Archive for October, 2006

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Experience Matters: IBM and Apple make most reliable PCs

IBM and Apple, the two who have been in the business the longest, make the most reliable computers.
It’s interesting that IBM, who is no longer really in the PC business, makes the most reliable PCs. Twice, I’ve talked to business people (not techs) who remember fondly how great their IBM PCs seemed to work […]

No Comments » - Posted in General, Products by Greg

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Big Blue Number Two in Software Sales

Craig Mullins of DB2Portal referenced a news piece I missed this week.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that IBM is officially the second largest software provider, bypassing former number two Oracle, but still behind number one Microsoft:
In its most recent quarter, IBM software generated $4.4 billion in revenue, and it’s the company’s main […]

2 Comments » - Posted in General, Performance, News by Greg

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

IBM Information Server

Last week IBM unveiled the IBM Information Server, “meant to be a departure from traditional databases or file servers that typically store information for a single application. Instead, the information server acts more like a gateway to multiple information sources and can reformat data for specific purposes, company executives said.” IBM is classing this […]

2 Comments » - Posted in General by Greg

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

IBM Sues Amazon for Selling Goods Online (or something like that)

IBM is suing Amazon over its alleged abuse of IBM ecommerce and customer customization technologies. The court filings are not yet public anywhere that I can find (on the ridiculous Texas Eastern District Website), but the patents allegedly violated are:

US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.

US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive […]

6 Comments » - Posted in Litigation, News, Patents by Greg

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

IBM Posts Strong Earnings, Analysts Credit Acquisitions

IBM released earnings today.
Per Forbes:
IBM has purchased 50 companies, 31 of which are software firms and 48 of which are at least software related, in the past four years.
The rain cloud in this sunny forecast is that the growth came mostly from hardware and software top and bottom line growth. To really grow, IBM […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Acquisitions, Performance, News by Greg

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

All of IBM Rallies Behind SOA

In recent news, IBM executives held a teleconference Tuesday, Oct. 5, to declare “the entire IBM company is now rallying behind SOA,” and announced new WebSphere offerings adding industry specific services and governance capabilities to their product line.
“SOA is a style,” Mills said. “It’s a style of building applications. It’s a style of integrating applications. […]

No Comments » - Posted in General, SOA by Greg

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Great Podcast on SOA Industry

There’s a great podcast with Steve Garone, formerly the Chief Technical Strategist for Sun Microsystem’s Software Marketing organization discussing SOA trends, focusing on IBM and BEA specifically. If you’re interested in IBM and SOA it would be worth a listen on the way to work sometime. I’ve pulled out some quotes that I […]

No Comments » - Posted in General by Greg

Friday, October 13th, 2006

IBM Gets Open Source Fickle

There was a blog post complaining about IBM stripping functionality out of a blog platform for Lotus that they bought to keep the source code closed. The author laments that IBM is inconsistent in its support for open source.
I was unfamiliar with the software, so I scanned through IBM’s technote on the release to […]

2 Comments » - Posted in General, News, Products, Open Source by Greg

Monday, October 9th, 2006

IBM Downsizing

The routine donwsizing first posted here was picked up by the mainstream press. The new detail is the line of work the employees were in:
The affected engineers are developing components for IBM’s line of BladeCenter servers–one of the company’s best-selling hardware products. Sales of BladeCenter systems, which feature a slimmed-down profile for ease of […]

2 Comments » - Posted in General by Greg

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

IBM asks for dismissal of all SCO claims. Request for the moon to follow

Groklaw has a great article about the news in the SCO vs. IBM case. In short, IBM asked the judge to throw out SCO Group’s breach-of-contract and copyright case on the grounds that SCO “has failed to identify any code allegedly owned by SCO and copied by IBM into Linux” (The Judge already stated as […]

No Comments » - Posted in Litigation, News by Greg