• What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace?

  March 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Analyzing the IBM i market could be generously described as a crap shoot. There’s not a great deal of hard data to be found. When something does arise, we take notice. A month ago, an article in IT Jungle provided a peek into the results of a survey of IBM midrange shops conducted by HelpSystems. The results of that survey have been compiled and presented in a report that has just been released. IT Jungle, along with the European publishing company PowerWire, assisted HelpSystems in choosing topics and questions that would lead to revealing details about the

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• SMA Aims To Grow IBM i Automation Biz In The U.S.

  March 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Despite being based in Texas, SMA Solutions and its systems automation software for IBM i are not particularly well-known in the United States. However, the company has enjoyed success recently in the European IBM i market, and now SMA’s owner and CEO, Michael Taylor, has tasked his European managers with accelerating growth in IBM i market stateside this year. Taylor admits that he would rather spend money on R&D and customer support, as opposed to investing in marketing. “The average iSeries reader is going to say, who the heck is SMA? They’ve got no clue,” Taylor tells IT Jungle.

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• Maxava IFS Replication Makes Performance Leap

  March 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  In the high availability world, the replication of IFS data has been a bit of a bottleneck. Companies that require 24×7 continuous operations have no tolerance for downtime, so backing up all systems and data, creating a failover system, and having access to everything is of the upmost importance. One of the keys to this is throughput performance and Maxava has addressed this with multi-threaded replication architecture for the IBM i Integrated File System, or IFS, which has just become available in its enterprise HA product. Multi-threaded IFS replication lets organizations run multiple IFS replication processes in parallel, increasing the

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• IBM Discounts Let CPUs And Memory Go Mobile For Less

  March 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been noting in recent issues of The Four Hundred that Big Blue’s sales and marketing people in the United States and Canada have been quiet on the wheeling and dealing front in recent months, which is a bit peculiar seeing as though you would think that IBM, having exited the X86 system business, would be doing everything in its power to help push new iron to its Power Systems and System z installed base. The Power8 machines have been in the field since last year, and many of the customers and resellers we talk to say a

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• Reader Feedback On Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community

  March 9, 2015 Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM's ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.

  Hi Dan: Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM’s ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share. One of the challenges for ISVs who want to work in this market is that sometimes the strategies and development methods recommended by IBM are out of touch with the ISV’s market niche. You have to be careful not to follow IBM down a path that can lead you to create an application that IBM developers will praise, but very few customers will buy. Another challenge

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• There Is No Lack Of RPG Programmers, IBM i Community Contends

  March 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Balderdash! That’s the general response to a story we ran two weeks ago in this newsletter about Computer Sciences Corp. blaming its earnings miss in part on an RPG programmer shortage. “There is no shortage of RPG programmers,” says one RPG programmer in the Northeast, “but there is a shortage of RPG programmers who will work at 1985 wages.” CSC said a lack of RPG talent was partly to blame for the company’s $230 million revenue shortfall during in the fourth quarter. “RPG is not a programming language where a lot of people are learning it today, so there is

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• HANA On Power Marches Toward GA

  March 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  SAP is now inviting its Power customers to participate in the final beta program to harden the HANA-on-Power code before it’s released to production. IBM Power Systems and IBM i customers are said to be “champing at the bit” about the prospect of using a single in-memory database to power both transactional and analytic applications in a single server. SAP officially unveiled its plans to get HANA running on Power last June at its Sapphire conference in Orlando. Over the summer, less than 10 joint IBM-SAP customers participated in a tightly controlled “test and evaluation” program that involved the first

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• UCG And Expedient Partner For Expanded IBM i Hosted Services

  March 4, 2015 Dan Burger

  United Computer Group built a trustworthy reputation alongside its growing IBM midrange customer base by offering online backup services. It also offered disaster recovery services to organizations that have figured out the limitations of their downtime survival endurance. UCG has made the investments in equipment and staff to deliver service that meets high expectations, and now it’s taking the next step. Expedient, a company with 11 data centers in seven markets from Chicago eastward, including the northeast regions of the United States, and UCG decided they could use one another’s help, so they formed a partnership. Expedient provides colocation

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• Where Have All The QSYSOPR Messages Gone?

  March 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  In the old days, you could rely on IBM i applications to always send error codes to a predictable place, such as QSYSOPR. But with the proliferation of newer Web-based applications and apps developed in Java, PHP, and other languages, that is no longer the case. HelpSystems is addressing this dilemma with a new release of its Robot/CONSOLE message monitoring software that looks for errors and alerts that IBM i admins may otherwise miss. While RPG remains by far the most popular language for developing IBM i applications, the number of IBM i apps written in more “modern” languages like

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• Linoma Unveils GoDrive, A Private Dropbox-Like Service

  March 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Online file sharing services like Dropbox have been readily adopted by companies in some fields, but security concerns make them a no-no in regulated industries. That’s created a gap that vendors like Linoma Software are looking to fill with so-called on-premise cloud storage solutions, such as the new IBM i-supported GoDrive offering that Linoma unveiled last week. GoDrive is a new module that Linoma added to GoAnywhere Services 4.0, which the company formally announced yesterday. Linoma says GoDrive is a secure on-premise solution that provides enterprise file sync and sharing (EFSS) services for authorized users. In other words, it provides

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