http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bnsindex.html Description When IBM preannounced its revenues and earnings as the market was swooning two weeks ago in an effort to calm a staggering and falling Wall Street, the company's overall numbers gave the impression that Big Blue was nonetheless weathering the financial storm. While this may be true in the aggregate, to IBM's credit (don't say credit) as an IT supplier, certain portions of its business--particularly certain server lines--didn't do so well. Decide for yourself if this is some kind of leading indicator for the rest of 2008 and maybe 2009. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns101608-story01.html 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. Today, 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. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns100708-story01.html IT Jungle has confirmed that Help/Systems and its private equity backer, the Audax Group, have acquired Bytware, the developer of security and management tools for the i OS platform. The purchase, for which the companies plan no formal announcement, comes just a month after the combination of Help/Systems and Audax snapped up i OS security tool vendor PowerTech, and lays the groundwork for more acquisitions in the months ahead. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns093008-story01.html If the economies of the Western countries are heading into recession, the purchase orders for servers at companies sure don't seem to be a reflection of this yet. And the Asia/Pacific, Eastern European, and South American markets still seem to be booming, despite more than a year of jittery economies where their indigenous companies have their own customers. And so, the second quarter looked pretty good in terms of server sales, according to research from box counter Gartner, with server sales up 5.7 percent to $13.8 billion and shipments up 12.2 percent to 2.34 million units. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns082508-story01.html Microsoft's Windows Server customers have not yet burned through all of the $240 million in certificates that allow them to get Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system and a year's worth of tech support from Microsoft instead of buying it through Novell. These Windows-Linux shops apparently want to acquire extended service contracts for SLES, and that is why Microsoft has coughed up another $100 million check for Novell. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns082008-story01.html While the U.S. dollar may be strengthening a bit in recent weeks, overseas currencies where IT sales are growing very rapidly were and continue to be a lot stronger and business is a lot more brisk, which means that Hewlett-Packard's third quarter of fiscal 2008 ended July 31 was helped considerably by the ongoing lopsidedness in the global economy. HP posted sales of $28.2 billion in the quarter, up 10.2 percent, and net earnings of just over $2 billion, up 14 percent. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns081908-story01.html If there is any rule in the latter stages of development in any market, it is that the big get bigger. So it has been in the market for application software for businesses of all sizes, and this week JDA Software continued to exert its gravity in the software space by acquiring sometime-rival supply chain software specialist i2 Technologies for a net cost of about $346 million. The move not only makes JDA that much more of a player in supply chain software--and for many companies, positions JDA up above SAP and Oracle--but also puts to rest years of speculation about what would happen to i2. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns081108-story01.html When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns071708-story01.html Well, customers who were expecting to be using Sun Microsystems' Rock UltraSparc-RK processors inside new Supernova servers within a few months have not been left empty handed by Sun and its server and processor partner, Fujitsu. The Rock chips and their related servers have been pushed out until the second half of 2009--if not later, given the history of Sparc delays--but in the meantime, Sun and Fujitsu are giving customers a new upgrade to quad-core Jupiter Sparc64 VII processors inside the Sparc Enterprise line. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns071408-story01.html As is traditional with Enterprise Linux releases from Red Hat, the latest RHEL 5.2 update that begins shipping today has a bunch of patches to make it work better on recently announced processors and related I/O peripherals. The update, which went into beta in March, also has the usual refresh of the open source stack for Linux as well as bug fixes and security patches. Significantly, the updated Linux kernel also includes support for more scalable processor clusters, for both physical machines and virtual machines. http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns052108-story01.html