Dan Burger
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Mincron Goes GUI and Mobile with LANSA
May 6, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreMincron is an old school IBM ISV with its roots reaching back to the days of the System/38 and green screen applications with RPG lineage. It’s a niche ERP software vendor serving the durable goods wholesale industry. In the beginning, the suite of applications were all green screen all the time. Then came the day when Mincron executives realized the world was moving beyond text-based data presentation.
“We started in the late ’90s to modernizing apps,” says Greg Neal, the IT director at Mincron. “This is not quite one of those stories about how it took a thousand tries to
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Looksoftware Introduces Open Access to COBOL Development
May 6, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreTime reveals all secrets. RPG Open Access is a good example. It didn’t take long for COBOL developers to hear about RPG OA and soon they began asking for an Open Access of their own. So this week, looksoftware, one of the early pioneers in RPG OA, is adding Open Access for COBOL to its product line, which has had a singular RPG orientation up to this point. What’s good for RPG is good for COBOL. Makes sense.
Open Access for COBOL was something IBM talked about as a potential project, says looksoftware product manager Eamon Musallam. “The level
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Mincron Goes GUI and Mobile with LANSA
May 6, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreMincron is an old school IBM ISV with its roots reaching back to the days of the System/38 and green screen applications with RPG lineage. It’s a niche ERP software vendor serving the durable goods wholesale industry. In the beginning, the suite of applications were all green screen all the time. Then came the day when Mincron executives realized the world was moving beyond text-based data presentation.
“We started in the late ’90s to modernizing apps,” says Greg Neal, the IT director at Mincron. “This is not quite one of those stories about how it took a thousand tries to
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IBM i 7.2 Available May 2
May 5, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen IBM flexes its brain muscles, heads turn. The competition that was posing for the crowd while working out with the light weights quietly leaves the gym. Friday was one of those days. A few select Power8-based servers, the first of larger lineup of what IBM is calling the “scale-out” machines, are ready to rip. And for the IBM i advocacy, the latest release of the operating system–available May 2–is showing off for the first time.
COMMON hosted a webinar on April 28 that officially introduced the news, which was a great opportunity for COMMON to increase its visibility. IBM
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Power8 Before It’s Too Late
May 5, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreNow that Power8 has broken out of the gate, the eyes of the Unix world will turned to see if IBM can rein in the challenge Intel has created in this enterprise computing horse race. The quarter-by-quarter decline in Power Systems revenue has not been a pleasant ride for IBM’s AIX side of Big Blue. We’ve often heard, “What’s good for Power Systems is good for IBM i.” That’s why we’re wishing Power8 the best.
IBM, as it introduced the first five Power8 boxes at the Impact2014 conference, also plugged into a social media audience with a promotional video that
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Business Aligns With IT At Midwestern Tech Conference
May 5, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreContinuing education and training programs for IT personnel seems like a no-brainer. The benefits seem obvious. And even more obvious are the disadvantages of an IT staff that has fallen behind the technical advancements that start-up companies have in place. That’s a competitive advantage that creates risk for businesses that allow IT skills to stagnate.
We hear a lot about the importance of aligning IT with business goals. Business goals are a moving target and IT skills are, too.
There are significant number of IBM midrange shops in the Midwest, and more than 100 or so should be sending people
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Executing RPG: Pull The Plug, Kilner Says
April 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreSteve Kilner has been down nine miles of ugly road and he’s seen enough. If you’ve ever looked at 20-year-old, monolithic RPG code with the thought in mind that this code can serve another five or 10 years, it’s likely you’ve seen enough, too. It’s time for assessment, Kilner believes, and his assessment is that a lot of high maintenance RPG is beyond saving, beyond modernizing, and is unmistakably ill-equipped for the modern age of business computing.
This begins with a question of quality code and Kilner is talking about code that possesses inert amounts of quality. It’s so convoluted
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Avnet To Resell SoftLayer Cloud, But No IBM i Slices
April 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM‘s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure division got a boost last week when Avnet Technology Solutions signed on as a reseller of cloud services. Avnet has been a major player in IBM’s value added reseller (VAR) channel for systems, software, and services for nearly 30 years.
In the early days, Avnet was completely devoted to the IBM midrange (the AS/400, iSeries, System i and IBM i), but it has diversified to handle the gamut of IBM’s hardware and software and many services, including most recently IBM training and education. Avnet’s partner channel education efforts related to the cloud have been in
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Big Deals Spark Q1 At Manhattan Associates
April 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read morePropelled by the evolution of multi-channel retailing called omni-channel, the supply chain software company Manhattan Associates turned in a quarterly financial report with better than expected gains. Compared to one year ago, revenue in Q1 2014 surged 15 percent to $113.6 million and license revenue climbed 17 percent to $17.1 million. License revenue was flat for the past two years. After paying all the bills, net income at the company rose 40 percent to $18.7 million.
About 60 percent of license fees come from the company’s warehouse management solutions and 30 percent of license revenue was attributed to net new
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Unions Criticize IBM’s Earning Per Share Focus
April 28, 2014 Dan Burger
… Read moreWorkforce rebalancing, IBM‘s term for erasing higher paid and higher skilled employees in more economically advanced regions while adding to its workforce with lower skilled and lower paid employees from less economically advanced regions, is a short-term win that leads to a long-term loss. And that loss could be the disappearance of IBM as we know the company today. That’s the warning message being delivered to the IBM board of directors just ahead of the stockholders’ meeting Tuesday, April 29.
The message, which calls for a reorientation of IBM, comes from an amalgamation of employee advocacy groups: the Global