Two Top i Concerns and a Bunch of Little Ones
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Our colleagues at COMMON Europe will this week present the first pass on their annual Top Concerns survey, which the IBM midrange user group has put together for the past five years to help steer Big Blue's marketing and development of machines running the i and predecessor operating systems and their RPG language and integrated database. I have no doubt that many users will give IBM some good advice on what it needs to do. As an advocate for i shops, I have two toppers of my own and a bunch of little ones that I would like to toss into the pile. READ MORE >

IBM Puts More Power7 Iron Through the Java Test Paces
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in March, in the wake of the initial Power7-based server announcements from IBM that came out in early February, I walked you through the available benchmarks for the new Power 750 midrange box running the SAP data warehousing benchmark and the SPECjbb2005 benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. Since that time, IBM has launched Power7-based blade servers and done tests on the larger Power 770 and 780 machines to show their Java performance on the SPECjbb2005 workload. READ MORE >

Open Source EGL Means an RPG Generator Is Possible
by Alex Woodie

IBM wants to take Enterprise Generation Language open source. Last week at its Rational user conference in Florida, the vendor submitted a proposal to the Eclipse consortium that would place the bulk of EGL--a high-level language intended for Power Systems and mainframe shops that generates Java, JavaScript, and COBOL code--into the public realm. In addition to expanding the EGL customer base, IBM hopes the move will result in the creation of new add-on tools, such as code generators for RPG and .NET. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Market Cap and Propeller Beanies
by Hesh Wiener

Lately, users of iSeries, System i, and Power Systems machines might wish their servers came from Apple, a company more famous than IBM for i stuff such as iPads, iPhones, iPods, iMacs. At least that's how investors see things. At the beginning of June, Apple's capitalization was nearly $234 billion; IBM's market cap was slightly over $160 billion, about a third less. The companies may be quite different, but in at least one way their computers are similar: IBM's i and Apple's Mac are both firmware cuckoos, the former hatched in a Power nest, the latter raised in an X86 creche. READ MORE >