• Zend And BCD Get A Little Closer For PHP

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies and BCD have been working together for about three years to help IBM i shops adopt PHP for developing new applications. Under a new partnership agreement unveiled recently, Zend will be referring customers to BCD for custom PHP-on-IBM i development work. But that’s not all the two vendors have up their respective sleeves. After analyzing the existing relationship between Zend and BCD, executives with the companies realized that a regular reseller model was not going to cut it, says Jeff Lovette, vice president of global sales and channels for Quadrant Software, which acquired BCD last year. “What

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• Cilasoft Introduces Single View Of Data From Multiple Systems

  April 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  Data aggregation, for many organizations, is more like data aggravation. Automating data consolidation from multiple files, even those that exist in different systems in different locations, has proved to be problematic, especially for businesses that run from multiple sites. When updating and aggregating data becomes a bottleneck, IT managers start searching for answers. Double the frustration when the distribution of data from one file to multiple files is also a factor. Solving those issues was a priority for Cilasoft, a security and compliance software vendor with a long history in the IBM midrange market. Last week, Cilasoft unveiled CENTRAL

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• SoftLanding Latest ISV To Add iASP Support

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The issue of whether to support independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) in your IBM i setup is not one to be taken lightly. For starters, just migrating from traditional ASPs to iASPs can be a major project, and your software will need to be tweaked to support it. While IBM i shops are moving to adopt iASPs, the growth is slow and steady rather than a mad dash. But for SoftLanding Systems, demand for iASPs was enough to justify modifying its change management tool, Turnover, to support the technology. iASPs debuted with the platform way back in 2001 with

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• Enough With The Huge Performance Increases Already, IBM i Pros Cry

  April 1, 2015 Swift

  IBM i shops are up in arms this week over the huge performance increases that IBM is seeking to foist upon them with the latest Power8 servers. “Eight threads per core and 12 cores per socket? Really IBM?” said clearly exasperated programmer/analyst Jack D. Sparrow. “I mean, what on earth am I going to do with all that raw, unbridled processing power?” Sparrow is not alone. In fact, a growing number of IBM i professionals are beginning to vocalize concerns about IBM and its sinister plan to equip every customer with a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower that will

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• Quadrant Simplifies Path To FoIP Glory

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the biggest challenges in setting up a virtual fax over IP (FoIP) system is getting the telephony settings right. Screw up one of the dozens of settings in a typical install, and you’ll quickly be on the phone to tech support. With a new release of Quadrant Software‘s QuadraDocV FoIP software, the vendor added a graphical wizard that significantly simplifies the setup process. Quadrant launched QuadraDocV two years ago to provide a virtual FoIP solution, primarily for its large base of existing IBM i customers. As a replacement for its popular FastFax “black box” appliances, QuadraDocV installs

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• OpenPower Could Take IBM i To Hyperscale And Beyond

  March 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Years ago, back when the IBM i platform was called the iSeries and IBM had just caught the Linux bug pretty bad, many of us had the idea that IBM should open up the OS/400 operating system and let it be driven more directly by a community of end users. The idea was to emulate the open source community that had fostered the maturity of the Linux kernel and the many thousands of other projects that make their way into a Linux distribution. As it turns out, Big Blue is starting out with opening up the hardware and from the

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• IBM i Skills Shortage: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

  March 23, 2015 Dan Burger

  A month ago when IT Jungle reported that CEO Mike Lawrie was blaming a lack of IBM i skilled professionals for a revenue shortfall at Computer Sciences Corp, the volume on this topic has been turned up considerably. That’s good. This is a discussion that needs to be heard. In the just-released IBM i Marketplace Survey, half the respondents listed IBM i skills depletion as a top concern. Much of this discussion is defined by whether a shortage exists or whether companies are doing a poor job with workforce management. “There’s only a shortage if you need them and

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• Tributary Flashes Backup To 60 TB Per Hour

  March 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Flash storage is not something you will find in the typical IBM i shop, which doesn’t get all worked up over shiny new technologies. But if a recent test that that pitted an IBM i host against an IBM FlashSystem 840 storage array–with Tributary Systems‘ Storage Director 5.0 managing traffic in the middle–is a sign of things to come, then flash may be here sooner than you think. Storage Director is virtual tape library (VTL) software that’s typically installed on an X86 server. This VTL appliance appears to its various hosts (IBM i servers, mainframes, OpenVMS, NonStop, etc) as

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Innovators’ Droll Lemma

  March 23, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  Robert Samuelson got it right, and memorably so. Last June, the Washington Post columnist characterized a spat in print between two Harvard professors as “an intellectual food fight.” The fight is over the value of business professor Clayton Christensen‘s theory of disruptive innovation, and Christensen’s adversary is history and literature professor Jill Lepore. Christensen’s theory, right, wrong, or some of each, may help explain IBM’s perplexing situation, and arguments about it are undoubtedly underway at the top of IBM. And if they aren’t they ought to be. In Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he asserts

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• Reader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace . . . Don’t Miss the IBM i Marketplace Webcast . . . COMMON Is Coming, Linux and VIOS Get Top Billing

  March 23, 2015 Hey, Dan

  Reader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace Hey, Dan: Your article on the HelpSystems survey of IBM i shops states: “For any IBM i advocate, this survey brings good news. By a wide margin, it demonstrates that organizations have no imminent plans to leave the platform. Nine out of ten are staying put. “This seems to me to be a marketing spin by HelpSystems. The 89 percent of shops that “have no imminent plans to leave the platform” includes 23.8 percent that are talking about leaving the IBM i platform, and 11 percent that are not sure

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