For the past 20 years, the class of applications known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has largely dominated the business software discussion. But that hegemony is now slipping due to a variety of factors, leading some to speculate that ERP’s heyday is in the past. The big question then becomes: What should companies do next?

If you work at a company of appreciable size (say $50 million in sales or more), chances are good you rely on an ERP system that doesn’t just plan (as the name suggests) but actually executes the business processes that make your business tick. Whether

Do you know a good mobile application when you see one? I’ll bet you do. Although the IBM midrange community lives in a predominately green-screen world and uses outdated terminology like AS/400, iSeries, and System i, we see what’s going on around us. It doesn’t matter if you are an application developer, an app dev manager, or the worried owner of a company with concerns about the current state of the business applications.

It’s not difficult to compare what you have application-wise with what is becoming the norm: Web applications that look better and work better on both desktop and

It is not often that I give readers of The Four Hundred reading assignments outside of this publication, but from time to time, in the course of the other work I do in other parts of the IT industry, I run across things that are relevant to adjacent markets that ultimately have some bearing on the Power Systems-IBM i platform. Such is the case with a presentation that the chief for IBM‘s Systems Group gave to Wall Street recently.

Tom Rosamilia, who has been general manager of the System z and Power Systems division in his long career at

Entrepreneurs are typically blessed with some combination of courage, imagination, and somebody else’s cash. But while these advantages occasionally translate to wild success in the marketplace, that success comes at a price. As reported by Business Insider, Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF, surveyed entrepreneurs and found that just under half admitted dealing with mental health issues, and 30 percent report suffering from depression (over four times the national norm), 29 percent struggle with ADHD, and 27 percent live with anxiety. Changing the world is stressful work. Sounds like they need a vacation.

They’re not the only

Anyone who says RPG is a dead-end career is dead wrong. It’s the door to opportunity. People are walking through that door with an education that costs less than $1,000 and a time investment of about six months. They have a certificate in hand and more than half of them have an entry-level RPG programmer job at an IBM midrange shop. Some would say this is the beginning of the end, but is an old-fashioned Midwestern success story.

“Most of the students are hard-working adults who are feeding a family and have committed to making a career change,” says Gregory