

“We’ve got more computers helping more small businesses than anybody.” It’s been a while since IBM could say something like […]

4 Comments » - Posted in General, Humour by Greg

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

IBM Open Source Strategy is “Beyond Linux”

IBM was the first big company to fully commit to Linux and tie its fortune to the success of the Linux OS.  It is hard to argue that IBM has done very well embracing the open source operating system with such vigor.  They are hoping to do it again.
Believing Linux to be mainstream and viable, IBM is moving […]

1 Comment » - Posted in News, Strategy by Greg

Monday, August 14th, 2006

Sametime 7.5 / Linux IM Nearly Ready

Per CIO mag, Lotus Sametime version 7.5, is to be released in the next 30 days. What’s noteworthy about this release are three things:

Linux version - the app has been ported to Linux, making a viable Linux OS alternative to the Exchange / Live Communications Server
Sametime will now be linked with popular public IM […]

1 Comment » - Posted in News by Greg

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

IBM Snaps up FileNet too

Today IBM announced that they were acquiring FileNet Corporation for $1.6 Billion.  IBM hadn’t signaled that there would be this kind of acquisition activity on the horizon.  This is IBM’s third acquisition in 2 weeks.  IBM’s software group has bought more than 50 companies in the past 10 years, and this is IBM’s largest purchase in […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Acquisitions, News by Greg

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

IBM Rational Application Developer #1 IDE, Visual Studio is #2

Evans Data Corp released a report ranking IDEs based on features and developer satisfaction.  Rational Application Developer For WebSphere (RADW aka WSAD) has the lead for the second year running over all other IDEs.  That’s good news, I guess.  And RADW is a slick environment for J2EE, with great debugging, support for all sorts of types […]

No Comments » - Posted in News by Greg

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

IBM’s MASTOR translates like no other

IBM Research has an incredible translation software product dubbed MASTOR (The Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator).  The service has seen rave reviews for both accuracy and ease of use.  At present, it works in both Arabic and Mandarin but the translation engine is very interesting.  Rather than attempting a word by word translation, the engine translates phrases and […]

1 Comment » - Posted in Research by Greg