When Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, erasing $65 billion in supposed wealth, the midrange community was somewhat surprised to learn that an AS/400 was at the heart of the operation. Soon thereafter, FBI agents called Rochester, Minnesota, with a request for IBM: Give us an expert witness who can untangle the ancient RPG II code and explain how it works to a jury. That job eventually fell to longtime IBMer Rich Diedrich.

Diedrich had worked in Lab Services since the early 1990s, back when it was called the Custom Technology Center. While Diedrich has expertise in

Two years ago, Micro Focus started building out its software empire in legacy systems with the acquisition of the Attachmate conglomerate, a company that was bigger than itself at the time. And now, Micro Focus has done it again, this time by eating the bulk of the software that is currently owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has lost all urges to try to build a complete hardware-software-services stack like IBM used to have back in the 1990s and 2000s.

HPE, which is the part of the Hewlett-Packard empire that includes the Four Ss of servers, storage, switching, and

If you like creating applications in the Rational Developer for i integrated development environment, and you also like Apple Macs, then IBM has a release update for you.

In announcement letter 216-143, Big Blue said that it was making the Mac OS client a peer to Windows and Linux machines with the V9.5.1 update to the RDi tool. To be ultra precise, RDi is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.11. IBM warns that some functions of RDi, such as program verifiers and syntax checkers, are not available on Mac OS, and it is not clear when or if

It’s not uncommon for people to overlook the IBM i Power Systems platform when it is data warehouse project planning time. Laura Hamway sees things differently. Hamway is a consultant who works primarily with manufacturing companies running Infor‘s LX ERP systems, which most people refer to as BPCS, the name of the software before the Infor acquisition. She helps these organizations consolidate data from multiple systems, which allows a single, summary view. More analysis. Less inefficiency. Better business.

There’s too much data for ease of use in transactional applications like BPCS, MAPICS, JD Edwards and other ERP software that

The IBM i community is best known for its RPG programmers and its steadfast loyalty to a computing platform with blue-collar traits such as handling heavy workloads without a flock of nannies tending to its special needs. Behind the uncomplaining “workforce in a box” is a mix of application development environments and programs that are a combination of packaged products from the IBM midrange vendor community and home grown application handiwork.

Software vendors have long relied on establishing business partners–resellers, integrators, and sources of referrals–to expand their sales channels. At the same time, organizations on the buying side of IT