This is a great time to be an IBM i shop. Whether your shop is hands-on with the latest technology or prefers to “set it and forget it,” there’s an abundance of new products and services available that will help your organization run smarter and with more efficiency. Check out Four Hundred Stuff‘s take on the top 10 IBM i technology trends for the new year.

1. Cloud Computing

The number one IBM i trend for 2013 is cloud computing. IBM may have been late to the cloud party with its midrange platform, but Big Blue is now coming

You can add one more name to the growing list of companies providing cloud infrastructure services to IBM i shops. Aegis Technology Services, a joint venture between Data Storage Corp. and ABC Services, is gearing up to run production IBM i and Windows environments through the infrastructure as a service (IAAS) cloud model. The company is expected to be one of the first cloud service providers to run its business with the new IBM PureSystems machines.

Data Storage Corp. (DSC) is no stranger to the cloud, but the move into production cloud services is a sizable one. The

Congress suddenly sprang into action last week, handing down dozens of “Fiscal Cliff” tax changes that affect everything from Medicare and payroll withholding to federal tax rates and inheritance taxes. ERP vendors and third-party maintenance firms, such as HarrisData, Spinnaker Support, and Rimini Street, are taking the changes in stride, and staying on the lookout for more changes that will affect customers.

None of the changes that Congress made with last week’s vote will have an impact on 2012 taxes, although some forward-looking states, such as California, enacted new progressive tax rates that are retroactive to 2012.

John Earl, an IBM i security expert who was recently the CEO of Townsend Security, passed away last week after a battle with cancer. Earl will be missed by the midrange community, which is encouraged to support his family by donating to a memorial fund in his name.

Earl was many things, including an IBM i security expert, a product developer, an IT business executive, a school volunteer, a poker and wrestling enthusiast, and above all a husband and father. His professional passion was security–specifically, IBM i security. He had the intellect to understand complex security concepts, and the

If you’ve ever walked into a Lamps Plus store, you may have found yourself donning sunglasses to help shield your eyes from the massive amount of light shining from lamps of every size and type imaginable. But if you were to find yourself in one of Lamps Plus’ server rooms, you may find yourself searching for the light switch, because the company has gone “lights out” during off hours thanks to IBM i automation software from Help/Systems.

Lamps Plus is the largest retailer of specialty lighting in the country. The privately held company sells about 40,000 products through 40

The beginning of the year is a great time to reminisce on the past 12 months, think ahead to the next 12 months, make a resolution or two, and, of course, ponder the seeming endless top 10 lists generated at this time of year. We’ve saved you the effort of looking at the best and the worst top 10 lists of the New Year with our first top 10 list of the best and worst top 10 lists.

We’ll start with the top five best Top 10 lists:

Number One: “Top Ten Predictions for the Global ERP Industry in 2013,”

EVault and Fujitsu are teaming up in a strategic partnership that will see Fujitsu launch a series of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions based on EVault’s technology.

EVault is a major provider of online backup and cloud-based DR solutions. More than 38,000 organizations use EVault’s technology, either as direct customers of EVault or as customers of EVault’s partners. The company, which is a subsidiary of publicly traded disk giant Seagate Technology, doesn’t break out a specific revenue figure, but it figures to be a pretty healthy slice of Seagate’s software and services business.

Now you can count

Storage giant Quantum is now shipping LTO 6 gear, including drives, cartridges, autoloaders, and libraries. The company says it will support the latest super tape drive format with its storage virtualization software for big data, called StorNext, in early 2013.

Quantum announced the availability of its LTO 6 lineup in late November. At the heart of Quantum’s LTO 6 offering is a SAS-connected half-height drive. Quantum sells four general editions of this drive, including versions that can be installed in a tape library or autoloader; a rack; used on a standalone basis; or installed with a PCI Express host bus

Pinnacle Business Systems, the IBM i software developer and IT service provider based in Edmond, Oklahoma, last week announced the acquisition of St. Croix Solutions, an IT service provider based near Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Pinnacle Business Systems (PBS) is renown in the IBM i world for employing the original developers of BRMS, the backup and recovery product that’s part of the IBM i OS. Today, PBS sells three IBM i solutions, including icom/400 for System i, a message monitoring and alerting tool; trac/400 for System i, a backup and recovery and media management tool; and ups/400 for System i,

Infinite Software announced last month that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to migrate RPG applications off the IBM i platform.

Laguna Niguel, California-based Infinite Software will migrate several of DOI’s RPG applications to the AIX operating system and the Oracle database, according to Raquela Kaplan, marketing director for Infinite.

“The key issue here is to migrate to a more open IBM platform,” Kaplan stated in a press release. “The client wanted the ability to write future data to Oracle in a seamless manner. The Infinite i solution is a perfect fit.”