Concluding a staged rollout covering two months, IBM has spilled out a grab bag of so-called service products encompassing a wide range of skills and technologies, from point-of-sale systems to an IT executive workshop. The bundles of software and expertise sold as distinct packages bring to fruition a significant goal of IBM: to capitalize on its vast storehouse of knowledge acquired developing client solutions by repackaging software and services for new customers.

IBM continues to dominate the global server market in terms of revenue, with 33.7 percent of the total market share in the third quarter of this year, according to the latest report from Gartner, released Nov. 21. The company saw its server revenue climb 7.4 percent from the same time a year ago in 2005, when the company held 32.7 percent of the market, according to the Gartner study.

Overwhelmed by an onslaught of external threats that aim to take down or infiltrate their networks, enterprises are increasingly turning to their telecommunications carriers, ISPs and managed services providers to help stop attacks before they arrive. Companies are demanding that their providers offer a range of security protections as part of their licensing agreements. Alongside those onboard network defenses, many telecom carriers, ISPs and MSPs are building out a range of additional security offerings to protect customers and create new opportunities to make money.

When it comes to IT, change may very well be the only thing CIOs can depend on in 2007. That’s what the editors at CIO Insight found when they took each of the 13 surveys they conducted in 2006 and put them under the microscope to project next year’s 30 major trends.

Shortened workdays before big holidays are an increasingly rare occurrence, finds a survey released by Hudson Employment, a New York-based staffing and outsourcing company. Half of the workers surveyed responded that their companies do not offer them any extra flexibility around the holidays, and 54 percent say their office is no more casual during the holidays than in the rest of the year. This is despite the fact that 37 percent of the work force admits to being less productive around the holidays. Increasingly, workers are simply not taking paid days off from work, even when weeks are made available to them. More than one-third (37 percent) of respondents said they anticipate not using all of their time off this year. Fourteen percent of respondents polled said they hadn’t taken a vacation this year longer than a long weekend, while 24 percent of workers reported that they had not taken a single vacation day this year.

Small businesses must become more aware that they are the potential victims of cybercrime, former White House security adviser Howard Schmidt has urged. Speaking at an IT security event at London’s House of Lords on Monday, Schmidt said all businesses are at risk through a lack of proper configuration of security equipment, or through not taking proper security precautions.

Contributing Editor Nancy Hand is back with another story from the support trenches. This time, a user’s mailfile gets all weird. Eventually, the Notes client is reinstalled. But you don’t have to do that. Read Nancy’s article and you’ll learn how to fix Notes without reinstalling.

Read this DominoPower article.

In addition to plenty of turkey, a record amount of spam will be served up this holiday season. Mass emailers traditionally bump up their activity as the year winds down. But this year, the amount of junk messages could be unprecedented, companies that make spam-busting tools say. And senders of unsolicited ads are already celebrating the close of the harvest season and the approach of Christmas.

Proliferating virally, wiki usage has grown exponentially in recent months, along with other consumer-centric technologies–including blogs, podcasts and RSS–that have made their way into the workplace thanks in part to the influx of the tech-savvy entry-level employees of so-called Generation Y. A wiki, which means "quick" in Hawaiian, is a Web site that enables users to easily edit and update shared content. Computer programmer Ward Cunningham originated the wiki concept and gave it its name more than a decade ago.

Computer and software giant Hewlett Packard said its largest research and development center will be located in Israel in the wake of its acquisition of Mercury Interactive. HP bought Mercury for about $4.5 billion in stock in a deal that was completed earlier in November. Thomas Hogan, senior vice president of HP Software’s technology solutions group, said HP has opted to keep Mercury’s 700 employees that had worked in its offices in Yehud, a town near Tel Aviv, which will bring HP’s workforce in Israel to more than 3,000–the second largest tech firm after Intel.