There is an old adage that it is 10 times as expensive to acquire a new customer as it is to keep an existing one happy. I think that whoever lived in those times and coined that phrase did not live in an economic period dominated by the cheap money that was made available–some would say necessary–to keep the global economy humming along or recovering relatively quickly when it falters.

I think it is maybe a hundred or a thousand times easier to buy a company with a set of established customers than it is to acquire them one at

Despite all the IBM i security vendors that HelpSystems has bought over the years–and there have been at least five of them–the company has lacked one key security capability valued by enterprises: encryption. With last week’s deal to acquire Linoma Software, the Minneapolis software vendor has finally obtained that encryption capability for IBM i.

HelpSystems has been experiencing heavy demand for IBM i encryption capabilities, says CEO Chris Heim. “I wouldn’t say we lost sales because of it, but we definitely wanted to offer a full solution to our customers and that’s why we wanted to check that encryption

Amidst all the chatter in the IBM midrange community, nothing rises above the catch-all category of modernization. Just about anything that’s done to the system, including brushing the dust off an old AS/400, seems to qualify as modernization. But, after separating the wheat from the chaff, there is real modernization being done and with it comes the realization that the IBM i is as modern as you allow it to be.

After years of Earl Scheib paint jobs–We’ll paint your car for $99–modernization efforts have become better planned, better executed, and better suited for a future that extends

In May, IBM said it would give the public a free taste of quantum computing: IBM is providing free access to a five-qubit quantum processor in the cloud, surrounded by support facilities to enable friendly experimentation. The offering has garnered a lot of favorable press coverage. This stunt is reminiscent of the unveiling of Angler, an augmented cell phone first shown at Comdex in 1992 to press acclaim. Two years later, in August 1994, Angler had evolved into an actual IBM product, the Simon Personal Communicator. Six months and 50,000 units later, Simon was gone.

IBM Simon:

I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ll give you the good news first. We’re never too old to learn something new. The bad news? Don’t ever expect to graduate. Learning is a never-ending process, or at least is should be. Taking breaks from learning is a good idea, but calling it quits is not. My mother used to tell me: What counts most is what you allow yourself to learn after you think you know enough.

While attending the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans, I met with Kevin Mort and Manzoor