• Head Power Sales Honcho Fires Up The IBM i Base

  May 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals are an unusually passionate and loyal group of customers, but you don’t typically hear much emotion from the IBM executives in charge of steering the ship. So when IBM’s top Power Systems salesman took the podium at last week’s COMMON conference and fired up the base with a rousing keynote address, it was a rare treat. After taking care of business and handing out the awards in a fairly full conference room at the Disneyland Hotel last Sunday, COMMON president Pete Massiello turned the microphone over to Alex Gogh, the vice president of global sales for IBM

  …

  Read more

• IBM Upgrades High-End And Low-End Power8 Machines

  May 4, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we told you that IBM was working on rounding out the Power8-based Power Systems lineup with a four-socket midrange machine rumored to be called the Power E850 and that it was also expected to expand the high-end Power E880 line with its full complement of Power8 processors. We didn’t expect hardware announcements at the COMMON midrange conference in Anaheim, but on Tuesday last week Big Blue went and put out some of the new Power8 iron anyway without doing a formal announcement. Specifically, in announcement letter 115-021, IBM has added some processor options for low-end,

  …

  Read more

• Cautious Optimism Pervades COMMON

  May 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  It’s tough to have a bad day at Disneyland, which is officially “The Happiest Place On Earth.” But the IBM i community carries a lot of baggage, and some of it is blacker than a Maleficent curse. So when 1,000 of the community’s staunchest supporters descended upon the hallowed grounds of childhood dreams last week, unfettered joy was not a preordained outcome. But, as it turns out, the COMMON conference that took place at the Disneyland Hotel last Sunday through Thursday came off better than expected, at least as far as the future of the platform is concerned. While nobody

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: Cold War 2.0

  May 4, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Russian history is one of repeated repression blanketing systemic failure. But it is also a history of a resilient people adapting to state-imposed limitations. Russia’s cultural achievements are a testament to intelligence successfully seeking expression, often against great odds. Defying state control over their lives and prospects, the exceptionally gifted gravitated toward arenas in which they could exercise a measure of control over their careers. Whatever flavor of oppression they were forced to swallow–Czarist, Stalinist, or Communist–creative minds found refuge in fields such as literature, music, dance, and notably chess–the only global domination communism ever managed to achieve. Move the

  …

  Read more

• An Open Letter To IBM From A Developer

  May 4, 2015 Garry Taylor

  The only thing that I request from IBM, is the ability to develop software for their IBM i platform. Am I asking too much? I don’t think so. Allow me to elaborate. I have been developing on IBM i since 2008. In that time, I’ve used public systems, had the use of business partner’s machines, and way back in time I had my own 9401/150 developer system with all compilers installed. Recently though, I have been wishing to ramp up my efforts on IBM i, to develop more software, more seriously. Now, on any other computer platform I can

  …

  Read more

• The Remaining Power8 Systems Loom

  April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rumors have started going around that IBM is getting ready to launch the remaining members of the Power8 family of Power Systems machines. We had been anticipating that these machines might come out in concert with the COMMON user conference in Anaheim, California, this week or perhaps at the IBM Edge2015 conference to be hosted in May in Las Vegas. We still do not know for sure when the expected midrange and high-end Power8 machines are coming, but they are not launching at COMMON as far as our sources know. Last fall, when the Power E870 and half of

  …

  Read more

• Fresche Legacy Advances App Dev Integration Plan

  April 27, 2015 Dan Burger

  A lack of IT integration is costing organizations untold, but not unquantifiable, sums of money. The noose on careless spending is tightening as the realization of integration benefits slowly comes into focus in specific areas–one of those being application development and modernization projects, which are top concerns for many businesses. Shortening the development process, increasing the quality of applications before turning them loose in production, and reducing the maintenance burden are all part of integration goals. With integration as a target, Fresche Legacy has taken a step toward combining development tools, code analytics, and software change management by integrating its

  …

  Read more

• Power Systems Sales Return To Growth

  April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long decline as the Unix and proprietary systems market succumbed to the double whammies of server virtualization and Moore’s Law increases in performance and decreases in price/performance, but it looks like IBM‘s Power Systems business may have found a new floor on which it can build some growth. That is a lot better than the overall IBM business can say, which has been slipping quarter by quarter, for years now and which did it again in the first quarter of 2015. In the quarter ended in March, IBM booked $19.5 billion in revenues, down 11.9

  …

  Read more

• IBM Blocks ‘Bar Mitzvah’ Attack In SSL/TLS

  April 27, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently issued a security bulletin for a newly discovered security vulnerability–a weak cryptography algorithm in the SSL/TLS protocol stack–that could allow hackers to steal data. That vulnerability was dubbed the “Bar Mitzvah Attack” by the security researcher who discovered it because it uses a 13-year-old weakness in the RC4 algorithm. The Bar Mitzvah flaw was first described by Itsik Mantin, director of security research with Imperva, at the Black Hat Asia security event held in Singapore last month. The attack stems from a weakness in the way that the RC4 stream cipher creates encryption keys, which could allow

  …

  Read more

• SystemObjects Gets The Word Out On Mobile Messaging

  April 27, 2015 Dan Burger

  A mobile messaging app that can automatically receive information from applications or utilities running on IBM i or Windows servers could change the way you think about mobile computing and business objectives. SystemObjects, the French software company that specializes in Web and mobile solutions for IBM midrange computer users, is rolling out a new utility that it believes is the best way to get the attention of business-oriented mobile device users. The utility is called Push4Servers. It works by sending push messages using a simple API call inserted into any number of user programs. Push4Servers consists of three parts:

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles