• IBM i Wish List For 2015

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year, and this is the appropriate time to ponder the things we would like to see happen in the IBM i community over the coming year. As I have said many times, the only way you ever get anything in this world is to ask for it, so I took a few moments to come up with a list of things that I would like to see IBM do in the coming year to help support and extend the IBM i community. Please let us know what you would like to see happen

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• TEMBO Regroups, Preps for New Database Modernization Push

  January 19, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The folks at TEMBO Technology Lab knew a tough road was ahead when they set out to fundamentally transform how IBM i shops use DB2. You don’t tell IBM i pros that they’re doing it wrong with record-level I/O, and not expect to get a funny look or two. But to its credit, when TEMBO encountered resistance to its SQL mantra, the company stepped back, regrouped, and figured out another approach. “It’s been a long hard slog,” says TEMBO CEO Marinus Van Sandwyk. “The one thing that really caught us off guard initially was we had to explain to these

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• Modernization Projects On The Rise, Says Fresche Legacy

  January 19, 2015 Dan Burger

  Every IBM midrange shop needs one of these–a person who goes around the office from desk to desk explaining, in defense lawyer earnest and animation, the magnificence of this built-for-business computer system. What it can accomplish is worthy of attention. What is actually does is largely overlooked and what it doesn’t do is overblown and used to plan its execution. What can this system accomplish is the question that most business executives want answered. Andy Kulakowski says more and more execs are finding the answer and moving their businesses forward. Kulakowski is intent on moving his company forward, and his

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• Power Systems Inspire New z13 Mainframe

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, the mainframe and midrange divisions of IBM rivalled each other almost as much as they took on competition from outside the walls of Big Blue. But since the mid-1990s, when the company first started converging its system lines and made sure they could all run Java and its application server, the different system units of IBM have been collaborating and converging. Now, after selling off its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall, IBM is down to two system divisions within a single IBM Systems group. The first machine to come out of the

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• Strengthening Dollar Curtails Global IT Spending Growth

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The new year is well under way and all eyes are already turning toward the end of 2015 to try to guess how much the IT market will grow. The good news is that the consensus seems to be that, in the aggregate, IT spending around the world and across all kinds of devices and services will be up this year compared to 2014. The less-than-good news–but still not bad news–is that the U.S. dollar is getting stronger and that actually cuts global IT spending projections. The prognosticators at Gartner shaved their predictions for IT spending growth throughout 2014 as

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• Under New CEO, HelpSystems Snaps Up Rival Halcyon

  January 12, 2015 Alex Woodie

  New HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim didn’t waste any time making his first big move last week when the company announced the acquisition of Halcyon Software, its closest natural competitor in systems management. The acquisition and the hiring of Heim–a one-time programmer with an eye for product development–kicked off a new era for HelpSystems following the retirement of former CEO Janet Dryer, who has been with the company for 30 years. HelpSystems looks a lot different today than when Dryer took over the top job at Help/Systems (it had a slash in its name until recently) 16 years ago. At

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• IBM Reorganizes To Reflect Its New Business Machine

  January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue did a lot of changing last year, and CEO Ginni Rometty started off this year by making some organizational and personnel changes that reflect the new shape of its company and the opportunities that it sees ahead of it in the global economy that is also undergoing wrenching change. Information technology and the economy have been changing each other for so long that it is hard to say what is cause and what is effect, but what can be said is that IBM has spent more than 10 decades adapting to such changes. In a memo to IBM

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• IBM i Shops Contemplate Collaboration

  January 12, 2015 Dan Burger

  If you know Domino, you’ve known the benefits of collaboration software long before they crowded under the umbrella of social networking. Peer inside a Domino shop and you’re likely to find an organization that understands the value of workflow and peer-to-peer teamwork. Efficiency? Yes. But for most, it is efficiency based on older collaboration technology. There are indicators that a transformation is taking shape. Keep an eye on this in 2015. And, yes, there are IBM i shops involved. Very few Domino shops have adopted IBM‘s flagship collaboration software suite of products known as Connections. It has been less

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Nerves Of Steel

  January 12, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  As 2014 drew to a close, the Wall Street Journal, which undoubtedly can recognize an outfit in decline, said IBM shares would be the year’s worst performing component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM was the biggest loser of the DJIA in 2013, too. The last company to do so poorly was Bethlehem Steel in 1995 and 1996; it was kicked off the DJIA in 1997. In 2001, Bethlehem went bankrupt, and two years after that it was dismembered. If IBM doesn’t change quickly and dramatically, it is a goner. Goodwill impairment may be the ruin of IBM.

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• OpenPower Builds Momentum With New Members, Summit

  January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just as last year was ending and The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the holidays, the OpenPower Foundation that IBM established a year ago added a bunch of new members and also announced that it would be hosting its first summit for system builders, application developers, and other parties that are interested in creating wares based on the Power architecture. While the OpenPower Consortium was created in August 2013 by IBM, Google, Nvidia, Tyan, and Mellanox Technologies, the more formal OpenPower Foundation that governs the effort to open source elements of the Power architecture to

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