There has been a flurry of acquisitions in the IBM i marketplace in the past several years–you might even call it a blizzard. That got me to thinking last week about the changes in the OS/400 and IBM i ecosystem that we have seen in the past several decades, which I talked about in an essay last week.

HelpSystems has built one of the largest software business dedicated to the IBM i platform. Infor could have a larger one, and Vision Solutions might, too, but they are all private companies so we can’t tell. Fresche, with its recent

Another IBM midrange earthquake was reported last week as two of the big application modernization vendors joined forces to create a single source of a wide range of products and services. Throughout the IBM i community, windows rattled and light flickered as Fresche Legacy–now known simply as Fresche–announced it was purchasing Quadrant Software. According to Fresche, it now has a client base totaling more than 22,000 IBM i customers.

Financial details of the acquisition were not reported, as both software companies are privately owned.

Fresche’s CEO Andy Kulakowski said the purpose of this acquisition was to allow Fresche

IBM i shops that are interested in extracting insights from their data under the guidance of automated statistical analysis and machine learning may want to check out a new offering from Rocket Software. Called Rocket Discover for IBM i, the new software combines data discovery capabilities with self-service data preparation, and is aimed at regular business users who find things like Tableau Software‘s products too geeky or difficult to learn.

Rocket began building its Rocket Discover tool several years ago to serve the growing need for self-service tools that can handle the entire analytic spectrum–from data preparation and

Focal Point Solutions Group, an IBM i-based managed service provider specializing in high availability, disaster recovery architectures, and security monitoring has expanded its services to include security assessments and document management in the cloud.

Slowly but surely the word is getting around that IBM i systems are securable but not inherently secure. The distinction is that it takes skills and knowledge to secure the box. Security doesn’t just happen when you push the power button. More to security than locking down the network. Customers are realizing they need to know that security issues are being monitored and addressed when

With one way of looking at it, the server market that drives the IT business is very mature and relatively flat, which shows demand for compute (and in some cases storage) remains steady and healthy. But in another way of looking at it, in a world obsessed by growth and often demanding it to drive revenues, profits, and stock prices, the server market has taken a dip and this is bad news.

Which way is it? Like an electron, perhaps, it is neither and both at the same time.

What we can tell you is that the box counters at