Articles about IBM

IBM is making a serious bid for a slice of the enterprise Linux market with the launch of a new range of mainframe servers called LinuxONE.

At the top end of the market is LinuxONE Emperor, a machine based on the IBM z13 and which can scale up to support 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers. It also delivers the security and advanced encryption features needed by large enterprises.

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I’ve been working on a big column or two about the Office of Personnel Management hack while at the same time helping my boys with their Kickstarter campaign to be announced in another 10 days, but then IBM had to go yesterday and announce earnings and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to put that announcement in the context you’ll see in the headline above. IBM is so screwed.

Below you’ll see the news spelled-out in red annotations right on IBM’s own slides. The details are mainly there but before you read them I want to make three points.

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Moore's Law, the rule describing the steady growth of computing power, seems to have been under threat of late. But work by an alliance led by IBM research could see it safe for a few years yet.

Researchers have produced the first 7nm (nanometre -- one billionth of a meter) test chips. What does this mean? Current chips have components with a width of 14 or 20nm so a 7nm chip will allow many more components to be included.

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IBM and Box have announced a global partnership that aims to transform work in the cloud by integrating existing products and services to develop new solutions for a range of industries and professions.

Box will combine its collaboration platform with IBM’s extensive portfolio of solutions in security, analytics, content management and social capabilities to partner in three key areas:

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This is my promised third column in a series about the effect of H-1B visa abuse on US technology workers and ultimately on the US economy. This time I want to take a very high-level view of the problem that may not even mention words like "H-1B" or even "immigration", replacing them with stronger Anglo-Saxon terms like "greed" and "indifference".

The truth is that much (but not all) of the American technology industry is being led by what my late mother would have called "assholes". And those assholes are needlessly destroying the very industry that made them rich. It started in the 1970s when a couple of obscure academics created a creaky logical structure for turning corporate executives from managers to rock stars, all in the name of "maximizing shareholder value".

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Disney has been in the news recently for firing its Orlando-based IT staff, replacing them with H-1B workers primarily from India, and making severance payments to those displaced workers dependent on the outgoing workers training their foreign replacements. I regret not jumping on this story earlier because I heard about it back in March, but an IT friend in Orlando (not from Disney) said it was old news so I didn’t follow-up. Well now I am following with what will eventually be three columns not just about this particular event but what it says about the US computer industry, which is not good.

First we need some context for this Disney event -- context that has not been provided in any of the accounts I have read so far. What we’re observing is a multi-step process.

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Businesses are constantly seeking to improve the digital experience that they offer their customers, delivering something that's engaging and personalized. Add in demand for mobile access from every device, integrated social capabilities, and the need to analyze data from the internet-of-things to quickly make decisions and companies are looking for faster ways to create improved customer experiences.

Today IBM and Portico Consultancy are unveiling new cloud services to help businesses of any size quickly build, test and deploy applications to deliver on their requirements.

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One reader of this column in particular has been urging me to abandon for a moment my obsession with IBM and look, instead, at his employer -- Hewlett Packard. HP, he tells me, suffers from all the same problems as IBM while lacking IBM’s depth and resources. And he’s correct: HP is a shadow of its former self and probably doomed if it continues to follow its current course. I’ve explained some of this before in an earlier column, and another, and another you might want to re-read. More of HP’s problems are covered in a very fine presentation you can read here. Were I to follow a familiar path at this point I’d be laying out a long list of HP mistakes. And while I may well do exactly that later in the week, right here and now I am inspired to do what they call in the movies "cutting to the chase", which in this case means pushing through bad tactics to find a good strategy. I want to lay out in a structural sense what’s really happening at both HP and IBM (and at a lot of other companies, too) so we can understand how to fix them, if indeed they can be fixed at all.

So I’ll turn to the works of Autodesk founder John Walker, specifically his Final Days of Autodesk memo, also called Information Letter 14, written in 1991. You can find this 30-page memo and a whole lot more at Walker’s web site. He has for most of this century lived in Switzerland where the server resides in a fortress today. We may even hear from Walker, himself, if word gets back that I’ve too brazenly stolen his ideas. Having never met the man, I’d like that.

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Staff at tech giant IBM are set to use Apple Mac machines following the company’s one-year partnership with Apple for the creation of business-centric apps for the iOS.

IBM employees will be given the option to choose between a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or traditional PC for their new workstations and will be part of the company’s choose your own device policy, according to the company’s recent memo.

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Figures released today from two major research organizations show that the worldwide server market has made a strong start to 2015.

According to Gartner shipments grew 13 percent year on year, while revenue increased 17.9 percent from the first quarter of 2014. IDC's Quarterly Server Tracker shows server revenue up 17.2 percent to $12.8 billion in the first quarter of 2015.

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Security is always in the news so it hardly comes as a surprise that the market for security products is growing. According to research specialist Gartner the worldwide security software market was up 5.3 percent in 2014.

In terms of value the market is worth $21.4 billion, however, the make up of that market is shifting. Low growth in endpoint protection platforms and a decline in consumer security software -- possibly because of improved built-in security in the latest versions of Windows -- are balanced by high-growth areas, such as security information and event management (SIEM), secure Web gateway (SWG), identity governance and administration (IGA) and enterprise content-aware data loss prevention (DLP).

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Security company Secunia has released its latest quarterly Vulnerability Update covering the period from February to April 2015.

It looks at the top 20 products with the most vulnerabilities each month and finds that there have been a total of 1,691 new vulnerabilities appearing in the top 20 over the three month period.

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Last month IBM launched its X-Force Exchange opening up access to threat intelligence data to help in the fight against cybercrime.

With 80 percent of cyber attacks now coming from organized gangs it's important that the good guys get organized too. IBM has announced today that more than 1,000 organizations across 16 industries are participating in the new threat intelligence community.

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New channels, new markets and changes in device usage make today's marketing environment more complex than ever, and that means delivering the right message to the consumer is increasingly vital.

But according to an IBM/eConsultancy study in April, only 35 percent of consumers say the communications they receive from their favorite brands are relevant and four out of five consumers believe that brands fail to understand them as individuals.

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All advertisers are keen to use the power of the Internet to deliver the right message at the right time. From today IBM and Facebook will be collaborating on the delivery of tailored marketing to help with that process.

IBM's marketing cloud clients will be able to utilize Facebook's powerful ad capabilities such as Custom Audiences, along with IBM's deep analytics and design features, to target their customers across applications, devices and time.

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