The future is never wide open, but rather is a sphere radiating out from this moment at precisely the speed of light. Everything that can and will happen will occur within that sphere, events moving out from the point where you sit and events moving in from outside, from all directions and as if they are pre-coordinated from the past outside of you to affect you precisely, right here, right now, from the edge of that sphere inwards. When you think about it that way, the orchestration of all of our presence is all the more remarkable. Outside of that

Building 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

Welcome to 2013. Before we get too far into the year that will be, let’s take a look back at the year that was. 2012 was an eventful year for the IBM i ecosystem, and brought IT Jungle several big stories to report, including major IBM product launches, mega disasters, a raft of new public IBM i clouds, an untold number of tools for mobile and big data, and enough acquisitions and lawsuits to keep lawyers out of trouble–for about 12 months anyway.

Acquisitions —

In January, Rocket Software announced that it bought the iCluster HA software from IBM, and

Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth century Danish polymath with a prosthetic nose, believed facts yield advances in science and business. Good at both, Brahe accumulated a fortune and built an observatory while accumulating the astronomical data he bequeathed to his German colleague Johannes Kepler. Decades later, formulating laws of gravitation, England’s Isaac Newton stood on Kepler’s shoulders. The computer industry could sure use a Brahe right now.

It is having difficulty charting a course between the Scylla of technological change and the Charybdis of fickle markets. Consequently, following the traditional leaders, as loyal, trusting customers do, is downright risky.

It is difficult to tell what any IT vendor is thinking as a year comes to an end, much less a year with the kind of economic uncertainties that we all were facing as 2012 came to a close. But after The Four Hundred went on hiatus and before the new year got rolling, IBM did a few nips and tucks and tweaks to pricing for its latest servers that indicates it is not happy with its competitive position. The changes were made to price lists in the United States and Canada, and the products not affected by changes are

Since we are just a week in to the new year, it might still be a little too soon to say with absolute confidence how the various economies of the world are going to fare. However, the Gartner analysts are bullish about saying we should see pocketbooks opening a little wider for IT spending in 2013, predicting worldwide IT spending will total $3.7 trillion this year, a 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trillion.

Just to be clear, since we’re all a bit beat up by the economic uncertainty that has characterized the past several years, this is

In 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

If you are thinking about getting a Capacity BackUp (CBU) variant of the Power Systems-IBM i platform to use in a high availability cluster, you can now use a few of the new Power7+ machines as your secondary box.

The CBU machines first debuted way back in September 2003, when IBM wanted customers to embrace high availability clustering for OS/400 applications and when it realized it would have to cushion the blow to make secondary machines that were being replicated to less costly than production machines that were doing useful work. Prior to that, if you wanted to run HA

Server virtualization is one of the big culprits behind the revenue decline in proprietary and Unix servers since the late 1990s and despite what many would have you believe, it has had a dramatic effect on X86-based server sales in recent years, too. Storage virtualization has been around nearly as long, and has driven up utilization and driven down sales of disk arrays in the past decade as well. And now it is time for the network to get the squeeze.

Specifically, a set of new capabilities called software-defined networking, or SDN for short, are being introduced into the physical

The 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