Lately, I have been thinking a lot about IBM‘s pricing for the IBM i operating system and database. With Big Blue having long since converged its Software Group and its Systems and Technology Group, you would think that the heat would be off in some ways to upgrade hardware and for the company to focus on getting customers current on software. But IBM likes to sell new systems as well as operating systems to customers, and it needs to make money as much as midrange shops don’t like to spend it.

I decided to take a look at OS/400,

When Frank Soltis retired from IBM three years ago, he wasn’t looking for a rocking chair, a fireplace, and a membership in the Nerdy Book of the Month Club. He’s ridden in too many rodeos to hang up his saddle. The IBM i running on Power Systems is his arena. Soltis continues to travel around the world advocating for the platform and listening to what users and IBM business partners tell him about life on the Smarter Planet.

Ever the optimist, Soltis is as reliable and dependable as the midrange servers he helped develop from the days of the System/38

It takes a whole village of smart people to raise a market because no single human being can calculate all of the angles. That’s why there are laws against selective disclosure in the financial services market, and it is also one of the reasons why newsletters such as this one not only persist in the Internet Era, but have much broader impact than magazines used to in days of old. (But online publishing is, alas, a much more difficult and less profitable business than the magazine salad days of the 1980s and early 1990s.) In any event, it takes smart

The shadows are just beginning to crawl down the massive sandstone walls as we struggle into our dry suits and neoprene socks. A thick pair of river shoes and a sturdy walking stick complete our outfits. It’s early morning and still cold as my wife and I prepare to embark on one of the legendary hikes in the National Park System, The Narrows at Zion. Zion is a long canyon carved over the centuries by the Virgin River. You enter the canyon from the south and it gradually constricts as you travel north until the walls close in and the

IBM i shops should take a long, hard look at cloud computing and see if it makes sense for them, IBM‘s director of business development for the IBM i business, Ari Kugler, said in a webinar last week. During his presentation with IBM i cloud service provider Symmetry, Kugler said that the security and scalability of the IBM i platform, coupled with the price/performance of the Power7 servers, has opened new opportunities for cloud computing. “The time for cloud is now,” he said.

Since he joined the IBM Rochester team last year, Kugler has become one of the

You said: “So, if you have an entry Power 710 or 720 machine, you are paying $7.29 per day to use IBM i 7.1.”

I’m based in the United Kingdom, so the numbers are different over here, but how does that stack up compared to the utilities cost per employee, I wonder? And maybe the phone bill? And the cost of IT support staffing to keep everyone up and running? I’m sure I heard that the corporate rate for IT support was horrendous for Windows and it’s not like you can access an IBM i without using Windows these days,

The Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship, created in 2008 to honor the beloved advocate of the AS/400 platform, is looking to up donations with a challenge grant.

The challenge grant is sponsored by midrange.com, which has pledged to contribute a dollar for every dollar contributed by other people (up to a maximum of $300). The challenge will count for any donations made between now and December 24.

Contributions should be made directly to the COMMON Education Foundation here. Midrange.com needs your help tracking the donations, so after you make your contribution, please email midrange.com owner, David Gibbs, here,

Jack Henry & Associates, a software and services provider for the financial sector that has a decently sized IBM i business, has turned in another good quarter of sales.

In the quarter ended in September, which was Jack Henry’s first quarter of fiscal 2012, hardware sales, which includes Power Systems running IBM i as well as other platforms, rose by 7 percent to $15.8 million. Software license sales skyrocketed 30 percent to $12.3 million, and support and services revenues were up a more modest 5 percent but weighed in at $220.3 million. (Within the support and services segment, Jack

John Opel didn’t want to run a hardware store after college and the great irony (pun intended) is that he ended up running IBM, the largest data processing hardware company in the world at the peak of its mainframe and midrange prowess.

Opel, who was 86, died on November 3. He was IBM’s fifth CEO and without a doubt one of its better ones. Ginni Rometty, who will be IBM’s ninth CEO when she takes over on January 1, has several sets of big shoes to fill. (Well, the assumption is that Lou Gerstner’s were not that big physically,

Having application development tools at your disposal is all well and good, but having the skills to make use of them in a big way is what really makes the boat float. That’s why a company like ASNA came up with the idea 11 years ago to host a tech conference for the users of its products.

If you are admittedly not one of the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to developing and modernizing applications the ASNA way, the ASNApalooza conference is a wise choice to hone your skills with hands-on lab sessions, meetings with the big