You’ll remember that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems early last year for $7.4 billion. Since then, IBM has been hoovering up customers. In August, market researchers IDC were saying that IBM had grown its Unix revenues by 15 percent in the second quarter and its market share by 6 percent. Adding that Oracle had lost share.

IBM claims that in the second quarter, its Power Systems unit acquired 334 customers from competitors, with 210 of those coming from Oracle. And, just to show that they are on a war footing and it’s not just friendly rivalry, IBM says that its formal migration program, which entices customers to move to IBM systems, has gained 7,210 server and storage customers from rivals since its inception in 2006.

There is a third player on the pitch – HP – which has been experiencing pretty dire times itself recently. IBM’s saying it’s acquired 110 users from HP. HP recently announced that Meg Whitman, the former CEO at eBay, will take over from Leo Apotheker, who’s only been there a year. Why dump Apothekar? No other reason than the company losing half it’s market value in the time Apothekar has been in charge!

There were even rumours (and, who knows, it might still happen) that Oracle would scoop up HP and add it to its own portfolio. Others suggest that the problems Oracle experienced with Sun’s SPARC hardware business may convince it to keep away from HP’s Itanium. Perhaps IBM might buy HP? That last sentence should come enclosed in <start rumour> tags!

But after a longish period of haemorrhaging its Sun SPARC users and having to put up with IBM’s suitably smug grins, Oracle has now announced its high-end SuperCluster system powered by its new T4 SPARC chip. With an estimated 50,000 SPARC customers, it’s a business well-worth hanging on to.

The SuperCluster T4-4 is a general-purpose system offering a claimed 33 percent more price/performance than IBM’s largest Power servers and (again claimed) more than 50 percent more price/performance than an Itanium-based Integrity server from HP.

The SuperCluster is powered by Oracle’s eight-core T4 chip, which Oracle claims offers five times the performance of the current 16-core T3. The SuperCluster also includes the capabilities of Oracle’s existing Exadata database system and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box offering, both of which are powered by x86 chips from Intel.

The SuperCluster runs the current Solaris 10 operating system or the new Solaris 11, and will run any applications that its SPARC customers might run.

We can only wait and see what IBM will produce when it comes out of its corner. It certainly knows that the fight is back on.

It seems that Windows 7 smartphones aren’t really up there with the top three yet, because IBM has only made its app available to the app store for iTunes, Android, and the teenagers’ favourite, Blackberry. For IBM, the idea is to make their social networking platform, IBM Connections, available on smartphones – like Facebook and Twitter (and other social media). To be fair, you could access IBM Connections through a browser on these phones, but now there’s a proper app. Obviously there are different processes for making the app available for the different organizations, which will affect how quickly it will be before you can download the app on your device. The good news is that the app is free.

So what is IBM Connections? According to IBM’s Web site: “IBM Connections is social software for business that lets you access everyone in your professional network, including your colleagues, customers, and partners.

“The latest capabilities in IBM Connections, such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and to work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.”

It seems that the ideation and media gallery modules are natively available in the mobile apps. This allows users to vote on ideas, comment on ideas, and manage the ideas from their phones. In addition, users can take photos and upload them – so they can be shared immediately.

Built in to IBM Connections 3 are ‘moderation’, ideation blog’ and ‘media widget gallery’. Moderation allows users to review content in blogs, forums, and files before lications and approve, reject, or delete as appropriate. There’s a template available for each community to generate ideas, gather feedback, and come to consensus on the best ideas. This is the ideation blog. The media gallery widget is obviously somehwere to upload and share photos and videos.

Meanwhile, Google has confirmed that it bought 1,029 patents from IBM. These include SEO, servers, routers, relational databases, object-oriented programming, and fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips. It seems that no-one is revealing how much was paid.

Why would they buy so many patents? Perhaps to avoid litigation because they are using someone else’s idea. Or perhaps it’s to stop a rival company using someone else’s idea. It may be little more than synchonicity that Google has recently launched it’s Facebook-like Google plus. The more cynical among you may suggest they are looking for a way to stop Facebook doing something as yet undisclosed that will affect their business! Or it could be to do with the Android versus iPhone smartphone war. Or maybe its because Oracle is seeking billions of dollars in damages and royalties because of Google’s use of Java in Android phones. Or maybe, late in the day, Google has realized how important patents are in the modern business world.

Interestingly, Google was after 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks, but lost out to a consotium including Apple and Microsoft, who paid $4.5 billion for the patents. This could be the year of patent sales.

So there you have it. A week when the king of big iron turns up on the smallest of smart devices, and when Google gets itself a stash of patents. What will next week bring?

Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.

It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.

Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.

The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.

If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.

Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?

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Clouds don’t care about operating systems. They don’t care about where data is. They don’t care about constraints like CPU speed, memory, or formats. They expand as needed, in the background.

Mainframes are not clouds. Neither IBM nor Oracle want you to know that. It would kill them for you to understand that.

In time it will.

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