If the IBM i-Power Systems platform was up for an award for longevity, it would actually have to be given two awards. One trophy would be for persevering as the last platform standing from the Minicomputer Revolution back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. And the second medal would be for machines that stay in the field for an incredibly, almost unbelievably, long time.

We all know this instinctively and anecdotally, having heard many of the legends of the AS/400 and its progeny out in the field. Stories of machines being sheet-rocked behind a wall or stacked over

The IT director of an IBM i shop somewhere in the Midwest was walking down the street wondering about where he was going to get several programmers with modern RPG skills along with Web and mobile skills. He walks by an employment agency with a sign in the window that says “brains for sale.” So he goes inside. The first thing he sees is another sign that says “CEO brains $8 per pound.” Next to that what he sees . . .

. . . is another sign that says, “CFO brains $12 per pound.” Beyond that were signs that

Modern–Spread The Word

Have you noticed IBM i executives are everywhere you look these days? I haven’t seen any of them on magazine covers at the grocery store checkout area, but it won’t surprise me when it happens. Steve Will, Alison Butterill, Tim Rowe, Barbara Morris and others seem to be more actively evangelizing. Conferences and local user group meetings are benefiting, many of them are blogging, but where it has picked up even more is their participation in vendor webinars.

Last week, I listened in to webinar that co-starred Rowe and Morris and was hosted by looksoftware.

Since biblical times, Mediterranean people have cultivated the carob tree. Its seeds, called carats, are remarkably consistent in mass, about 200 milligrams each. For ages, the carat weight has been a measure of gemstones and other valuable items. The Roman pure gold solidus coin weighed 24 carats; it was the original 24-carat gold. Mobile device displays may soon be described in carats along with pixels and inches. This is because Apple is getting into the sapphire sheet business.

It might make a monkey of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, because wherever Apple leads, the rest of the technology world usually

The figures are out for server shipments and revenues for the third quarter from Gartner, and they shed a little more light on what is going on in the IBM customer base and in the market at large. A number of different factors are making it tough on Big Blue and these have short-term and long-term ramifications for IBM i shops and indeed any customers who are deploying Power-based systems.

The most important thing to realize is that while server shipments are continuing to grow, revenues are not and I suspect that profit margins have fallen even faster than

Victor:

Warning: Many generalities, and complaining, follow.

I agree that complaining is not always the best way to deal with a problem.

But if one thinks that there are situations that involve someone like the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert (and I do), and if you feel stuck in that situation for any number of reasons, then some complaining may be a way of seeking sympathy from others who have similar feelings.

Maybe the point of your article is that this is not a good thing, but sometimes “letting off steam” let’s you get back to work.

If you feel

It is that time of the year again, when all of us look at how we did this year and wonder if we are going to better than this next year. For the IT departments in the United States, the outlook is a good one, according to the latest data coming out of Computer Economics.

The company has just completed its annual survey of 140 IT shops in the United States, and it looks like companies are expecting that inflation will go up a tiny bit in 2014. Inflation will be kept in check by the relatively high unemployment

IBM last month unveiled a refresh of its high-end DS8870 SAN disk array that features the latest Power7+ processors, which Big Blue says will deliver a 15 percent increase in data throughput for transactional workloads. The refreshed SAN also features a pair of new hard drive options, new security features, and new optimizations for Flash drives.

IBM first rolled out the DS8870 over a year ago to serve the data storage needs of its most demanding customers. Users can mix and match a variety of different drives to house hot and not-so-hot data–up to 2.3 PB of it when four

IBM has promised Wall Street that it will have a $7 billion cloud business by the end of 2015, and it has gotten out the checkbook once again to help it along its way to that goal.

Last week, IBM said that it has inked a deal with Dexia, a financial services company based in Brussels, Belgium, to take over the operations of its Associated Dexia Technology Services unit. ADTS is a service company not unlike IBM’s own Global Services that provides services to Belfius Bank, Belfius Insurance, International Wealth Insurers (IWI), Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL), Dexia and Dexia

The inability to afford many of the new information technologies and lacking the skills to implement those they can afford is a tightening rope around the neck of many small to midsize companies. It certainly contributes to the lack of application modernization projects that are discussed in two other articles I’ve written in this issue.

Any organization, but especially the small to midsize organizations, looks at IT investments in terms of spending money to save money. That’s pretty much a universal business fact in these times of fast-paced IT evolution. For every operational efficiency promised, there needs to be a