It is the beginning of a new year, and this is the appropriate time to ponder the things we would like to see happen in the IBM i community over the coming year. As I have said many times, the only way you ever get anything in this world is to ask for it, so I took a few moments to come up with a list of things that I would like to see IBM do in the coming year to help support and extend the IBM i community. Please let us know what you would like to see happen

The folks at TEMBO Technology Lab knew a tough road was ahead when they set out to fundamentally transform how IBM i shops use DB2. You don’t tell IBM i pros that they’re doing it wrong with record-level I/O, and not expect to get a funny look or two. But to its credit, when TEMBO encountered resistance to its SQL mantra, the company stepped back, regrouped, and figured out another approach.

“It’s been a long hard slog,” says TEMBO CEO Marinus Van Sandwyk. “The one thing that really caught us off guard initially was we had to explain to these

Every IBM midrange shop needs one of these–a person who goes around the office from desk to desk explaining, in defense lawyer earnest and animation, the magnificence of this built-for-business computer system. What it can accomplish is worthy of attention. What is actually does is largely overlooked and what it doesn’t do is overblown and used to plan its execution. What can this system accomplish is the question that most business executives want answered.

Andy Kulakowski says more and more execs are finding the answer and moving their businesses forward. Kulakowski is intent on moving his company forward, and his

Back in the old days, the mainframe and midrange divisions of IBM rivalled each other almost as much as they took on competition from outside the walls of Big Blue. But since the mid-1990s, when the company first started converging its system lines and made sure they could all run Java and its application server, the different system units of IBM have been collaborating and converging. Now, after selling off its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall, IBM is down to two system divisions within a single IBM Systems group.

The first machine to come out of the

The new year is well under way and all eyes are already turning toward the end of 2015 to try to guess how much the IT market will grow. The good news is that the consensus seems to be that, in the aggregate, IT spending around the world and across all kinds of devices and services will be up this year compared to 2014. The less-than-good news–but still not bad news–is that the U.S. dollar is getting stronger and that actually cuts global IT spending projections.

The prognosticators at Gartner shaved their predictions for IT spending growth throughout 2014 as