The new year is here! Will 2015 be the year IBM i makes a comeback, or will there be another setback? IT Jungle reached out to the IBM i community for predictions and was rewarded with a treasure trove of ideas–some of them serious, some of them zany, but all of them authentic from the people who know the platform the best.

Dr. Frank Soltis, retired chief scientist at IBM

“Because of IBM’s low stock price, Apple will consider buying all of IBM and begin selling a new leading-edge business computer that they will call iBusiness.”

Trevor Perry, IBM i

We’re never going to entirely eliminate paper in the workplace. People are much too dependent on it for that. But the way S4i Systems CEO Spencer Elliott sees it, companies can take tremendous bite out of their paper consumption–and become more agile and efficient businesses–by transitioning to electronic document management tools, such as the IBM i-based package he sells at S4i.

Like many people in the IBM i community, Elliott is old school. He often prefers reading on paper compared to computer monitors, and likes the simplicity that a pencil and a piece of paper afford.

“You’re never going to

Conversion of IBM i spool files to a format that readily fits into a business workflow process is a great idea. Lots of companies have done this successfully by starting with a clear and well defined business problem to solve. And now T.L. Ashford, a company best known for its IBM i-compatible barcode software, is in the electronic forms business with a new product called TLA Forms.

The software is designed to extract data from IBM midrange systems’ spool files and place it into a custom designed form as text, barcodes, or graphics. The spool files are what drives

Although the company might be called International Business Machines, the real drivers, at least in 2015, are set to revolve around data, cloud, and engagement. That was the message from Martin Schroeter, IBM’s chief financial officer, who walked Wall Street analysts through the company’s financial results for the fourth quarter of 2014 after the markets closed on Tuesday. While Power Systems and System z servers and various storage products will be a foundation for IBM’s business, Big Blue will continue to push its software and services in the pursuit of revenue and profit growth.

As is usually the case, Ginni

In this issue’s roundup of IBM i news, we cover the latest AUTOMON offerings from SoftLanding, a new digital signature capture solution from InterForm (which is sold as ArtForm/400 here in the U.S.), and the 2015 edition of Infinite’s BABY36.

A SoftLanding for AUTOMON

UNICOM Global subsidiary SoftLanding Systems recently issued new releases of its AUTOMON suite of systems management tools for the IBM i.

The New Hampshire company bolstered several AUTOMON components, including the job scheduler, called iSchedule; the iConsole message monitoring tool; and iMessage, which allows users to respond to messages remotely.

The new release of iSchedule should