Dan Burger
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looksoftware Updates Server for Web and Mobile Interfaces
October 1, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhat do you want out of your Web and mobile applications? The answer to that is different for each company and each individual. Some want basic information all the time and anywhere they travel, and some want interactive capability on par with the best user experience technology can offer. All these things were on the mind of developers at looksoftware as they created lookserver 10, which becomes generally available October 10.
The delivery of lookserver 10 will be the final piece that aligns all the looksoftware products on the version 10 plateau. It serves Web and mobile applications to any
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Just Watching Or Making An IBM i Modernization Plan?
September 30, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreMove deliberately. Move carefully. But for the love of Frank, just move. Get started with an application modernization project. Evolve or dissolve might be putting it a little too harshly, but there are plenty of business reasons for modernization. Three that come to mind are data integration, data accessibility, and a user interface that promotes the first two. The IBM midrange community–known by the greater IT community as “those legacy dinosaurs,” has a boatload of successful app modernization achievements. The majority of the boats are still at the dock, unfortunately.
“A lot of our IBM i companies are bleeding edge.
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Something New For Enterprise Mobile
September 30, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreOne of the reasons companies shy away from projects such as mobile computing and application modernization is because they don’t have the skills and/or the time to devote to the project. It’s a fairly common occurrence given that most IT departments are short-staffed and modern skills training doesn’t fit into the schedule or the budget. And if you think that only happens in small and midsize organizations, you haven’t talked with ClearBlade‘s Eric Simone.
Simone works with large enterprises–mostly in the banking, insurance, and healthcare fields–that depend on big iron: Power Systems and mainframes. Many of these, he explains,
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IBM i Squeezes Into Arkansas Tech Curriculum
September 30, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreFor many schools in the IBM Academic Initiative program the amount of IBM i-specific training is minimal. There are two-year technical colleges and four-year programs with multiple IBM i courses in programming, administration, and networking, but it’s not unusual to find a single course that introduces the IBM i platform along with other enterprise business computing systems.
“We have a lot of students who have gotten jobs because of this one course,” says Sarah Robison, an instructor at Arkansas Tech University. “It’s an advantage over other schools that don’t have anything like it. Businesses are having problems finding graduates
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PureSystems Anyone?
September 23, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM introduced the PureSystems in April 2012. It was a big deal and it still is. IBM is certain this is the system to converge all systems, with infrastructure in a box–PureFlex–as the solution to the huge business knot caused by IT redundancies. Instead of each platform requiring its own infrastructure, this is one infrastructure for all and all for one. In the past year and a half, the successes have mostly piled up on the X86 side as a server consolidation play, but IBM i shops are in this game, too.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say
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IBM i Jobs: Having What It Takes To Get Hired
September 23, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe job market for IBM midrange professionals fluctuates somewhere between contrary and crotchety. The same could be said about many of the pros who are inside and outside the workforce. One thing for certain is that this job market is changing and the people who want to get jobs or keep jobs have to change with it. Resistance, as we all know from watching Star Trek, is futile.
A friend of mine, Bob Langieri, is dialed into the IBM i job market in the greater Los Angeles area. He’s been a one-man employment service specializing in career placement for
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COMMON’s Fountain of Youth
September 23, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreMore than a few people have asked me where are the young people in the IBM i community. It’s a good question, because you really don’t see a lot of them. That’s why it was somewhat surprising to learn that nine college students attended the COMMON Fall Conference and Expo about a week and a half ago in St. Louis, Missouri.
They were able to get indoctrinated because of an emerging program from the COMMON Education Foundation, which rounded up enough money to pay for travel, lodging, and registrations. The Foundation–which operates as a separate entity from COMMON, the user
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IBM i Advocate Ian Jarman To Keynote At RPG & DB2 Summit
September 23, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM i Advocate Ian Jarman To Keynote At RPG & DB2 Summit
The general managers for the IBM i platform and its earlier iterations the System i, iSeries, and AS/400 have come and gone like clockwork. But one constant at the IBM executive level for as long as I can remember is Ian Jarman. He’s often been called on to be the voice of the platform when well-meaning folks like the gang at IT Jungle want to know why IBM is doing something or doing nothing with the operating system, the database, the hardware, or the marketing. He knows IBM
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Slices Of i For The Little Guys
September 16, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreReplacing chaos with calm while solving the mysteries of computer voodoo could earn you a pretty good reputation in the which-planet-am-I-on world of IBM midrange computing. It’s not that you’re more likely to get zapped here in the i zone than in any other IT fun house, but coming to grips with things like managed services and cloud computing have their own i-flavored outcomes here. Even for the little guy who is wondering how he fits into the MSP and cloud action.
Larry Bolhuis has an idea or two about the MSP and cloud computing topics and a few other
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Key CIO Confab Uncovers Concerns
September 16, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreYou’re not alone. CIOs, CTOs, IT department managers, and other executives wrestling with decisions affecting business strategies are increasingly turning to peers and partners to plan and implement their IT tactical strategies. At the Key Information Systems Summit last week, the core dump on topics–from cloud computing to business analytics to executive development facilitated by subject matter experts and IT industry thought leaders–was impressive.
The format for the summit was round-table discussion groups of 12 to 15 people with expert facilitators, and is a far better method for strategy discussions, exchanging lessons learned, and displaying battle scars. The participants include