IBM‘s latest round of technology refreshments for IBM i 7.1 and 7.2 were announced last week, so I asked Steve Will and Alison Butterill to pick what they expected to be the operating systems’ most appreciated and readily implemented enhancements. Their agreed upon choices came down to support for popular development languages Java 8 and Python, plus expanded support for the data interchange format JSON, and native flash storage, which replaces virtual attached storage.

Will, the chief scientist for IBM i, and Butterill, the IBM i program offering manager, have a great deal to say about what goes into

After years of discussion and months of testing, SAP‘s HANA in-memory database is now officially supported on IBM‘s Power servers, giving joint SAP-IBM customers an alternative to running HANA on X86. IBM on Monday officially launched two special editions of its Power Systems servers designed to run HANA Business Warehouse software this week, while an announcement from SAP is expected soon.

“I don’t think it’s a big shock to anybody that we’re entering the HANA space and that we’re doing it with a processor that was designed for big data and analytics,” says Vicente Moranta, IBM’s director and

It’s no secret that BCD Software likes PHP. The company, owned by Quadrant Software since February 2014, has supported the Web application programming language since it rolled out a special PHP version of WebSmart back in 2007. But with the recent launches of two new PHP bundles aimed at IBM i shops, as well as support for Zend‘s Z-Ray functionality, the company is taking its affinity for PHP to a whole new level.

BCD used last week’s COMMON conference as a springboard to launch two new software bundles that combine the WebSmart development tools and Zend’s PHP software for

When it comes to IBM i application modernization, subfile programs can present a dilemma. If you’re going the whole-hog route and getting rid of all 5250 and DDS underpinnings, you can convert subfiles into modern tables or grids. But what if you’re aiming for just a quick Web-enablement with screen-scraping tools? Keeping track of shifty subfiles here can be a challenge, but Profound Logic recently tackled the issue in an update to Genie.

Genie is Profound’s fast and easy Web-enablement tool for 5250 interfaces. The company is not shy about calling Genie a screen scraper, which is exactly what it

Maxava is no newbie in the cloud. Indeed, it counts hundreds clients whose IBM i data and applications are protected by business partners who run Maxava’s high availability software in their own data centers. But those business partners don’t provide complete coverage around the world, and so Maxava is building its own HA cloud to serve them.

“We’re filling a bit of a gap,” Peter Kania, director of technical services and development, said at a press conference during the COMMON conference held at Disneyland last week. “We’re starting to get into that space ourselves.”

The New Zealand company is installing