With IBM’s official end of support for the IBM i 6.1 operating system coming up at the end of September, it’s natural to wonder what effect this will have on the IBM i community. It’s not exactly a long walk off a short pier for those organizations using 6.1 as their primary OS. The upgrade is uncomplicated. IBM has an extended support plan for the undecided. But what about the unsupported?

The winding down of 6.1 is certainly not going to stir up things like when this release was the freshest rose in the garden and support for V5R4 was

In the world of Web design, a user interface built with a “responsive design” is equally at home on a smartphone as a Windows PC. HelpSystems took responsive design to heart with the latest update to Robot SCHEDULE, which now features a Web-based user interface that will give customers deeper insight into how jobs are running on the IBM i server.

With the new interface, Robot SCHEDULE users will be able to see IBM i jobs as they’re running, and interact with them through a mobile device. If a problem crops up with a job, the interface will notify them

Faction, one of the largest owners of cloud data centers that you’ve probably never heard of, is getting into the IBM i hosting business through a partnership with Data Storage Corp. While Faction doesn’t intend on shifting its focus very far from its core business of hosting VMware environments, adding IBM i to the mix will be beneficial.

Faction supplies tens of thousands of virtual machines to its business clients via eight cloud “nodes” running in data centers in the US and the UK It’s one of the top five providers of VMware based clouds, and is listed on

Rimini Street and Oracle are prepping for a September trial that should help conclude the five-year legal battle over Rimini’s third-party ERP maintenance business. However, the clock is just starting on a fresh lawsuit Rimini filed against Oracle in which it hopes to clarify the legality of its new business model. Despite the legal murkiness, both Rimini and its top competitor, Spinnaker Support, report brisk sales.

The trial in Oracle vs. Rimini that’s slated to begin in about two months should decide whether Rimini stole Oracle’s copyrighted material relating to its JD Edwards and Siebel applications and, if so,

In June Infor delivered two products that are relevant to its IBM i installed base, including the 13.3 release of its M3 ERP suite and a new IBM i-based offering called AutoRelease Cloud. The new cloud version of AutoRelease, which is based on an iSeries-based product once used by more than 100 companies in the automotive business, includes software from Infor’s business partner InterForm A/S.

Infor has been trying to get customers to upgrade from older versions of CRM AutoRelease for the better part of 10 years. Four years ago, the company had about 130 customers running the i5/OS-based