Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008

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IBM defers New Coke financing High performance access to file storage Launching a new server platform of any kind in this economic environment is never an attractive option - unless it costs a lot less money than the alternatives. With mainframes, just being a lot cheaper than last year's model is progress, and with the System z10 Business Class entry mainframes announced this week, IBM has cut the price for the server as well as for main memory and specialty engines to support Linux, Java, and DB2 workloads. But the $100,000 price tag for an entry z10 BC is still a lot of money to ask, and IBM and its Linux partners have to do something to not only sweeten the deal, but to get customers to invest now rather than wait for 2009. That is why IBM's Global Financing unit also this week announced a marketing program called Why Wait? This deal is not like Sun's Try and Buy program, where Sun gives the iron to companies to use for 90 days without requiring them to ink a deal ahead of time.

IBM's Big Push into Business Consulting IBM biggest foray yet into consulting will try to tap into the one area of the tech market expected to grow this year: analytics When Riswan Khalfan, chief information officer at TD Securities, set out to improve the performance of the bank's options-trading system last year, he couldn't find ready-to-use technology suitable for the job. So he agreed to let his company become a test subject for a research project at IBM (IBM) called "stream" computing. In TD Securities' case, stream computing lets it handle 5 million pieces of options trading data per second, analyze them on the fly, and make automated trading decisions. Stream computing is just one part of IBM's biggest foray into business consulting since it acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting seven years ago. IBM's most direct rival in business analytics consulting may be Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). IBM also faces stiff competition in the software end of the business from Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP).

Outsourced IBM Workers Denied Federal Aid -- InformationWeek Department of Labor turns down bid for Trade Adjustment Assistance. The U.S. Department of Labor has rejected a request for assistance by a group of former IBM workers who claim their jobs were offshored to China. The workers had requested aid under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, but a note published Tuesday in the Federal Register indicated that the request was denied. The workers had been employed at IBM's Integrated Supply Chain Operations unit in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. IBM cut a total of 274 jobs at Hopewell Junction in January. Labor Department officials said the workers at the plant did not qualify for TAA assistance because they weren't producing a saleable product that had been displaced by imports. A Labor Department investigation found that the workers "managed existing applications in the IBM procurement portfolio that were used internally for purposes such as invoice support, Web orders, and procurement," according to the Federal Register. More Insights