i 7.1 Due April 14, with Open Access for RPG, Other Goodies
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that the next iteration of IBM's i for Business operating system, i 7.1, will be announced at an unusual Wednesday press conference a little more than a month from now on April 14. While that may seem like an odd time to do an announcement, that just so happens to be the last day of the Northeast IBM i User Groups Conference, which runs from April 12 through 14. READ MORE >

It's Big Picture Time for Application Development Projects
by Dan Burger

Right away, application modernization sounds like a technical subject. But it really is a business topic. It's about getting a return on investment by reusing existing assets. Those assets are applications and they need to be enabled for a business environment that has changed since those applications were born and raised. To understand application modernization, it has to be discussed in terms of business strategy, user requirements, and integration. As IBM has been fond of pointing out in the past, the i is for integration. READ MORE >

Unix, Other Servers Still Wobbly in Q4, Says IDC
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In last week's issue of The Four Hundred, I drilled into the quarterly server sales and shipment stats from Gartner, and this week, it is time to take a look at the similar, yet different, set of stats coming out of Gartner's rival, IDC. The latter companies cuts up and talks about the server racket a little differently from Gartner, and by looking at both, you get a better sense of what is going on. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Accidental Philanthropist
by Victor Rozek

Words can be unreliable. Their meaning changes with context and time. Take cool, for example. Until the late 1950s it referred to ambient temperature when the Beat generation co-opted it as an expression of approval. These days when you see words like traitorous and Pakistan they conjure up betrayal and terror. But when applied to the life of a person responsible for one of the most important innovations in the history of the computer industry, those meanings are dead wrong. And you have to go back more than 50 years to understand them. READ MORE >