IBM is very obviously throwing a lot of research, marketing, and sales effort at its Smarter Planet initiative, all of which seems to put Smarter Planet in the category of IBM's older (and successful)
Value Added Resellers are seeing customer interests and investments in IBM i on blades, upgrades, new storage features, solid state drives, upcoming POWER7, and the next version of IBM i.
In the U.S. economy, it would seem that companies are buying programmer's skills like commodities: all they have to do is find the lowest price and buy it. And what's scarce in the U.S.