Big Blue is getting ready to flesh out the rest of the Power8 systems lineup, and it looks like the pace is picking up a bit. Back in June, IBM announced a four-core variant of the Power S814 single-socket server, a machine that was only tentatively expected to be launched in the third quarter and was not part of analyst or customer briefings. IBM had said very little about its plans for larger systems that gang up more than four Power8 processors.

In fact, the roadmaps that I have been able to get my hands on seemed to indicate that

Do you ever get the feeling that IBM i news is the news that never makes the news? There’s a joke that IBM i is Big Blue’s best kept secret. It doesn’t get many laughs, except for the smart-alecky kind. IBM’s i team has ramped up its efforts, but their reach is limited to a few hundred at conferences and a few thousand by blogging. That level of evangelism was recently displayed at the OCEAN Technical Conference, where Alison Butterill was the messenger.

Butterill is the IBM i product offering manager and worldwide evangelist. She’s as close to the

At first glance, the partnership between IBM and Apple is a bit of a head turner. The companies have little in common, either technologically or culturally. One makes electronic gadgets for consumers and the other sells IT solutions to enterprises. But when viewed through the lens of the world’s obsession with mobile apps and Apple’s unquestioned supremacy in creating app experiences that people love, the union starts to make sense.

The central component of the deal is the 100-plus new, industry-specific apps that IBM and Apple will jointly develop for the iPhone and iPad. The applications will be natively developed

Bloomington, Indiana, is not the stuff of science fiction. Yet for the past 30 years, teams of scientists toiling in a non-descript house near Indiana University have been quietly conducting a decidedly Asimovian experiment. They have been teaching computers to think. Given the highly publicized achievements of IBM‘s playful R&D department–the spanking of chess champion Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue, and the Jeopardy dominance of everybody’s favorite know-it-all, Watson–it is tempting to believe that the challenges of creating thinking machines have largely been solved.

But those breakthroughs relied more on brute force than nuanced understanding. Dave Ferrucci, Watson’s daddy,

With the Power8 machines launched in April and not shipping in some cases until June and in others until August, no one expected for the second quarter to be a necessarily great one for IBM‘s Power Systems business. But, as it turns out, it was not as bad as many quarters have been, even though there was an understandable decline. With Power8 machines now shipping, and as we report elsewhere in this issue, more on the way in the midrange and high-end, perhaps the Power Systems line will stabilize in the second half of the year.

We certainly hope

The leading independent IBM i job scheduler is getting smarter with this month’s release of Robot/SCHEDULE version 12 from HelpSystems. The new file event monitoring features added in v12 allow the job scheduler to react to file and directory events occurring on the IFS and physical file changes on the DB2 database, just like managed file transfer (MFT) products can do.

Ensuring the smooth and orderly execution of jobs is not an easy thing to do, especially in larger organizations running dozens of applications across one or more IBM i servers. When the inter-dependencies of jobs, tasks, and processes

The supply chain software company Manhattan Associates, a key independent software vendor (ISV) in a key vertical market for the IBM i platform, completed its second quarter of 2014 ahead of projections. Consulting services drives the revenue bus at this company, but the firm highlighted five software licensing contracts with new customers and expanded contracts with 27 existing customers. Three contracts were in excess of $1 million. Compared to a year ago, license revenue for the quarter was up 11 percent to $18 million.

Services revenue in Q2 totaled $93.5 million, an increase of 20 percent compared to Q2

Getting started on a mobile application development project can seem just slightly less challenging than swimming up Niagara Falls. And sometimes, after you’ve started the project, it can seem like hurtling down Niagara Falls. Well, hold on, there are ways to dismiss your panic attacks. One option is the just-out-of-the-oven aXes Mobile App cooked up by the IBM midrange pros at LANSA.

The best advice for first-time mobile app developers is to keep it simple and make it work. Don’t try to build the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on your first try. A better choice for the

The opportunity to attend a local IBM i training and education conference only comes around once a year in Southern California. IBM i shops know it and they take advantage. Nearly 200 IBM i advocates gathered at the National University facilities in Costa Mesa earlier this month, the largest attendance in recent years. The OCEAN user group, based in Orange County, California, hosted the event. OCEAN is one of the largest IBM i user groups in the United States and by far the largest west of the Mississippi River.

The 2014 technical conference was expanded to a three-day affair after

Hot on the heels of Germany’s victory in the World Cup soccer tournament, software giant SAP is extolling the benefits of the HANA in-memory technology that the German team used to analyze its own players as well as do competitive analysis on its opponents before, during, and after matches. “When you think about what they accomplish with their smart use of big data, it amounts to making a complex game look simple,” explained co-CEO Bill McDermott in a conference call with Wall Street analysts going over SAP’s second quarter financial results. “And now we know that simple helps win the