A Power Systems Wish List For The Year Ahead

January 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the beginning of a new year and that means a bunch of different things. First, we are not quite as rested as we would like, but we are also ready to get on with it. It usually means that people are making resolutions to change their own behavior for the better and making prognostications about what may or may not happen in the future.

Sometimes we are not in a mood to prepare or predict, and as this year gets rolling I am in much more of a mood to prescribe. Sometimes, you can’t wait for the future …

What Will This Year Bring For IBM i?

January 18, 2017 Alex Woodie

A hearty if belated welcome to 2017! In what has become something of an IT Jungle tradition, we’re turning the microphone over to you, the IBM i community, to share your thoughts on what the New Year may bring to the platform, what it may mean to the vendors that play the market, and how it will impact the people who make everything possible.

Trevor Perry, an IBM i evangelist and consultant with IBM i modernization vendor Fresche (which acquired looksoftware several years ago), leads off our new round of predictions.

“We’ll see more talk about blockchain, especially in …

Guru: SQL PL, WHILE And REPEAT Loops

January 18, 2017 Ted Holt

In earlier editions of this august publication, I covered the SQL PL looping structures that I consider to be the most useful. Today I cover the remaining looping structures. I cover them for completeness, but also because what I consider to be most useful may not be what you consider to be most useful.

To review, the FOR loop provides a simple way to process the rows of a result set. LOOP structure is versatile, providing the freedom to exit a loop from any point. The remaining loop structures are WHILE and REPEAT.

The WHILE loop is a top-tested loop. …

Mad Dog 21/21: As Ginni Bows Out

January 18, 2017 Hesh Wiener

In 1993, when Lou Gerstner became the boss of IBM, it was failing under inept John Akers. A decade later Gerstner passed IBM’s leadership to Sam Palmisano. Gerstner had revived IBM’s computer business, developed a huge services operation and regained the admiration of customers.

But Palmisano was no Gerstner. The IBM he left to Ginni Rometty in 2012 was, beneath the surface, as loused up as it had been under Akers. Moreover, Rometty, who knows IBM needs to invent a new future, is saddled with underlings who often seem to be looking back rather than ahead.

IBM’s largest …

IBM i Open Source Business Architect Lays Out A Plan

January 18, 2017 Dan Burger

Enterprise level application development is no place for open source languages. Can you believe it? That was once the widely accepted truth. Jiminy Crickets! Things have changed. The number of the stable open source distributions available with comprehensive support and maintenance goes well beyond common knowledge. Industry giants, successful SMB players, and mom and pop businesses are finding good reasons to use open source. Even IBM uses open source for internal business reasons.

There are reasons for you to do the same.

Before you recoil and brace for a “mind your own business and I’ll mind mine” retaliation against open …