Through the venture, Big Blue hopes to regain the companies that flocked to the AS/400 20 years ago.

By Lee Kroon

Last Thursday, IBM unveiled an initiative that could utterly change the way the company markets and delivers applications to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Then again, the enterprise, which IBM calls "Blue Business," could turn out to be a fascinating yet largely unsuccessful venture on the computer giant's part. Either way, Blue Business is an effort that bears watching, as it could have a dramatic impact on System i users (or whatever we decide to call ourselves now) over the next several years.

The company's emphasis on green IT is designed to lower users' energy costs while boosting sales of its valued technology.

By Chris Smith

IBM introduced a series of new business initiatives last week that will be a roadmap for the company and its Business Partners for at least the next several years. The plans call for aggressively reaching out to small and medium businesses (SMBs) here and abroad with simpler, more energy-efficient solutions that can be deployed quickly and easily.

The company announces three new POWER6 servers along with special financing.

By Chris Smith

IBM introduced a new generation of POWER6 servers last week at COMMON and consolidated the System i and System p brands onto one hardware platform.

The new servers, to be packaged under the umbrella title of IBM Power Systems, will run one or all of the company's three major SMB operating systems: i5/OS, AIX, and Linux.  The company's flagship integrated platform i5/OS, whose name was more closely affiliated with the POWER5 chip, has been renamed simply IBM i. The company also said that V6R1 would be renamed to 6.1 in accordance with the industry's conventional naming protocols.

By bringing two product lines together, IBM created exciting possibilities and a few short-term headaches for its customers.

By Lee Kroon

When IBM unified the System i and System p last week, it did much more than change the nameplates on the cabinets of its POWER processor-based servers. It launched massive changes to how it prices, packages, and goes to market with those servers. While some of those changes will become obvious to everyone in short order, others will become apparent only over time. With that in mind, here are seven thoughts about how IBM's announcement will transform life as we know it within the System i community.

Many of the 1,800 attendees visit COMMON's 92 Expo vendors this year in Nashville.

By Chris Smith

COMMON 2008 by all standards was a very good show in the eyes of vendors who greatly help to support it. It didn't matter that Nashville was deluged by a series of thunderstorms during the show because all of the 1,800 attendees and 92 vendors were well-protected under the glass dome of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel complex, an amazing environment with all the hotel rooms, exhibit halls, restaurants, and nightspots enclosed inside a biosphere-type environment that is adorned with plants, walkways, rivers, and streetlights. The main complaint visitors had was that it was so large and complex they were constantly getting lost.

Conserving energy is an IT movement developing tremendous momentum as people realize the wasted heat loss in yesterday's products.

By Chris Smith

I like to go to Germany in the fall when people are celebrating Oktoberfest, but this year I thought it would be fun to go in the spring when the CeBIT trade show was being held in Hannover and be able to turn in the whole trip as a necessary travel expense.

My boss got wind of my idea and made it clear that he thought I would be much better off sticking to plan and going in the fall at my own expense.