There is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter.

To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i

Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging.

If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,

IBM i storage strategy remains heavily dependent on tape. Even beyond the IBM midrange, around 75 percent of all data is stored on tape. Old habits die hard, even when alternatives become easier and less expensive to manage. A good example is the Universal Backup Device designed by LaserVault. In its original form, it’s an IBM i backup appliance that appears as a tape device. Now it works in VM environments as well.

The VM integration eliminates the cost of the LaserVault appliance and the cost of an X86 server. That’s roughly $6,000 to $8,000. Instead of requesting a

It was a known problem 16 years ago. And for 16 years it was largely ignored, even though it poses a direct threat to representative democracy. It is a problem well understood by IT professionals and cyber security experts, and it haunts the entire spectrum of computer-dependent users from the military and political establishment, to corporations and the public. It was the subject of debate, accusation, and investigation during the recent election, and it has the power to cast doubt on its legitimacy.

The problem: Through neglect or deliberate intent, computers that decide elections have been allowed to remain vulnerable

Last week, an email from Computer Economics advised me of an updated report on IT spending and staffing. CE has cranked out these reports on an annual basis for many years, which is useful for long-term comparisons. These days, however, the short-term comparisons are almost microscopic. There are times when it is wise to expect the unexpected, but this isn’t one of them.

IT spending and hiring leaves a faint mark on the chart that maps business growth. The indistinct spending growth that is revealed in the CE report, indicates cloud computing has the best potential for “long-term growth and