Dan Burger
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Data Skills Crashes Dice Top Five Hiring Demands
January 21, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe sun has just eased over the horizon of calendar year 2013, but those up-at-the-crack-of-dawn, career-minded folks at Dice are already predicting steady growth in the hiring of tech talent in the first half of the year. Recruiting priorities are essentially unchanged with Java professionals leading the way, but a new skill category has slipped into the top 10.
Hiring managers and recruiters say data skills are a hot–and getting hotter–ticket in the job market. Not quite on the radar last year, data wranglers are considered a necessary investment, especially when those talents are tied to communication skills.
Just a
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What’s Happening In IBM i App Dev?
January 14, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreGreen screens scare the daylights (actually not my first choice of words) out of me. Like great white sharks and vampire bats, they have their place in the world. But I don’t want to go to that place. Most people would probably agree with me about the sharks and the bats. There are many RPG and COBOL programmers, however, who are perfectly comfortable in a green-screen world. What in the name of modern application development are they thinking?
There is a reason people use the term computer science rather than computer history. IT is an ongoing endeavor. You have probably
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Job Board For IBM i Talent Powers Up
January 14, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreFinally, the day has come: IBM i shops on the search for young talent have a dedicated job board to turn to. We have been hearing for years how companies have a difficult time locating people with the specific skills to take on entry-level jobs. There have been fears that the talent pool was drying up. At the same time, colleges teaching IBM i skills as part of their computer science curriculum have not always been successful in placing graduates with companies that had job openings. It has been a frustrating disconnect.
A job board has been on the IBM
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RPG & DB2 Summit Adds Analytics, BI To Agenda
January 14, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreRPG & DB2 Summit Adds Analytics, BI To Agenda
The RPG & DB2 Summit, a twice-annual, subject-focused conference hosted by System i Developer, will take place March 19 through 21 in Atlanta, Georgia. The event is billed as “an interactive, total-immersion experience to RPG and DB2 for i developers who want to stay abreast of the latest advancements and learn how to apply specific RPG and DB2 techniques to keep their software applications vibrant and innovative.” Registration is now open.
The RPG and DB2 topics covered include RPG IV, ILE, and modular programming; embedded SQL, DB2 for i capabilities,
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ITG Report: Resiliency Floats The IBM i Boat
January 7, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreBuilding an IT strategy takes well-thought planning and a rock solid foundation. Yet decisions are being made every day that are counter intuitive to that basic tenet and it is costing companies millions of dollars. Often this occurs because a lack of evidence skews the decision making. You better believe this is happening in IBM i shops where the encroachment of other platforms brings IT professionals face-to-face with an unfamiliar–and often less reliable–hardware, operating systems, and databases.
Ignoring the threat that is gathering against the unfamiliar and often misunderstood IBM i platform, which is mistakenly imagined as never having progressed
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Thirty Years In The Midrange, Help/Systems Is Going Strong
January 7, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreIn a business world obsessed with startup companies with lots of flash in their pans, what sort of milestone achievement is 30 years in the IT marketplace? That depends on how much you believe in the presumption that age and experience is of greater value than youth and exuberance. There is a lot to be said for standing the test of time. Shoddy products and second-rate customer service typically do not weather well. Help/Systems, at 30, has learned through experience.
It also happens to have 6,300 customers and 200 employees who depend on the success of its 45 products
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COMMON Introduces New Educational Options
January 7, 2013 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe first thing you need to know about the COMMON RPG, PHP, and Application Modernization conference is that it is designed with specific education and training needs in mind. Application development in IBM midrange shops is a hot topic. And COMMON has chosen to make a break for its conferences with broad appeal to zero in on this subject. If this works, expect to see the COMMON Focused Educational Series to expand into other topic areas.
The second thing you need to know about this conference is that its sessions are very oriented on RPG and PHP. There are many
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New ITG Report Is Reinforcement For The IBM i Advocate
December 10, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreChoosing one computer system over another has the potential to significantly reduce costs, but each individual company has to do some homework before coming to a decision. It is disappointing, to say the least, that many of these decisions are made regardless of whether they make good business sense. Can a business case for IBM i running on Power Systems be made when compared to Windows and Linux alternatives? Yes, indeed, when bolstered by reports like the one recently released by ITG.
ITG, which is called on regularly to assemble total cost of ownership studies that build a favorable
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Tech-Business Skills in Demand, Academic Initiative Expands
December 10, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreDeveloping new technology skills and being better prepared for future job opportunities will keep IT workers and those aspiring to become IT professionals busy these days. According to the just released 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report, 10 percent of the managers surveyed believe their organizations are inadequately staffed due to a lack of technology skills mixed with business skills. To address that situation, IBM has re-purposed its Academic Initiative program, which includes a Power Systems element.
Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on headliner type topics such as big data, analytics, digital marketing, mobile computing, and security. Educational materials
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Mobile Developers Battle Complexity, Deployment Time
December 3, 2012 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt is a simple and irreversible fact that application development teams are consumed by mobile computing. Smartphones and tablets have put the pressure on companies in the IBM midrange community (users of IBM i on Power Systems, i5/OS on iSeries, and OS/400 on AS/400s), where it is not far-fetched to say 50 percent are still dependent on the green-screen interface. A reluctance to convert at least some of their applications to a graphical interface is coming around to haunt them.
Meanwhile, there are businesses, particularly start-ups, that recognize the power of the graphical user interface and that the need to