IBM is hosting its Edge2015 Power and System z conference in Las Vegas this week, and with the System z13 mainframes already launched in January to help that ramp get underway and bolster the company’s hardware sales, that leaves the final rounding out of the Power Systems line with Power8 processors as the star of the show. As expected, IBM is indeed launching its Power E850 four-socket midrange system, complementing the Power E880 high-end system that IBM let fly early (for some reason) ahead of the event. IBM is also including a new preconfigured cluster called the PurePower System, something

IBM just completed the best quarter for IBM i revenue in recent memory. While Big Blue no longer releases hard sales figures for the platform, the company did let it be known that the IBM i side of the house enjoyed double-digit revenue growth during the first quarter, which is great news for the platform. You might be wondering where that growth is coming from, and so are we.

With support for i5/OS V5R4 (finally) winding down and Power8 servers ramping up, now is as good a time as any for IBM i shops to get current with their setups.

The IBM i community has always looked to IBM for evidence that it is protecting its collective investment in the platform. Lately it seems the IBM i executives are playing up the investment angle more than usual. At the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and I talked about that topic. Nelson played a key role in the recent Power-SAP Summit in Rochester. The event was primarily for IBM i business partners and SAP end users and their interest was in roadmaps.

There’s an existing perception among the SAP on IBM i community that

On a scale of one to 10, the expectations for business-focused mobile applications are somewhere in the teens. Business apps, mobile devices, and remote workers are on a steady climb. Although Appleand Android devices dominate the mobile landscape, LANSA just announced it has added Microsoft Windows to its write-once-deploy-many strategy for native application development. The long-time IBM i software vendor believes Windows will soon be an important mobile choice.

Windows mobile? Are you kidding me? That’s pretty much what I asked Steve Gapp, president and CEO of LANSA, when we got together at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition

It’s a fact that professional associations are struggling to sustain themselves in the modern work environment. What organizations need to do to remain relevant is a never-ending question. Solutions come from what has always worked, but they also require new strategies and a break from the past. The COMMON user group finds itself in this position. So do 95 percent of the professional associations representing everything from doctors to dog catchers. And in most cases, the success of the association comes down to members and money.

The greatest tangible benefit for the COMMON user group is its Annual Meeting and