It is hard to remember that IBM was not exactly sitting on the sidelines when Linux swept over the datacenter in the early 2000s in the wake of the dot-com bust. Big Blue saw the rise of Linux early on, among its supercomputer customers, and it was unsure how to preserve its revenue streams from AIX and OS/400 systems while at the same time embracing Linux. Here we are 15 years later, and it looks like IBM finally has its Linux act together on Power.

The question we all have is this: Will it make a difference? Hope springs eternal,

Reflections Upon The RPG & DB2 Summit

I just returned home from Chicago and another enjoyable learning experience at the RPG & DB2 Summit. This was the fourth consecutive Summit for me as a member of the session speakers group. I consider it an honor and a privilege to be teaching alongside people like Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Paul Tuohy, Scott Klement, Barbara Morris, and many others. Each Summit has been very beneficial to me, and I suspect it is the same for others who attend.

Meeting and talking with the conference attendees is a treat for me. These are

Home Depot’s point of sale (POS) system was breached in 2014, comprising information on 53 million accounts. A year before, Target’s POS was breached, putting data from at least 40 million customers in jeopardy. In both cases, the retailers were deemed “compliant” with Payment Cardholder Initiative (PCI) data security standards. But obviously there’s a big difference between complying with security regulations and actually having good security, and that’s true whether your shop runs on IBM i or any other platform.

As cyber criminals get better at penetrating computer systems (and it’s worth reminding you that they are getting very, very

Behind this distribution company that spans Europe and the United States is an IBM Power8 system running IBM i. The production box is a single-socket, six-core, 3.02 GHz processor configuration capable of 59,500 CPW, but able to get the job done while operating on two cores. It sits in the home offices of LF SpA headquartered in Cesena, Italy, about a four-hour drive north of Rome. The company takes its business continuity very seriously, which is why it recently implemented high availability software from Maxava.

Maxava has been in the high availability and disaster recovery business for 15-plus years.

IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too.

Getting a grip on a project without the financial investment of buying software and signing service contracts appeals to some shops that prefer to keep their business an internal affair. And there