Dan Burger
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Modernization Projects On The Rise, Says Fresche Legacy
January 19, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreEvery IBM midrange shop needs one of these–a person who goes around the office from desk to desk explaining, in defense lawyer earnest and animation, the magnificence of this built-for-business computer system. What it can accomplish is worthy of attention. What is actually does is largely overlooked and what it doesn’t do is overblown and used to plan its execution. What can this system accomplish is the question that most business executives want answered.
Andy Kulakowski says more and more execs are finding the answer and moving their businesses forward. Kulakowski is intent on moving his company forward, and his
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IBM i Shops Contemplate Collaboration
January 12, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIf you know Domino, you’ve known the benefits of collaboration software long before they crowded under the umbrella of social networking. Peer inside a Domino shop and you’re likely to find an organization that understands the value of workflow and peer-to-peer teamwork. Efficiency? Yes. But for most, it is efficiency based on older collaboration technology. There are indicators that a transformation is taking shape. Keep an eye on this in 2015. And, yes, there are IBM i shops involved.
Very few Domino shops have adopted IBM‘s flagship collaboration software suite of products known as Connections. It has been less
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Critical Times, Critical Skills
December 8, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM i shops are better equipped to performance tune their infrastructure than they are to performance tune their IT workforce. On first glance, that may not raise many eyebrows. But the fact is that relatively few IBM i shops performance tune their infrastructure. What’s that tell you about their investments in training and education? There’s something stopping companies from making investments in skilled workers.
Last week I had a conversation with Jon Paris and Susan Gantner. They spend more than 300 days a year training IBM i programmers. That connects them with the minority of IBM i shops that are
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Big Blue And ITG Build Case For IBM i Resiliency
December 8, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreBusiness resiliency and business continuity are terms that are mistakenly used as synonyms with disaster recovery. A disaster is the worst type of disruption to business continuity. It is also the most infrequent. Like death from a thousand paper cuts, a variety of little things can play havoc with business resiliency. How much havoc is related to the value a company attaches to any aspect of the business that does not run at peak performance.
Downtime is the enemy of business continuity. Every year the tolerance for downtime edges closer to zero. For some shops zero tolerance has been in
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How Does Three Percent Sound?
December 8, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIT salaries are nudging their way upward and the outlook for hiring IT workers is somewhat improved as we get ready to turn the page on another calendar year. The Computer Economics 2015 IT Salary Report anticipates wages for Joe and Jane IT Worker will rise above the rate of inflation to the tune of 3 percent in the coming year, a modest increase that signals wage growth in these low-inflation times.
It may not look like much, but this indicates organizations are increasing pay rates as the jobs market improves.
The study shows that even at the 25th percentile,
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IBM i Modernization Relies On Solving Mysteries
December 1, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreBy boldly stepping into an IT modernization planning strategy, Royal Caribbean, one of the world’s largest cruise lines, is altering its 20-year-old applications and database development processes in preparation for the next 20 years of business goals. It is currently in the second phase of a program designed to migrate selected, monolithic, RPG applications to Java-based Web services that will continue to run on IBM Power servers and the IBM i operating system.
The current project focus is a strategic modernization of the company’s custom-designed reservation system that includes accounting, inventory, revenue management, and sales. The objectives include the creation
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IBM i Shops Offloading Infrastructure
December 1, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreInfrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers are gaining ground in the IBM midrange community as more organizations explore the IT strategic plan of outsourcing servers, networking, storage, and data center space. Connectria Hosting, a company with more than 15 years of managed services experience for IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 customers, is noticing the change. It’s not dependent on existing customers. New customers are coming to the cloud.
“Our IBM i business is up 35 percent over last year,” says Connectria CEO Rich Waidmann.
On a percentage basis, that’s on par with the 40 percent-plus increase Amazon Web Services
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IBM i Total Cost Of Ownership Report Updated
December 1, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreITG is IBM‘s go-to research and analysis firm when it comes to studies comparing IBM i to its competition. These studies zero in on total cost of ownership build a favorable case for IBM’s midrange systems based on costs related to hardware purchase and maintenance; licenses and support for operating systems, databases, and other systems software, systems management and database administration costs; and energy costs.
During its most recent comparison, which is dated September 2014, ITG lined up IBM Power S814 and S824 servers against two- and four-socket X86 servers powered by Intel E5 and E7 processors. One of
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RPG Certification And College Curriculum Revision In The Works
December 1, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreCOMMON is beginning work on a new RPG certification for college graduates that IBM i shops can use as a yardstick for entry-level talent. The RPG Associate certification is expected to be ready by the next COMMON Annual Meeting (April 26-29 in Anaheim, California).
COMMON Certification Steering Committee chairman Randy Dufault explained that the certification will be developed in conjunction with a revised RPG curriculum for colleges participating in the IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative program. The existing RPG curriculum is badly in need of replacement. The most prominent schools teaching RPG are not using the outdated curriculum, which does
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Midrange Dynamics Expands IBM i and Multi-Platform App Dev Capabilities
November 18, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreSingle-platform application development is a weed that won’t be pulled out of the garden. It’s not going away any time soon. But multi-platform development has been increasing and continues to expand–often in individual silos, but increasingly seen in multi-team, cross-platform, unified development environments. The idea that development environments have specific strengths and weaknesses and each has its place if you can manage the integration is not a new idea, but it is more widely acknowledged.
Productivity and integration are the two key ingredients in modern development environments. You’ve probably heard arguments that developers are most productive using tools they’re most