• New Power8 Midrange, PurePower Kicker To PureSystems

  May 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is hosting its Edge2015 Power and System z conference in Las Vegas this week, and with the System z13 mainframes already launched in January to help that ramp get underway and bolster the company’s hardware sales, that leaves the final rounding out of the Power Systems line with Power8 processors as the star of the show. As expected, IBM is indeed launching its Power E850 four-socket midrange system, complementing the Power E880 high-end system that IBM let fly early (for some reason) ahead of the event. IBM is also including a new preconfigured cluster called the PurePower System, something

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• Where IBM i’s Double-Digit Growth Is Coming From

  May 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM just completed the best quarter for IBM i revenue in recent memory. While Big Blue no longer releases hard sales figures for the platform, the company did let it be known that the IBM i side of the house enjoyed double-digit revenue growth during the first quarter, which is great news for the platform. You might be wondering where that growth is coming from, and so are we. With support for i5/OS V5R4 (finally) winding down and Power8 servers ramping up, now is as good a time as any for IBM i shops to get current with their setups.

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• IBM i Shops Not In A Hurry For HANA

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community has always looked to IBM for evidence that it is protecting its collective investment in the platform. Lately it seems the IBM i executives are playing up the investment angle more than usual. At the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and I talked about that topic. Nelson played a key role in the recent Power-SAP Summit in Rochester. The event was primarily for IBM i business partners and SAP end users and their interest was in roadmaps. There’s an existing perception among the SAP on IBM i community that

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• LANSA Bets On Windows Mobile Acceptability

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  On a scale of one to 10, the expectations for business-focused mobile applications are somewhere in the teens. Business apps, mobile devices, and remote workers are on a steady climb. Although Appleand Android devices dominate the mobile landscape, LANSA just announced it has added Microsoft Windows to its write-once-deploy-many strategy for native application development. The long-time IBM i software vendor believes Windows will soon be an important mobile choice. Windows mobile? Are you kidding me? That’s pretty much what I asked Steve Gapp, president and CEO of LANSA, when we got together at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition

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• COMMON Still In The Red; Trend Is Favorable

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  It’s a fact that professional associations are struggling to sustain themselves in the modern work environment. What organizations need to do to remain relevant is a never-ending question. Solutions come from what has always worked, but they also require new strategies and a break from the past. The COMMON user group finds itself in this position. So do 95 percent of the professional associations representing everything from doctors to dog catchers. And in most cases, the success of the association comes down to members and money. The greatest tangible benefit for the COMMON user group is its Annual Meeting and

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• Technology Refresh Highlighted By Development Languages And Native Flash Storage

  May 6, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s latest round of technology refreshments for IBM i 7.1 and 7.2 were announced last week, so I asked Steve Will and Alison Butterill to pick what they expected to be the operating systems’ most appreciated and readily implemented enhancements. Their agreed upon choices came down to support for popular development languages Java 8 and Python, plus expanded support for the data interchange format JSON, and native flash storage, which replaces virtual attached storage. Will, the chief scientist for IBM i, and Butterill, the IBM i program offering manager, have a great deal to say about what goes into

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• SAP HANA Now Available On IBM Power

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  After years of discussion and months of testing, SAP‘s HANA in-memory database is now officially supported on IBM‘s Power servers, giving joint SAP-IBM customers an alternative to running HANA on X86. IBM on Monday officially launched two special editions of its Power Systems servers designed to run HANA Business Warehouse software this week, while an announcement from SAP is expected soon. “I don’t think it’s a big shock to anybody that we’re entering the HANA space and that we’re doing it with a processor that was designed for big data and analytics,” says Vicente Moranta, IBM’s director and

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• BCD Cranks Up Its PHP Engine

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  It’s no secret that BCD Software likes PHP. The company, owned by Quadrant Software since February 2014, has supported the Web application programming language since it rolled out a special PHP version of WebSmart back in 2007. But with the recent launches of two new PHP bundles aimed at IBM i shops, as well as support for Zend‘s Z-Ray functionality, the company is taking its affinity for PHP to a whole new level. BCD used last week’s COMMON conference as a springboard to launch two new software bundles that combine the WebSmart development tools and Zend’s PHP software for

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• Profound Gets A Handle On Subfiles In Screen Scraper

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to IBM i application modernization, subfile programs can present a dilemma. If you’re going the whole-hog route and getting rid of all 5250 and DDS underpinnings, you can convert subfiles into modern tables or grids. But what if you’re aiming for just a quick Web-enablement with screen-scraping tools? Keeping track of shifty subfiles here can be a challenge, but Profound Logic recently tackled the issue in an update to Genie. Genie is Profound’s fast and easy Web-enablement tool for 5250 interfaces. The company is not shy about calling Genie a screen scraper, which is exactly what it

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• Maxava Building Its Own Cloud For IBM i High Availability

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Maxava is no newbie in the cloud. Indeed, it counts hundreds clients whose IBM i data and applications are protected by business partners who run Maxava’s high availability software in their own data centers. But those business partners don’t provide complete coverage around the world, and so Maxava is building its own HA cloud to serve them. “We’re filling a bit of a gap,” Peter Kania, director of technical services and development, said at a press conference during the COMMON conference held at Disneyland last week. “We’re starting to get into that space ourselves.” The New Zealand company is installing

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