One of the great things about the IBM i server is it adapts to the times. While the platform often gets tagged with the “legacy” name, that’s merely because there’s still a lot of vintage iron running antique software in the real world. But the little elves way up north in IBM‘s Rochester toyshop have been hard at work bringing new capabilities to the platform.

Here are the top five new things that IBM brought to the IBM i platform in 2014 and 2015:

1. Native Flash Storage

IBM added support for native flash storage in the latest round

You don’t have to stretch your IBM midrange imagination too far to understand that today’s app dev decisions will have a great impact on tomorrow’s IT success. Some things never change. And that’s one of them. But situations change and doing business changes. The trick is to integrate the past–keep the valuable experiences and toss the excess baggage–with the present to prepare for the future.

Technology is almost always disruptive. How you deal with that, how you make it work for your career success and the success of your organization is the on-going challenge until you decide to hang up

When IBM sold off the System x division to Lenovo Group, one of the things that went with it was the modular Flex System chassis. Yes, IBM said it would source the machines from Lenovo and, yes, IBM said that it would continue to make and sell Power-based nodes for the Flex Systems to make its PureApplication converged systems for those customers who want them.

But the fact that there are, a year after the Power8 chips first came to market, no Flex System nodes based on the Power8 speaks volumes about just how IBM is really thinking about

ERP in the cloud . . . would you go for such an idea or not? If Infor didn’t think some IBM midrange shops were ready, it wouldn’t be offering this option to its discrete manufacturing customers. Infor’s Cloud Suite has been available to customers on other platforms for more than a year. We’re about to see how its IBM i shops take to the cloud.

The official announcement of Infor’s Cloud Suite for IBM i is still several weeks away, but the company already has a few shops operating in the cloud. At a gathering of Infor XA, LX,

It’s unreal how often I keep bumping into you. I was intrigued by the title of the article in the attached note, followed these links, and again found an article by you. (And thanks for the reference.) I’ve shared your emotions about IBM and this system, with ever increasing sadness, from the inside.

Still, you laid down a challenge and that reminded me of something I was asked to review by an IBM friend named Phil Vitale. He asked me to review and comment on a paper he had read named The CHERI capability model: Revisiting RISC in an age