HelpSystems has picked up two more IBM i independent software vendors to add to its product portfolio. Last week, the acquiring minds at HelpSystems added document management software company RJS Software and the data warehousing product from Coglin Mill into its product ShowCase, which already includes systems automation, security, and business intelligence software.

I estimate the RJS customer base is approximately 1,500. Coglin Mill’s customer count is maybe 150. With HelpSystems’ worldwide customer base at 8,800 before these acquisitions, it seems likely that the company will top more than 10,000 customers. Around 75 percent of those customers are considered IBM

Whenever we come upon the anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, which passed on a week when The Four Hundred was off on hiatus, most of us are inclined to contemplate and celebrate the genius of the system and the adventurous techies inside of IBM who took a lot of cool ideas about how a system should be designed and created a platform that made it possible for midrange businesses to do sophisticated things without having a lot of propellerheads on their staff to make it all work. This is a very top-down view of the AS/400 and its

The Great Recession may be over, but it has become clear that the job market has transitioned to a “new normal” that is defined by a lack of full-time jobs across many industries. In the IT industry, and specifically in the IBM i niche, employers still largely have the upper hand in setting terms, while employees are increasingly forced to make due with part-time, temporary, and contract work.

“We’re just not seeing the jobs like we used to see,” says Bob Langieri, the CEO of Excel Technical Services, a job placement company based in Orange County, California. “I’ve been

If you want to screw up your life, there’s nothing like a Midlife Crisis to provide handy justification. The affair with the younger woman, followed by spending quality time with the wife’s attorney; the outlandish purchase, after which your kid discovers she won’t be going to Stanford after all; and the cosmetic surgery that makes your face unresponsive to human emotion. These are some of the ingenious ways we’ve developed to cope with the unavoidable process of aging.

Having said that, sometimes a properly managed Midlife Crisis can save your life. But more on that later.

The Midlife Crisis is

High availability software vendor Maxava has generously opened up its checkbook and for the fourth year in a row has committed funds for the Maxava iFoundation to help support efforts to bolster the IBM i community.

The iFoundation was set up by the New Zealand company, which now has a presence around the globe, four years ago because the company’s managers wanted to actually do something to promote the community. Specifically, iFoundation makes grants to not-for-profit organizations promote the IBM i platform and support activities that are involved with the exchanging of knowledge, skills, or ideas about the IBM i

Thank you for the news stories and industry commentary. Coming back to the IBM i fold after eight years, this is exactly what I need.

I have a comment on your P05 Power8 story though. You mention that the memory cap is the same as IBM put on the Power7+ P05 machine, which is not what I have encountered. I have just installed a Power7+ 710 Express and it has a 256 GB memory limit but is a P05 box.

Kind regards,

–Matthew

That cap is only on the Power 720 and Power 720+, which has room for expansion for

If IBM pushed any harder on promoting “The Cloud,” it would rain for 40 days and 40 nights. Investments have been made in technologies such as PowerVM, SmartCloud management products, and Live Partition Mobility. And you can’t undervalue the investments from the managed service providers (MSPs) and the independent software vendors (ISVs).

“We see a revenue shift from the traditional buy/sell business to ‘the cloud’ and managed services,” says Jim Kandrac, who makes his living selling cloud-based backup and recovery services and remote hardware for disaster recovery and high availability. Kandrac’s business model relies a combination of IBM Power Systems

I’d like to tell you Modernizing IBM i Applications from the Database up to the User Interface and Everything in Between is on the IT Jungle Best Seller List. But we don’t have a best seller list and if IBM knew how many of these Rebooks were being downloaded, it’s against Big Blue’s better judgment to release such information.

You’ve heard about this Redbook before if you are a regular reader of The Four Hundred. It was a monumental effort that was first released as a Draft Redbook (Danger: Typographical errors and other bugs have yet to be thoroughly

Every year starts out anew with its own optimism and then the reality of the year gradually becomes apparent. It may seem like it has been a long time since a year of spending in the IT sector started out strong and got stronger as the year progressed, but it has happened, in 2010 as the world started to come out of the Great Recession. But in recent years, as in lingering recessions of years gone past and during major transitions in the IT sector itself, it does seem like forecasts of IT spending growth get cut as the year

There is nothing quite like an economy to send mixed signals. The growth rate in gross domestic product was estimated to grow at an anemic one-tenth of a point in the first quarter when the Bureau of Economic Analysis put out its initial figures in April, numbers that were revised two weeks ago to a decline of 1 percent. Declines in exports and inventories accounted for most of that fall, and it is not clear yet what, if any, effect this will have on the jobs market. Thus far, this signal does not appear to have gotten through the system.