January 20, 2011
IBM (nearly) hits $100bn in 2010 sales
The Register
Timothy Prickett Morgan shares IBM’s recent mainframe sales.
“It looks like there was a lot of pent up demand for IBM’s System zEnterprise 196 mainframes. At least for the large banking, insurance, and manufacturing companies that tend to buy this big iron. In the fourth quarter of 2010, IBM’s mainframe sales were the best that company has seen in six years and they helped drive the company’s sales up to $99.9B, an increase of four per cent compared to the year before. In the fourth quarter, IBM’s sales rose 6.6 per cent, to just over $29B, and net income rose by 9.2 per cent, to $5.26B.”
MSPs: How to Increase Revenues Without Increasing Costs
MSPmentor
Dev Anand shares some tips on how to select business automation tools.
“Take extra care when deciding on your business automation tools. The more intelligent and integrated they are, the easier it is to handle them. Choose intelligent tools with active development; not the age old dying technology. Fish out the information on the future development of the tools from the vendor’s Web site or road map. The tools must require a minimum learning curve, must be easy to work with, provide useful reports, have adequate help materials on using the tools, provide quick and quality support, etc. The tool should integrate with various third party tools. This helps you offer a wide range of services without much hassle.”
HP Slate orders still delayed, still blaming ‘high volume of orders’
Engadget
Joanna Stern writes why there’s a delay on the Palm/HP Web OS tablets.
“Oh sure, it looks like some glorious Palm / HP Web OS tablets are headed our way (even if we are hearing it won’t be until late summer / early fall), but you know what has been supposedly headed our way for over two months now? The HP Slate 500. Yep, HP’s seemingly-abandoned Windows 7 tablet is still suffering from major delays, and according to our sources and an HP customer support rep, a ‘material shortage’ combined with a ‘high volume of orders’ are causing these tablets to be held up.”
