The IBM midrange ecosystem was built on ISV applications. When the first AS/400 was ready to be shipped, more than 2,500 applications were available. That was a huge number then and it’s a huge (but undetermined) number now. So much has changed in the past 25 years. Who would expect the AS/400, now the IBM i, ISV community to resemble what it once was? And a fair question to ask is: “Should it?”

As long as the software remains vital and diverse and modern, the platform survives. A weak ISV community will sap the strength of the system. True. But

It is a bit quiet out there in Power Systems land, but IBM is getting its house in order and making a few changes as it moves solidly into the Power8 era and puts older systems out to pasture. IBM also announced a few minor upgrades to the networking and virtualization features in the Power Systems line last week, and withdrew a key piece of WebSphere software from its catalog that might affect IBM i shops.

Let’s go over the tweaks to the Power Systems line first, which were detailed in announcement letter 115-043. IBM is partially fulfilling its

It might seem there’s only so much you can do in the field of time and attendance (T&A) management. But in fact, there’s always something new. “Just when we think we’ve done it all, there’s always somebody saying, ‘Hey what about this?’ and down the path we go,” says Kronos vice president Barry Moore. That path was remarkably fruitful with the recent delivery of iSeries Central suite version 7.0.

While the Windows-based Workforce Central suite gets all the attention and glory at Kronos headquarters in Chelmsford, Massachusetts (look, a cloud version!), the rock-solid iSeries Central suite continues to be relied

“We see lots of interesting ways forward for IBM i applications,” says Infinite Corporation president and CEO Bruce Acacio. He’s talking about IBM midrange shops looking to modernize, but he’s specifically interested in shops that have decided to leave the IBM i platform behind and migrate their applications to Linux, Windows, or Unix systems. Infinite helped “just under 200” IBM i shops make that migration in 2014, Acacio says. He expects that number to reach 400 in 2015.

Decision makers have had modernization in mind for several years during which they’ve been in talks with Infinite about options and the

If you are looking to shop for all-flash storage systems to attach to your IBM i or other systems in the datacenter, you might want to take a gander at the new FlashSystem arrays that Big Blue launched last week. IBM has partnered with memory manufacturer Micron Technology and moved from the enterprise multi-layer cell (eMLC) memory used in the FlashSystem 840 and V840 machines to more capacious and presumably less expensive NAND MLC memory in the new Flash System 900 and V9000 machines launched last week.

From the looks of things, the basic feeds and speeds of the FlashSystem