Dan Burger
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IBM Opens North Carolina Cloud Center
September 29, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM opened the doors to another cloud resiliency center this week. You’ll find it in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, an area in the midst of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. The facility provides cloud-based business continuity capabilities for companies with low tolerance for downtime and without suitable disaster recovery or high availability implementations.
No specifics were given regarding the available platforms at the new cloud center, but similar cloud centers in London and Hong Kong are operating in the SoftLayer cloud, which is chiefly Intel oriented. IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 to gain a customer base and revenue stream
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Pushed Content Provides Easy Entry to Mobile Development
September 23, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreYour excursion into mobile application development can be a lot easier than what you’ve been led to believe. And a lot less expensive, too. A pre-packaged mobile app that allows system administrators and application developers to automatically send mobile device notifications from modern IBM midrange servers or from applications running on those boxes could be the mobile momentum you need. The app, which delivers notifications to iOS and Android mobile devices, was released last week by SystemObjects.
SystemObjects calls the app SP4i-Push. It’s a follow-up to SmartPad4i, which SystemObjects introduced in mid-2013. That product was designed to create IBM
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Pushed Content Provides Easy Entry to Mobile Development
September 23, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreYour excursion into mobile application development can be a lot easier than what you’ve been led to believe. And a lot less expensive, too. A pre-packaged mobile app that allows system administrators and application developers to automatically send mobile device notifications from modern IBM midrange servers or from applications running on those boxes could be the mobile momentum you need. The app, which delivers notifications to iOS and Android mobile devices, was released last week by SystemObjects.
SystemObjects calls the app SP4i-Push. It’s a follow-up to SmartPad4i, which SystemObjects introduced in mid-2013. That product was designed to create IBM
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IBM i Modernization Gets A Fresche-look
September 22, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreFresche Legacy is making a name for itself in the IBM midrange business. Today the company announced it is acquiring looksoftware, one of several successful third-party application development tool vendors. The transaction creates a unique modernization-focused company. One year ago, Fresche Legacy purchased Databorough, a company with strong database technology. What’s taking shape is a company with an expanded modernization strategy designed to help companies solve modernization puzzles.
The marriage of application modernization and database modernization is something new for the IBM i software community, where application modernization has gained a foothold while database modernization struggled for attention.
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COBOL And RPG Take Similar Roads To Revival
September 22, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreCOBOL and RPG are brothers of different mothers. They share many characteristics, not all of them bad. Both languages have powered enterprise-grade applications for a long time, relying on strength in their early years and stamina as time marched on. Both are capable of handling massive workloads, despite being classified as garage sale relics by promoters of lighter weight systems. And modernization strategies and academic initiatives have been designed to steer companies with COBOL and RPG dependencies into the future.
COBOL workloads on IBM midrange systems are not abundant. But they are out there. Ed Airey, product marketing manager for
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IBM Worklight Gets The Magic Quadrant Treatment
September 22, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreGaining a favorable place on Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant is as good a reason as any to bake a cake and have a party.
IBM‘s Worklight application development portfolio an amalgamation of developer tools for creating, deploying, managing, and securing mobile applications was recently judged worthy of Magic Quadrant “Leader” status after an assessment with other selected tools.
Worklight is the mobile application development platform component of IBM’s MobileFirst enterprise mobility program. The Worklight platform includes analytics, testing, integration, security and management. IBM built Worklight to create hybrid apps, but it’s also a capable tool for building Web apps
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Watson Heading To Predictive Analytics
September 22, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen IBM talks about its cognitive computing brainchild Watson, words like “the future of computing” tumble out of press releases like peanuts from a box of Cracker Jacks. But don’t blame Watson if he comes to the party wearing a hyperbole suit. He’s not just another ordinary language-based cognitive robot. He’s the face of business computing. And he has a last name now: Analytics.
Watson Analytics took a bow looking like a billion dollars, which coincidentally is the amount of money IBM claims is invested in the Watson platform. Since 2011, when young Watson was a mere computer system packed
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Searching For IBM i Answers
September 22, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIn general terms, we know the IBM i community pretty well. It’s a little frustrating, however, that so many of the specifics that are lacking. Anecdotal stories abound. Generalities are applied with impunity. IBM, even with big data and analytics as cornerstones of its modernization marketing messages, claims it knows almost nothing about its IBM i customers when it comes to hardware and software implementations. Meaningful data is either not being collected or not being shared if it is collected.
It’s easier to believe the second of those options as opposed to the first.
Therefore, I’m in favor of
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IBM i Upgrades Not All On The Same Path
September 15, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreThere are many IBM midrange shops that recognize the value of investing in and implementing the new capabilities in the IBM i operating system. Sometimes we lose sight of that because there’s no tidal wave of OS upgrades on the heels of major new releases. There never has been. It’s more like the steady flow of a river, which looks calm on the surface and belies the activity that goes unseen.
You can get a glimpse of that by talking with someone like Pete Massiello. His company, iTech Solutions Group, is on schedule to do 150 IBM i OS
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Integration Eases Free-Format RPG Migrations
September 15, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe capability to convert fixed form RPG to free form RPG is one of the most far-reaching enhancements to the IBM i operating system. Last week, two members of the IBM i ISV community formed a partnership that could benefit organizations that are ready to take advantage of this feature, which was introduced with IBM i 7.1 TR7. The software change management company Remain Software and the RPG modernization firm Linoma Software are combining efforts to ease the migration of RPG applications to free-format, a process that is considered a wise investment in legacy IBM i assets.
Linoma’s RPG Toolbox