Dan Burger
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Starving For IBM i Security Skills
August 18, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreSkills keep organizations moving forward. The person who has skills and who can prove it is a hot commodity these days. Professional development is a great investment whether it is a company investing in its IT staff or an individual investing in his or her career. There is a skills gap and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of it, or let that gap get so wide you can’t jump back across.
Let’s take security skills as an example.
Many of you know Robin Tatam, a subject matter expert on security for the COMMON user group who
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Coming Face To Face With An IBM i Recruit
August 18, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat might you expect to find at the COMMON Fall Conference, which is coming up October 27 through 29 in Indianapolis? How about college students searching for jobs with companies invested in IBM i? If all goes as planned, there may be 20 or more attending the conference with eyes wide open and expectations set high. IBM i shops, IBM i ISVs, and business partners could use this trip to Indiana as an opportunity for recruitment.
If I may be so bold, let me suggest you make recruitment a priority. Not necessarily because you have an empty chair in the
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Agilysys in Transition; Revenue Falls Short of Goal
August 18, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreBuilding revenue growth continues to be a struggle for Agilysys, a developer of enterprise software for the gaming and hospitality markets with large portion of IBM midrange customers. In its most recent financial reporting, the company reported first quarter fiscal 2015 revenue of $23.7 million, which was less than its estimated target of $25.7 million.
Support, maintenance, and subscription revenues brought a 7 percent increase in revenue, however, the transition to subscription-based software and a repositioned sales effort to emphasize new products combined to create a 19 percent decrease in overall product revenue. Proprietary product sales were the primary
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There’s Something Happening Here
August 11, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat makes working worthwhile? A paycheck that puts a smile on your face and a work environment that doesn’t smother your personal life? How important is it to be working for a company with a progressive approach to IT with people who want to grow professionally and who want to be part of what drives business success?
If it was your responsibility to determine which technologies would be most useful to your business and how they fit in a budget and a skill set, could you lead those projects?
“There is a line in the job descriptions of all my
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Busy Signals Coming From PowerRuby
August 11, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt has been almost a year since we found out about a company called PowerRuby, a coming together of the open source Ruby on Rails development environment and the IBM Power Systems user community. “There’s something special going on with Ruby and Rails,” we were told by one of the brightest young minds in the IBM i community, Aaron Bartell. Notable IBM i evangelists Steve Will, Alison Butterill, Jon Paris, and others eagerly encouraged IBM i developers to try it.
A lot has happened for PowerRuby, although you might shake your head after reading the beta test site on
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Avnet Financials Illustrate IT Industry Volatility
August 11, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreCautiously optimistic is a popular description of the business climate. It is most often said with the emphasis on optimistic, but it seems most businesses, in reality, emphasize the cautious. The IT business is a lot like that, but what we are seeing is an unevenness that spins the weathervane toward and then away from the direction of optimistic.
You really can’t find a better example of this than Avnet, the huge electronic components and IT distribution business that moves IBM products, plus plenty of products and services from other top-tier vendors, through the sales channels. Avnet just closed
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IBM Cooks Up Online Consultant Shopping
August 11, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat do you get when you cross consulting services with e-commerce? You get IT assessments from IBM that are only a mouse click away. Order online. Delivery within 24 hours. Credit card payments accepted. It’s called IBM Global Business Services Online and it comes in five flavors: social media, mobile app migration, application development analysis, and value-enhancement examinations of either SAP or Oracle applications.
These are not designed to address large-scale engagements and complex issues. The goal is to assess the current situation and recommend a product and a plan for accomplishing an improved and IBM-approved outcome. And the targets
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A Peek At IBM i Directions And Destinations
July 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreDo you ever get the feeling that IBM i news is the news that never makes the news? There’s a joke that IBM i is Big Blue’s best kept secret. It doesn’t get many laughs, except for the smart-alecky kind. IBM’s i team has ramped up its efforts, but their reach is limited to a few hundred at conferences and a few thousand by blogging. That level of evangelism was recently displayed at the OCEAN Technical Conference, where Alison Butterill was the messenger.
Butterill is the IBM i product offering manager and worldwide evangelist. She’s as close to the
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Manhattan Associates Q2 Sales Advance; Consulting Carries The Groceries
July 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe supply chain software company Manhattan Associates, a key independent software vendor (ISV) in a key vertical market for the IBM i platform, completed its second quarter of 2014 ahead of projections. Consulting services drives the revenue bus at this company, but the firm highlighted five software licensing contracts with new customers and expanded contracts with 27 existing customers. Three contracts were in excess of $1 million. Compared to a year ago, license revenue for the quarter was up 11 percent to $18 million.
Services revenue in Q2 totaled $93.5 million, an increase of 20 percent compared to Q2
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New No-Code, Low-Code Mobile App From LANSA
July 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreGetting started on a mobile application development project can seem just slightly less challenging than swimming up Niagara Falls. And sometimes, after you’ve started the project, it can seem like hurtling down Niagara Falls. Well, hold on, there are ways to dismiss your panic attacks. One option is the just-out-of-the-oven aXes Mobile App cooked up by the IBM midrange pros at LANSA.
The best advice for first-time mobile app developers is to keep it simple and make it work. Don’t try to build the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on your first try. A better choice for the