Big Blue was widely expected to trot out the new entry Power Systems machines based on its Power8 processors this week, but it looks like the company wanted to make sure that the machines had a day of their own rather than being a part of the broader discussion about big data and cloud at the Impact2014 shindig that IBM is hosting. The interesting bit of news for IBM i shops that came out last week as IBM preannounced the Power8 systems is that there are five new systems, but only two of them are certified to run IBM i.

You cannot get one just yet, but perhaps in the not-too-distant-future if you want to hack together your own Power-based IBM i server, you will be able to do just that. Last week at the OpenPower Innovation Summit in San Francisco, IBM and its OpenPower Foundation partners showed off the first non-IBM motherboard based on a commercial-grade, 64-bit PowerPC or Power processor.

In fact, if this OpenPower scenario plays out the way Big Blue is hoping that it will, there will be multiple processor and motherboard makers who supply components to system suppliers as well as those who design and

Steve Kilner has been down nine miles of ugly road and he’s seen enough. If you’ve ever looked at 20-year-old, monolithic RPG code with the thought in mind that this code can serve another five or 10 years, it’s likely you’ve seen enough, too. It’s time for assessment, Kilner believes, and his assessment is that a lot of high maintenance RPG is beyond saving, beyond modernizing, and is unmistakably ill-equipped for the modern age of business computing.

This begins with a question of quality code and Kilner is talking about code that possesses inert amounts of quality. It’s so convoluted

In 1956, Nathan Rochester approached the Rockefeller Foundation to apply for a princely grant of $7,000. He said he wanted to throw a little shindig at Dartmouth University, where the minds of mathematicians and computer scientists could run free exploring what must have seemed like a fanciful and distant notion at the time–the creation of intelligent machines.

He probably would have been dismissed outright, but Rochester was no garden-variety, star-struck futurist. He also happened to be the chief engineer of the IBM 701–the first general purpose, mass-produced computer–and therefore had the requisite gravitas to pacify the normally conservative moneymen.

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When IBM recently patched the Heartbleed vulnerability that existed in the Power Systems firmware, it did more than issue a more secure piece of system code. IBM also demonstrated the fallibility of maintaining an IBM i mentality in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. As IT Jungle‘s PTF patch master and IBM business partner Doug Bidwell explains, we can ill afford to think of IBM i as an isolated entity anymore.

“I just read your article, IBM Patches Heartbleed Vulnerability in Power Systems Firmware. Thank you for getting that out there,” Bidwell writes via email. Bidwell, who edits

IBM‘s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure division got a boost last week when Avnet Technology Solutions signed on as a reseller of cloud services. Avnet has been a major player in IBM’s value added reseller (VAR) channel for systems, software, and services for nearly 30 years.

In the early days, Avnet was completely devoted to the IBM midrange (the AS/400, iSeries, System i and IBM i), but it has diversified to handle the gamut of IBM’s hardware and software and many services, including most recently IBM training and education. Avnet’s partner channel education efforts related to the cloud have been in

Propelled by the evolution of multi-channel retailing called omni-channel, the supply chain software company Manhattan Associates turned in a quarterly financial report with better than expected gains. Compared to one year ago, revenue in Q1 2014 surged 15 percent to $113.6 million and license revenue climbed 17 percent to $17.1 million. License revenue was flat for the past two years. After paying all the bills, net income at the company rose 40 percent to $18.7 million.

About 60 percent of license fees come from the company’s warehouse management solutions and 30 percent of license revenue was attributed to net new

It could just be a hiccup in the downstream channel from Avnet, or it could portend something else happening in the market for data center equipment. But the master reseller, which is one of the largest distributors of IT gear on the planet, had a weak close in its Technology Solutions business in the 13th and final week of its fiscal third quarter.

In the March quarter, which is the third quarter of Avnet’s fiscal 2014 year, the company booked $6.68 billion in total revenues across its electronic components and IT distribution businesses, an increase of 6.1 percent from

How many IT managers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hopefully not more than one at most IBM i shops, and in many cases the IT manager does double-duty as a system administrator and sometimes triple-duty as a programmer at IBM i shops. That is the great thing about the IBM i platform: It takes very few people to get a lot of application work done, making it a perfect platform for small and medium businesses who wanted to be experts in their businesses, not in hardware and systems software.

That doesn’t mean there are not big

Workforce rebalancing, IBM‘s term for erasing higher paid and higher skilled employees in more economically advanced regions while adding to its workforce with lower skilled and lower paid employees from less economically advanced regions, is a short-term win that leads to a long-term loss. And that loss could be the disappearance of IBM as we know the company today. That’s the warning message being delivered to the IBM board of directors just ahead of the stockholders’ meeting Tuesday, April 29.

The message, which calls for a reorientation of IBM, comes from an amalgamation of employee advocacy groups: the Global