Sometimes the crazy ideas come from us, sometimes they come from you. Sometimes we are all pondering the possibilities at the same time and it seems like an idea is almost a meme, spreading like a virus, hopping from brain to brain, or as I sometimes suspect might be possible, vibrating in the cosmic ether for others to reflect on if they can only hear the image. Whatever scenario this one is, a bunch of you have reached out and asked me to write about the possibilities of a leveraged buyout of the IBM i business. And so, here we

As a topic of discussion, software pricing is an incendiary device. But a flame without fuel goes out quickly. And for a lot of companies, status quo means no open flames and don’t even think about throwing that wood on the fire. There’s another term for status quo. It’s called complacency. The opposite of complacency is not change; it’s investigate. In terms of software, that means taking a look at software as a service.

Software licensing, support, and maintenance costs can be pretty steep, particularly the up-front licensing charges, which are often a point of fixation for customers. There’s a

IBM i is often portrayed as out-of-date platform for running ancient applications long since placed into maintenance mode. If you want real innovation, the mainstream thinking goes, you’d best look to more “modern” platforms. But if the award that two European companies recently won for a PHP-based logistics application is any indication, that preconception deserves to be popped, posthaste.

In late March, Proximity and Scandinavian House took home the SHD Logistics Award 2015 in the Innovation Technology category. The award was granted for STREAM, the PHP-based application that Proximity developed to provide order, delivery, and transportation management capabilities.

Scandinavian House,

With some reluctance, I take a deep breath and begin to tiptoe into the minefield. There are topics so polarizing that no matter what opinions you express, or how benignly you express them, they are bound to spawn potent disagreement. And with the advent of social media, taking a stand on anything even slightly controversial guarantees that remote hatred will roll in with tidal inevitability.

Topics like discrimination, white privilege, women, minorities, economic equity, and male domination, potentially explosive in their own right, are made incendiary when they are flogged in the pursuit of money.

Which is why Ellen Pao’s

Agilysys develops one of the most industry dominate applications in the IBM i ISV territory. Its Lodging Management System (LMS) has been the standard of the gaming industry for as long as those businesses have been computerized. Casino resort operations around the world use LMS for much of their business operations. A new software release from a dominate software company is a bellwether event for IBM midrange market watchers.

LMS 7.3, the first major release since 7.2 in October 2012, is highlighted by the long overdue integration with Insight Mobile Manager, a dashboard application that allows hotel managers to quickly