Over the last 12 months, there has been unprecedented progress in third-party mobile development tools. Whether your shop wants to take a native or a hybrid approach, or whether it wants to use pre-built templates or to build from scratch, this is a great time to bring IBM i content to the latest iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows mobile devices. Here is a handy dandy roundup of 16 of the most well-known mobile development tools for the IBM i platform.

A quick scan of the 12-year Four Hundred Stuff story archive shows a flurry of mobile activity in the last

If you are a typical IBM i shop, you have spent decades turning the transactional data in your application stack into information that business managers and other workers within the company can not only use to keep the money rolling in and the products rolling out, but to do a better job of managing those two processes. And you are probably pretty proud of the fact that it takes relatively modest resources to accomplish this, and you are no doubt wondering what all of this yammering about so-called “big data” is all about.

Well, the first thing big data is

Twenty years ago, the DB2/400 database from IBM was not being asked to do the things that the DB2 for i database for the IBM i operating system is being asked to do today. Database limitations sometimes sneak up on us. Even though the handwriting has been on the wall for some time, there has to be a reason to stop and read it. Jim Ritchhart read it. He knows database modernization because he is living it. His story of database modernization is a good one.

Ritchhart works for Uline, a shipping supplies and packaging materials manufacturer with headquarters near

Arguably the most memorable part of the movie Cast Away is watching Tom Hanks slowly going mad from an excess of solitude, eventually befriending a Wilson volleyball. Conversations and arguments ensue, and even though they’re one-sided, so deep is Tom’s character’s longing for a connection that an inanimate object is preferable to the terror of prolonged aloneness. If only Tom had texting.

Since the advent of the Internet, the business of assuaging loneliness has reached a feverish pitch. Self-help books and bars have been displaced by social media and pornography. And if connection is the new frontier, there are few

We are not even to summer yet and the hopeful prognostications of 2013 being the year of the rebound in the IT jobs market is melting away faster than the winter snow. The good folks at Janco Associates, who keep a close eye on IT industry trends, are reporting slow growth in IT hiring for the third month in a row.

It is human nature to start a new year with an optimistic outlook for the coming months, anticipating happy and prosperous times ahead. At the beginning of 2013 we were reporting on a IT job explosion in North

Various IT suppliers have had a tough time in various parts of their businesses as 2013 has gotten rolling, but master electronics and IT distributor Arrow Electronics seems to be having an easier time than some of the upstream vendors whose products it peddles in the data center.

In the first quarter ended in March, Arrow said that its overall sales contracted by 1 percent to $4.85 billion, mainly by a reduction in its electronic components business, which fell by 5 percent to $3.19 billion. Keeping that revenue coming in selling components came at a cost, however, and operating earnings

Call it a sign of the times. According to the latest rankings available from IT market researcher Gartner, online and SaaSy software supplier Salesforce.com has blown by SAP to become the top supplier of customer relationship software in the world.

The rankings from Gartner are based financial figures for the full 2012 year, and have Salesforce.com raking in $2.53 billion for its online, subscription-based CRM wares. That is an increase of 26 percent over the revenues that the company generated in 2011. Salesforce.com was by no means the only fast-growing CRM software supplier, so don’t get the wrong idea.

If you are a business partner who can’t get access to a new Power7+ machine but you want to compile and test your code on some shiny new iron, then IBM has a slice of iron it wants you to take for free.

On April 24, the developerWorks web site aimed at application developers announced that the Virtual Loaner Program, a long-running service that Big Blue set up when it decided to go cloudy for developers instead of giving them cut-priced Power Systems on which to code their apps, had been updated with Power7+ machines. IBM does not say what

Corus360, an Atlanta, Georgia-based value added reseller (VAR) with a 30,000-square-foot data center, is expanding its services with an application hosting business for companies using IBM i, AIX, and Linux apps. It calls its new, on-demand, allocation of resources venture PowerCloud360. Companies looking to reduce IT capital expenditures and expenses are the target market.

Behind the PowerCloud360 name is IBM Power Systems’ proven virtualization capabilities–virtualized processors, memory, network, and storage. Of course, disaster recovery and high availability are part of the design. More than likely it will be the biggest portion of the business. And in true, cloud-like fashion,

It’s that time of the year again. If you have a suggestion for IBM or just a helpful suggestion on how it might improve the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating systems, now is your chance to do something about it.

For the past seven years, COMMON Europe has done its part to poll the IBM i user base and try to figure out what they are worried about. And now the eighth annual Top Concerns survey is open for you to speak your mind and help shape the future of this platform.

The 2013 Top Concerns survey