It is hard to believe, but we are most of the way through the third quarter and looking ahead to the final quarter of the year. There is a pretty big lag in time between the last bit of business that is done in every 13-week period and when large companies like IBM actually know how well or poorly they have done. In the case of the Power Systems division within Systems Group, and particularly with the IBM i portion of that business, Big Blue says as little as possible to quantify and qualify how the business is doing. But

Determining the benefits, challenges, and costs associated with evolving IT environments leads to one of the most critical decisions businesses face. The IBM midrange environment is unique in many ways due to the system architecture and, some would say, the reluctance of its user base to make changes. The advocates geek out on the system’s vast capabilities, but surprisingly little is known about the actual developing trends and evolving IT roadmaps of the organizations that make up the community.

Jumping on and off technology bandwagons is rarely seen in the IBM i community, but then a lot goes unaccounted for

Two computer science students in Europe were recently given an unusual assignment: Learn about the IBM i platform and what makes it tick. After talking with a number of IT professionals familiar with IBM i, they gained a greater understanding and respect for it–and most importantly, what IBM i needs to continue being a successful platform in the future.

Victor Wiklund and Veronica Randleff say they felt lost when they were first asked to investigate the IBM i and report on the future of the platform. As second-year students in the computer science and engineering program at KTH, the Royal

A long overdue update to the RPG curriculum and course guide available through the IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative (PSAI) is nearing completion. The revision work puts several modern RPG enhancements into the education and certification processes, which have gone hand in hand because of a cooperative effort involving IBM and COMMON. Jim Buck, an instructor at Gateway Technical College was instrumental in the bringing forth the changes.

The revised curriculum is seen as a key piece in getting more schools to teach RPG and other IBM i topics. “The schools that are part of the Academic Initiative need

Over the past several issues of The Four Hundred, I have been talking about the gap between the impressive performance that IBM delivers with each successive generation of Power processors and the amount of capacity that the vast majority of customers need. Or, more precisely, the capacity that they don’t seem to need to run their core IBM i workloads, much to the chagrin of Big Blue, its reseller and ISV partners, and the rest of the IBM i ecosystem that is trying to make a living.

In addition to outlining that performance gap, with the help of