Posted 10/30/09 at 08:03:47 AM by Paul Lilly

According to IBM, some 235 former Sun and HP customers moved their critical business workloads to IBM servers and storage systems in the third quarter. And in the past three years since IBM first established its Migration Factory program specifically for this purpose, Big Blue has been able to convince nearly 2,000 customers to make the switch, most of which have come from rivals Sun and HP.

Perhaps weary of what the future holds once Oracle's acquisition of Sun is complete, 84 Sun clients made the move to IBM Power Systems in the third quarter alone. According to IBM, it's the company's long-term investments in systems and consistent roadmaps that have been the biggest draws.

Speaking of Power Systems, IBM gained five share points in the third quarter, which is the sixth consecutive quarter of share gains. System x systems gained two points, while IBM storage went up an unspecified amount in the third quarter.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 10:17:00 AM by Pulkit Chandna

IBM is hoping its latest war cry can somehow pierce the din that Windows 7 seems to be generating. In September, the company struck a partnership with Canonical, the UK-based sponsor of Ubuntu, which resulted in the launch of an Ubuntu-based desktop bundle in Africa.

The cloud- and Ubuntu-based software package, which is part of IBM’s Smart Work Initiative, will soon be debuting in the States. The Ubuntu-based desktop package includes IBM’s free Lotus Symphony productivity suite and Lotus Notes, which is a business email and collaboration solution.

The IBM Client for Smart Work will only arrive in the U.S. in 2010 despite IBM positioning it to rival Windows 7 – on the brink of launch - in the enterprise market. It will be available both as a run-of-the-mill desktop and as a virtualized desktop.

"If a company is a 'Windows shop,' at some point it will need to evaluate the significant costs of migrating its base to Microsoft's next desktop," said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software. IBM and chums are clearly targeting those businesses that are not too keen on Windows 7.

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Posted 10/20/09 at 09:50:01 AM by Paul Lilly

Robert Moffat, IBM's highest ranking hardware executive and front runner to carry the CEO torch, has been indicted on chargers of insider trading. So has Rajiv Goel, a managing director of Intel subsidiary, Intel Capital, and Anil Kumar, a director at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and adviser to AMD.

Insider trading carries some serious repercussions, and if found guilty, all three could be looking at prison time. And it's not looking good. Thanks to wiretapped phone conversations and statements from an informant, SEC investigators believe they can show how the trio used inside information and well-timed trades to accumulate more than $25 million in illegal gains.

One alleged illegal instance includes Goel giving billionaire investor Raj Rajaratnam a heads up on January 8, 2007 that Intel share prices would likely rise over the next couple of days. According to the feds, this prompted Rajaratnam to purchase 1 million shares of Intel stock, and then 500,000 more on January 11. On January 16, he unloaded all of his Intel stock, netting about $1 million profits in a matter of four days.

Goel is also accused of alerting Rajaratnam about an impending deal between Clearwire and Sprint, which ended up netting him another $750,000 in profits.

There's a ton more to the scandal, all of which you can read here.

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Posted 10/16/09 at 08:39:37 AM by Paul Lilly

IBM on Thursday posted its third quarter results, and for the most part, it was all good news for Big Blue. Compared to last year, the company posted better numbers pretty much across the board.

IBM report third quarter diluted earnings of $2.40 per share, up 18 percent over last year's earnings of $2.04 per share. Net income also shot up by double-digit percentage points and settled at $3.2 billion, up from $2.8 billion last year, which is a 14 percent gain.

"We continued to invest for growth in areas where clients see potential for value creation including Smarter Planet solutions, cloud computing, and advanced business analytics," the company said in a statement. "We are optimistic about 2009 as we again raise our full-expectations and we remain well had of pace for our 2010 roadmap of $10 to $11 per share."

By the end of the year, IBM said it now expects full-year earnings to hit $9.85 per share compared with its previous expectation of at least $9.70 per share.

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Posted 10/04/09 at 04:19:48 PM by Justin Kerr

Starting on October 5th IBM will begin selling a Web-based version of its popular Lotus Notes software suite, a move that puts it in direct competition with Google. The service which is currently being called “LotusLive iNotes” will include the traditional email, calendar, and contact management applications, but interestingly enough will not have any type of substitute for Google Docs.

IBM is apparently counting on the notion that most companies simply don’t want all of the applications that come with Google Apps, and would choose just the core communication applications if they had the choice. Just in case that alone isn’t enough to win over companies looking at cloud based options, they are also undercutting Google’s price per user by $14 a year, bringing the annual cost of a license down to a mere $36.

Google may have a two-year head start on IBM with over 1.75 million registered businesses, but researchers from Gartner claim this is only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently if current trends continue, almost 20 percent of companies will use some form of hosted email by 2012. It will be interesting to see if IBM’s sterling reputation with enterprises will be enough to beat out Google. Currently they don’t have any plans to offer free consumer level versions of the product, but that could certainly change over time.

Head on over to IBM's website to access the free 30 day trial.

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Posted 08/27/09 at 09:08:48 AM by Paul Lilly

According to IBM's semi-annual security report, hackers and other cyber miscreants are spending fas less time phishing as they shift their attention to other technologies to swipe your personal data.

"The decline in phishing and increases in other areas (such as banking Trojans) indicate that attackers may be moving their resources to other methods to obtain the gains that phishing once achieved," IBM said in its Internet Security Systems 2009 Mid-Year Trend & Risk Report.

Trojans, which include downloaders and info-stealers, are now the most commonly used tools of the trade accounting for 55 percent of the new malware seen, says the report. That's an increase of 9 percent over last year. The rise can partially be attributed the existence of "public-available toolkits" that malware distributors advertise as being easy to use.

More info here.

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Posted 08/26/09 at 03:01:32 PM by Paul Lilly

The CPU wars in the desktop market have grown pretty stale with Intel's Core i7 architecture kicking AMD's tail, but when it comes to the server sector, the battle is starting to heat up.

Enter IBM, who at this week's Hot Chips conference officially unveiled its muscular 8-core Power7 processor. The mighty chip is expected to pack 1.2 billion transistors onto a 45nm die. Each core will boast 12 execution units, as well as 32 threads per chip and advanced pre-fetching data and instruction sets.

"I am sure Power7 will be the fastest processor around, probably faster than Intel's Nehalem in some benchmarks," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64.

Other specs include scalability up to 32 sockets, 256KB L2 cache per core, 32MB of on chip eDRAM shared L3 cache, dual DDR3 memory controllers, 100GB/s memory bandwidth per chip, and 360GB/s SMP bandwidth per chip.

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Posted 08/17/09 at 10:02:14 AM by Paul Lilly

Imagine a microchip with the most beautiful blue eyes you've ever seen and absolutely no propensity towards disease. Now get that picture out of your head because it has nothing to do with what IBM is experimenting with.

IBM is, however, playing around with artificial DNA nanostructures, or "DNA origami," as a way to develop even smaller chips at cheaper prices, according to a paper published on Sunday in the journal of Nature Nanotechnology.

"This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry," IBM research manager Spike Narayan said in an interview with Reuters. "Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes."

Narayan went on to say that if the DNA origami process scales to production level, manufacturers could look at spending less than a million dollars on polymers, DNA solutions, and heating implements, rather than hundreds of millions of dollars on complex tools.

Sounds great, but the technology is still a ways off. It will be take at least another decade of experimentation and testing, Narayan says.

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