Dan Burger
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Porter Makes Employee-To-Consultant Migration
November 11, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreCareer goals have always been in the back of Justin Porter’s mind. He’s an IBM midrange guy with broad IT knowledge, a business degree, and literally a field of dreams.
Some of you may recognize his name. Porter is an active member of the IBM i community, is the youngest member on the COMMON board of directors, and is one of the volunteers who helped organize and fuel the Young i Professionals organization. Recently he began his own consulting business called Integrity First Technology Services.
If you know Porter, you know the name of his company is more than
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Revenue Stream Floats Agilysys
November 11, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe hospitality and gaming industry flies when the overall global economy flies. And although the economy is not exactly soaring, it is off the ground. Hotels and casinos are expanding with more choices, new locations, and indications that competition does not allow any napping. That’s good for a software company like Agilysys, which is counting on brick and mortar growth and a highly competitive hotel/gaming market to stimulate IT spending. The second quarter financial results for Agilysys indicate a net revenue pop of 10 percent year-on-year with the identical gain when comparing the first half of fiscal 2014 with
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iAdvocacy Resources On Demand
November 5, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM midrange community, as a group, can be influential. But many individuals are unaware of the power of advocacy and what it can mean for their own organizations. Like a flashlight in a dark cave, advocacy for the IBM i system can prevent companies from making uninformed decisions.
There are proven advocacy successes, but there are also instances when the lack of advocacy results in the IBM i becoming a forgotten entity, a misunderstood system, and the black sheep of the IT department. It’s fair to say that too often the information about the i is locked up in
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Watson’s Prodigy Leads Power Systems Into The Cognitive Era
November 4, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreYour entire career has played out in the programmable era of computing. That’s not likely to be the case for young IT professionals with recently launched careers, as new trails are being blazed into cognitive computing. Leading the way is IBM‘s most famous computer, the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer that goes by the name Watson. But Watson’s Jeopardy! fame was just the beginning of things to come. And if that’s all you know, you have some catching up to do.
“The next 20 years will change computing as we know it today,” says the person chosen to guide Watson development.
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Talking IBM i With Power Systems Marketing Chief
November 4, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreSeldom is heard an encouraging word about IBM Power Systems marketing. That’s the cold hard facts when you talk with the IBM i community. It’s an old complaint, much like the name change that remains a burr under the saddle of some folks. I’d like to see some i-specific marketing done to grow the market as much as any of the world-class complainers in the IBM i community, but this is quite obviously and assuredly not a IBM priority.
At the recent Enterprise2013 conference, I had a meeting with IBM’s vice president of worldwide marketing, Lisa Johnston, who reports directly
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Arrow’s Q3 Financials Flat Not Fat
November 4, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreArrow Electronics, known to the IBM i community because of its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group that moves a ton of IBM gear, delivered its third quarter financial report that puts the overall company revenue at $5 billion. The ECS group contributed $1.6 billion to that amount. In addition to being a top IBM reseller, Arrow ECS also resells products for fifty of the largest IT companies in the world.
The overall company revenue showed no gain in revenue compared to the same quarter in 2012. The same was true for the ECS group.
Company executives provided some details
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Budget For Infrastructure And Shared Systems, Say IBM Top Brass
October 28, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe more that IBM‘s enterprise computing business changes, the more it stays the same. Last week at the Enterprise 2013 conference, a newly constructed crossroads of Power Systems and mainframe technologies, the big dogs in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group preached unprecedented changes in IT while also emphasizing centralized computing, a strategy that it has always promoted as the best way for enterprises to operate. The audience seems tentative about the first, while being solidly behind the second.
Analytics, cloud, social, and mobile are all barreling down the road at the same time. Individually they are more than a
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Big Data, OpenPower Are Big Levers For Power Systems
October 28, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreDoug Balog, the general manager for IBM Power Systems for right around three months, was the big data evangelist at last week’s Enterprise2013 conference in Orlando, Florida. In the context of his presentation, he referred to data as the “new national resource” and described Power Systems as “a great box for data analytics.”
Although he lauded Power Systems hardware for its ability to do high performance analytics and its “massive compute capabilities” with parallel processing, plenty of cores, lots of threads per core, and high I/O, he followed that up by adding that “conversations with customers are about problems and
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Being CIO At IBM Means You Are IT
October 28, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreBeing the CIO at IBM must be like being the top tailor at Ralph Lauren or the number one test driver at Ferrari. It’s a great job, but you have more eyes watching you than a Siamese cat at a German Shepherd police dog academy. Jeanette Horan doesn’t seem to notice, even though there are 470,000 IBMers in 140 countries depending on her to deliver IT services like it was a box of doughnuts.
Expectations? Yeah, you might say there are a few.
Horan’s job is essentially to put into practice what IBM preaches. Ideas are only worth the paper
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RPG Toolkit Updated for TR7 Capabilities
October 22, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreConverting old RPG code to new RPG code is nothing new for Linoma Software. The company’s RPG Toolbox has handled conversions for thousands of IBM midrange shops since V5R1, according to company literature. The latest release of the Toolbox is version 5.0 release. The enhancements will enable fixed format RPG conversions to the free form syntax that is available with the IBM i Technology Refresh 7.
IBM’s TR7 was announced on October 7 and becomes generally available November 15. Linoma Chief Technology Officer Bob Luebbe says the RPG Toolbox 5.0 will be available by the end of November.
Luebbe