What has PHP done to buck the trend in IBM midrange shops to resist change? Fear of disrupting traditional business policies and procedures is not unusual and it’s not unique to the IBM i community. Change is scary, but it can also be exciting. PHP has brought about a pretty fair share of change. And in the process, PHP has changed. The IBM i PHP community has changed, too.

There are a lot of companies that leverage their RPG development staffs by cross-training them in PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for Web development but also used as a general

A company called OpenLegacy is beginning to gain momentum with a suite of free and open source tools for modernizing IBM i and z/OS applications. Besides giving away most of its technology (it charges for support in its professional edition), the company is also unique with its API-driven approach to giving older apps new life with Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces.

OpenLegacy was founded in Israel about a year ago with the goal of helping organizations expose their IBM i and z/OS assets in new and useful ways. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Romi Stein, is a former IBMer and

With the new year under way, with IBM shipping a substantially completed Power8-based system lineup, and with the company eager to ramp up its Power Systems sales, it would be reasonable to expect for Big Blue to be wheeling and dealing here in the first quarter of 2015. As it turns out, IBM has been quiet as a mouse on the deal front in the United States and Canada, but the company is cutting deals in Europe to bolster Power System sales. At the same time, paradoxically, and no doubt due to the strengthening US dollar, IBM Europe is raising

SoftLanding has collaborated with HelpSystems to obtain more modern cross-referencing and documentation tools for SoftLanding’s widely used change management tool, TurnOver. The partnership, which was announced last week, involves the integration of a more modern version of HelpSystems’ application development tool, called ABSTRACT, with the goal of enhancing software development capabilities for IBM midrange shops using TurnOver.

TurnOver (referred to as TurnOver for iSeries v100 edition in the company’s literature) supports repeatable procedures for developing and maintaining IBM i applications, including issue tracking, project management, development, and deployment. It is used by IBM i ISVs and development departments in IBM

System management skills on IBM i have never been showcased in their own conference, but that’s about to change. A two-day conference co-hosted by the COMMON user group and i In the Cloud, a managed service provider, is scheduled for March 3 and 4 in suburban Chicago. The session agenda includes two tracks: one is straight-forward systems management while the other is specific to virtualization skills. Instruction is being handled by system admin subject experts Larry Bolhuis and Pete Massiello.

Technologies such as virtualization, the cloud, analytics, and mobile and social front-ends each require a good grasp of the