Big Blue has had a busy couple of weeks making enhancements to the Power Systems lineup and crafting deals to try to entice customers to move up to more modern machines, or, in the case of IBM i shops, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of the AS/400 platform. The AS/400’s silver anniversary will be on Friday this week, and I will share my thoughts on the Silver Anniversary for the system that was code-named “Silverlake” in next week’s issue. For now, let’s talk about memory enhancements at the high-end of the line.

The big thing relating to

A two-week flurry of activity, including a financial report that showed a return to profitability, the sale of one business unit and the acquisition of another, has Agilysys popping up on the BusinessWire like thunderstorms on a Florida summer afternoon. Agilysys is best known in the IBM midrange community for its hospitality and gaming software that is dominant in those markets. However, the company has more than that on its plate.

Two weeks ago, Agilysys announced it was selling its Retail Solutions Group to an affiliate of Clearlake Capital Group for $34.55 million in cash. An estimated 200 customers buy

With the ever-increasing miniaturization of electronic components, it should be easy to cram a baby data center into a box that does not make a lot of noise and is therefore suitable for small and midrange businesses to park in their offices or for larger companies to plunk in their remote offices. Six years ago, Hewlett-Packard jumped in with its variant on the theme with the “Shorty” BladeSystem c3000 system and a few weeks later IBM countered with its BladeCenter S baby blade server. Now Dell is taking a run at SMBs with a new system it is calling

Christoph Meili was a security guard who worked the night shift at the Union Bank of Switzerland. One night while making his rounds, he discovered that the management of UBS was doing naughty, naughty things in the dark. There’s no pretty way to put this: they were working overtime to cheat the families of dead people. But not just people who died in the normal scheme of things. Oh, no. These people happened to be Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. UBS probably didn’t want to disturb their descendants by digging up all those painful memories, so

IBM i shops and managed service providers that adopt the latest release of IBM‘s SmartCloud Entry for Power software will gain several new points of control over their private cloud environments, including the capability to start and stop workloads at any time, and the capability to deploy multiple copies of an image simultaneously. IBM also divulged pricing details with the SmartCloud Entry for Power version 3.1 announcements, and made a statement of direction regarding “adopting a common technology base” rooted in open standards for SmartCloud Entry.

SmartCloud Entry for Power is a lightweight (for IBM anyway), AIX-based software product

When something works in a small venue, you try to take it to a big venue in the big cities and see if it will play even bigger there. And so it is with a promotion that Abacus Solutions tested out at the COMMON midrange user group and expo back in early April. And now, it is open to all of you members of the IBM i community.

The theme is running on the cloud, and there’s some double, and maybe triple, entendre in there, since athletic footwear maker Brooks Sports, a $425 million company that runs on IBM

The skilled workforce is a big concern for all companies. In the IBM midrange community, you won’t find many people who believe it isn’t a problem. Potential entry-level employees with IBM i skills are scarce. And companies that are hiring tend to be particular about that. In most instances, organizations are not looking for one-dimensional individuals. Broad-based skills, including multiple languages and operating systems, are more the norm.

What’s being done to address this?

Some companies have found success when the IT and HR departments work together on a recruitment strategy that has close ties to colleges where IBM i

Version changes between operating systems have been getting stretched out across all platforms for the past several years because most of the major OSes have reach a certain level of maturity and customers are loathe to go through qualification processors at a rapid pace for very little change in functionality. And so the industry has split the difference, doing more frequent updates that add functionality without messing with runtimes and therefore application compatibility.

And so it is with Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2012, which had a Release 2 (R2) preview down in New Orleans in early June, showing off some

There’s no sugar coating this one. The IT jobs market has hit the skids. At least that is what the latest report from Janco Associates, whose analysts keep an eye on IT market trends, is saying.

“Based on our interviews with over 90 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff,” said Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco. “In addition, a number of CIOs do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.”

This comes on the heels of the latest jobs report

After all of these years and so many battles in the Minicomputer Wars and the Midrange Wars, the OpenVMS operating system is more a friend of the IBM i platform than a foe, particularly with common enemies swarming the data center landscape from the warring tribes of Windows and Linux. So it is important not to gloat as we get what is very likely the final roadmap out of Hewlett-Packard for the venerable OpenVMS.

On June 6, Ric Lewis, general manager of HP’s Enterprise Servers division, which is in charge of its Itanium-based systems, sent a letter to OpenVMS shops