It is hard to remember a time when I didn’t spend each and every day with the AS/400 and its progeny. For precisely half of my life, I have spent my days and many of my nights trying to understand the IBM midrange platform, the clients and other systems it interacts with, and watched how it has evolved over time to accommodate new technologies like client server and the Web. I have received a wonderful education about business and technology from countless midrange shops, with the only tuition fee being my own sweat equity and the coursework nothing but the

What’s ahead for the IBM i platform is a very good question. IT Jungle readers are pretty well versed on what’s been accomplished during the platform’s 25-year run. Many of you have been with the platform from the beginning and more than a few recall when IBM stormed the midrange with its first mini mainframes. While looking back provides many good memories, it doesn’t do much to keep modern businesses running. So the road ahead has our attention.

The IBMi25 campaign, which was devised as a three-month saga that played up the history of the platform but differentiated it from

IBM is now shipping Rational Developer for i (RDi), the name of the once-and-current flagship development tool for writing RPG, COBOL, Java, and C apps for IBM i. The product, which replaces Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDp), was officially unveiled by IBM two months ago. Chief among the new capabilities is support for Worklight Studio, which brings hybrid mobile application development capabilities to the IBM i platform.

IBM has, once again, reshuffled the deck of cards (some say nested set of Russian dolls) that is its Rational development tool collection. On June 14, it began shipping a broad new

Towards the end of May, Arvind Mahankali, a very smart kid from Long Island, won the National Spelling Bee. His winning word was knaidel. Knaidel is the Yiddish-American term for matzoh ball, variously spelled as matza ball, matzah ball or matzo ball. The top speller was the sixth consecutive desi to cop the prize; soon the winning word might be dacoit. Meanwhile, IBM, with its center of IQ mass in South Asia, can contemplate how it should spell out cloud computing . . . and the possibility that its services empire is the wrong kind

Like night follows day, darkness is descending on nearly 3,000 IBM employees who are being dishonorably discharged–the company prefers the term “workforce rebalanced”–from the payroll of the IT giant in the United States and Canada. On a global basis, the number is expected to exceed 5,000 and possibly as many as 8,000 could be without jobs by the end of the year. Earnings per share, which guides IBM’s decision making, should benefit, while families and communities get the dirty end of the stick.

Don’t let that first paragraph fool you. I despise the influence of stock prices over corporate citizenship

The general rule of thumb is that for every dollar that is spent on servers, there is another 50 cents or so spent on storage and another 50 cents or so spent on networking. That is the ratio across the industry, and the server class average is brought up mightily by mainframes and other big iron that is pricey indeed. While server and storage purchases are not always directly tied to each other, they are often part of a single system upgrade or new installation and, in many cases, disk arrays are in fact internal to the server. So there

With new Power7+ processors in full production and Big Blue wanting to shift customers to the latest iron rather than stuff that is one to three years old, it is no surprise that the marketing and manufacturing people in Systems and Technology Group are cutting some pages out of the IBM product catalog.

In announcement letter 913-142, IBM said that effective September 20, it would stop selling the original Power7-based Flex p260 server node, which was announced back in April 2012 as one of two Power7 nodes for IBM’s PureFlex modular system. This is the half-width, two-socket node, which

The OS/400 and IBM i platform has turned 25 years old, and IBM’s units in Australia and New Zealand are offering special financing to celebrate.

In announcement letter A313-099, IBM’s Global Financing unit, which provides leases and rentals to business partners and end users alike, is offering special zero percent interest rate financing on IBM i-based gear over a term of–wait for it–25 months, one for every year that the AS/400 and its progeny have been running applications in the midrange. The deal in New Zealand is structured the same way and is detailed in announcement letter NZ313-099.

IT departments around the world can practically be heard crying out “show me the money” after years of tight budgets and sweeping cutbacks. And while the overall picture for IT spending still isn’t looking too rosy, there are a few areas that will get an infusion of cash this year, according to a recent survey of spending by government sector organizations on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications by Gartner.

The Gartner analysts are projecting that worldwide IT spending by government organizations will total $449.5 billion in 2013, which is a slight decrease of 0.1 percent from 2012. This

There are two ways to look at the IT skills shortage: macro and micro. Macro is an industry-wide view and micro is how the skills shortage affects the organization where you work. A week ago, in the But Wait There’s More section of The Four Hundred, readers were encouraged to participate in a survey designed to gauge the severity and focal points of the IBM i skills shortage. Equally important was the objective of matching up companies that are searching for talented entry-level workers with IT educations that included IBM i-related skills with the colleges that specialize in that