Dan Burger
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Technically Speaking, SMBs Struggle To Compete
December 9, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe inability to afford many of the new information technologies and lacking the skills to implement those they can afford is a tightening rope around the neck of many small to midsize companies. It certainly contributes to the lack of application modernization projects that are discussed in two other articles I’ve written in this issue.
Any organization, but especially the small to midsize organizations, looks at IT investments in terms of spending money to save money. That’s pretty much a universal business fact in these times of fast-paced IT evolution. For every operational efficiency promised, there needs to be a
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Roping The Wind: Power7+ In The Texas SMB
December 2, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe last time I checked in with Doug Fulmer it was March and the IBM Power7+ machines were just getting into the market. Interest in the Power7+ boxes wasn’t exactly lighting any fires in the small to midsize market down in Texas, where Fulmer works for the value-added reseller (VAR) KS2 Technologies, and Fulmer wasn’t inclined to think that Power7+ was going to be a game changer. But then the wind started to pick up.
In the past nine months, there has been a bit of a sales spurt for the small VAR that specializes in helping small IBM
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IBM i ERP Vendor Modernizes For Success
December 2, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM i software vendors are one of the big reasons this platform, which is built around business applications, has enjoyed 25 years of greatness. The majority of these vendors are much more oriented on the midmarket than the enterprise, which happens to be where the greatest number of IBM i users do what they do. One of those vendors is VAI, the ERP software company with a healthy customer base of midsize manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.
As 2013 draws to a close, VAI is on course to close out the year with an annual growth rate in the
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Wanted: The Enterprise Data Center Of The Future
December 2, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThere are periodic leaps of progress in the IT business and some don’t even require leaps of faith. It has been 25 years since IBM introduced the AS/400 midrange computer and there are many companies now running the AS/400 successor, IBM i, that have refused, with good reason, to leap into the X86 alternate universe.
How will the data center landscape change in the coming years? The IT analysts at Gartner pay little, if any, attention to the IBM i user base, but they are predicting great leaps of progress in data center architectures. Advice for planning data center strategies
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The Risk Of Doing Nothing With Modern RPG And DB2
November 18, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe cost of application maintenance can really shrivel the effectiveness of IT. Too many people with too many hours devoted to maintenance should be raising red flags. One thing you can do to diminish the application maintenance money pit is re-evaluating mature (overly kind description) applications. Converting old RPG apps to modern free form RPG apps should be a consideration. But how many IBM midrange shops will take a look with an eye toward long-term savings?
Technology Refresh 7, available now as a PTF for companies running IBM i 7.1, can provide a substantial advantage, but even the log jam
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In The Shadow Of Database Hype
November 18, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt always chaps a few hides in the IBM midrange community when a technology gets hyped by another company as being shockingly innovative when it has been part of the IBM midrange systems for many years. In-memory database processing is one of those provoking topics. It’s a great idea for cranking up database performance, but how about giving credit where credit is due? This is about setting the record straight.
Six weeks ago, Mike Cain, a member of IBM’s senior technical staff for DB2 on i, wrote about this topic in his blog with the no-nonsense name DB2 for i
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Watson Apps Ready To Change The World
November 18, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe promise is that with technology comes change. The reality is that technology sometimes arrives alone. Cognitive computing, formerly known as artificial intelligence (old names are seldom used to market new ideas), is ready for its next chance at changing the world.
IBM‘s Watson, remembered for its Jeopardy! conquest, but so much smarter than that famous game show gladiator, is ready for another step into the spotlight.
Are you ready to make that step, too? Imagine cognitive computing–the capability to think things through and provide advice that is better than the best decision makers–as a development platform in the
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Magic Software Scores Another Quarterly Revenue Success
November 18, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe revenue trajectory for IBM i development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises continues to soar posting a third quarter revenue gain of 9 percent in year-to-year comparisons and topping its previous quarterly revenue by $1.2 million. Revenues for the first nine months of 2013 reached $103.8 million.
In the third quarter of 2013, which ended September 30, Magic Software’s revenues grew to $35.6 million compared to $32.6 million for the same quarter in 2012. The Q3 revenue incline topped Q2 revenue by 6 percent. So far in 2013 the quarterly revenue ramp has climbed from $33.4 million to $34.8 million
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Power Systems Provisioning For Enterprise-Level Academics
November 14, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative dishes out some serious enterprise-level computing to colleges around the world. Handling most of the load is a Power 770 box with a whole lot of partitioning and virtualization going on. Dialing up multi-tiered architectures with three operating systems (IBM i, AIX, and Linux) plus a variety of software combinations, and delivering functioning systems to hundreds of colleges with thousands of students is not a trivial achievement.
Kevin Langston is the principal architect in the Phoenix, Arizona, facility known as the Power Systems Hub. The Power 770 that handles the bulk of the workloads
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PowerHA On IBM i Lags Behind AIX
November 11, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreHardware-based high availability has been in the IBM playbook for several years, and Big Blue has made it one of its Power Systems priorities. Steve Finnes, IBM’s worldwide product offering manager for PowerHA on AIX and IBM i, isn’t one to play favorites when it comes to one platform over another. But when it comes to PowerHA, even Finnes will admit the product’s popularity on the AIX side far surpasses the embrace by the IBM i community.
In a conversation with IT Jungle at the Enterprise2012 conference, Finnes estimated the AIX users of PowerHA totaled “probably over 10,000 clients.” And