IBM has a plan for the IBM i operating system. It sounds slightly ominous and it might even cause some of the IBM i advocates to lock the doors to the server room. It’s not a secret. In fact, some say the idea is gaining support. The idea is to surround the i. Surround it with new Linux workloads, primarily analytics workloads, which to a large degree involve mobile and, to a lesser degree, social applications.

Maybe you don’t give a flying flapjack about Linux. Maybe, from your point of view, it’s still not ready for enterprise operating system duty

Here is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems.

An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the

Some ideas need to be told and retold before the concept is fully grasped and action results. This isn’t the first time outspoken IBM i security expert Pat Botz has warned developers about dangerous security assumptions. This advice comes periodically, and it demonstrates how people hear without listening. That’s maybe a bit too harsh because there are indications it’s become more widely recognized that programmers have a role in data security at the application level.

“You can’t secure a system these days without the programmers knowing about security,” Botz says. “Programmers can’t write programs that make data available to anyone

Buying enterprise software is never easy. But the complexity and heavy-handedness that IBM and the other megavendors bring to software licensing and enforcement hurts everybody involved. That’s the opinion of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, which recently announced that it is going to step up its analysis of Big Blue’s licensing practices.

The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) last month announced that it is stepping up its research of IBM and SAP software licensing strategies in hopes of helping customers navigate overly complex structures and pressuring the vendors into simplifying their policies. To that end, the UK-based firm held

It is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do.

Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of