The Four Hundred Archives - Page 392 of 1510

Infinite Success Is Modernization Via Migration

March 2, 2015 Dan Burger

“We see lots of interesting ways forward for IBM i applications,” says Infinite Corporation president and CEO Bruce Acacio. He’s talking about IBM midrange shops looking to modernize, but he’s specifically interested in shops that have decided to leave the IBM i platform behind and migrate their applications to Linux, Windows, or Unix systems. Infinite helped “just under 200” IBM i shops make that migration in 2014, Acacio says. He expects that number to reach 400 in 2015.

Decision makers have had modernization in mind for several years during which they’ve been in talks with Infinite about options and the

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IBM Boosts Capacity On FlashSystem Arrays

March 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are looking to shop for all-flash storage systems to attach to your IBM i or other systems in the datacenter, you might want to take a gander at the new FlashSystem arrays that Big Blue launched last week. IBM has partnered with memory manufacturer Micron Technology and moved from the enterprise multi-layer cell (eMLC) memory used in the FlashSystem 840 and V840 machines to more capacious and presumably less expensive NAND MLC memory in the new Flash System 900 and V9000 machines launched last week.

From the looks of things, the basic feeds and speeds of the FlashSystem

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IBM Grants After License Amnesty For Software Maintenance

February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Unless a Federal judge overturns* the deal, IBM is going to be granting amnesty to customers using Power Systems iron who have let their Software Maintenance, or SWMA in IBMspeak, lapse. This maintenance service is available for the systems software, compilers, middleware, and related core software that is used by IBM i or AIX shops, and there are a lot of customers who have falling off the SWMA wagon. IBM wants to get them back on.

In an announcement letter sent to business partners, the Power Systems division and the U.S. Technical Support Services unit of Global Services are jointly

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Implement, Teach, And Get Out Of The Way

February 23, 2015 Dan Burger

Stretched, strained, and even swamped are words that describe IT resources in a great many companies that are leaning on service providers to advance their IT objectives. This is decidedly true when it comes to implementing new technology, where skills and experience are in short supply. The circumstances occur across all platforms, but perhaps is more apparent among the users of the IBM Power Systems running the IBM i operating system, where IT staffing is known to be light.

IBM recognized this years ago and came up with team of technology specialists who could be called on when

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Experimental Node.js Chatserver For IBM i

February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Rainer Ross, the intrepid IBM i developer that we profiled in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago because he had developed a hotel search engine that mashed up the IBM i platform with Big Blue’s Watson cognitive analytics software, has another project he has been working on. And Ross wants to get the word out that all of us need to work to get more applications running on the Power Systems-IBM i combination to ensure the longevity of the platform.

First, here is his sense of what we have to do to broaden the appeal of IBM i.

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Mad Dog 21/21: Groundhog Days

February 23, 2015 Hesh Wiener

On February 2 each year, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a groundhog predicts the duration of winter. If the woodchuck, awakened by handlers, sees its shadow, winter will last six more weeks. But if the animal casts no shadow, winter will soon give way to spring. Shortly before February 2, after three years of financial winter, IBM’s executive handlers elevated CEO Ginny Rometty’s remuneration by $3.6 million, calling the boost a performance bonus. I wonder what aspect of Rometty’s performance was so amply rewarded. IBM reported dismal quarterly results ending yet another year of financial decline.

Notwithstanding the apparent optimism of IBM’s

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Power Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada. . . Vaulting Service Replaces Mirroring For IBM i Shop. . . Power Systems Academic Initiative Tops 300 Schools

February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Power Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Maintenance and support is an important part of any IT vendor’s revenue and profit streams and these services are also what make IT shops more or less comfortable with using a piece of hardware or software for mission-critical work. And generally speaking, maintenance prices tend to rise over time because the cost of people tends to go up, too.

In IBM’s fourth quarter, maintenance services represented about 12 percent of the $13.5 billion in Global Services revenues, or about $1.6 billion, taking a 9 percent hit as IBM divested

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Five IBM i Facts That Will Surprise Your CIO

February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

Trying to keep the IBM i relevant in your organization? It probably seems like an uphill battle at times, especially if you have a CIO who knows next to nothing about the platform. Here are five fun facts that may help save the platform at your organization, or at least get the CIO to give it a second look before he kicks it to the curb.

Fact 1: IBM i on Power is cheaper in the long run than Windows or Linux on Intel

The sticker shock associated with the acquisition of a new IBM i server can be damaging

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RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC’s Earnings Miss

February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

Depending on where you live in the world, there’s either a shortage or a surplus of RPG programmers at any point in time, a dynamic we have covered here in IT Jungle. But rarely has the availability of IBM i programming talent so publicly affected a company as it did last week, when the CEO of Computer Sciences Corp. blamed his company’s $230 million-plus revenue shortfall in part on a shortage of RPG coders.

Mike Lawrie, the president and CEO of CSC, said “execution missteps” related to personnel recruitment were partly to blame for a revenue shortfall in the

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iFD Streamlines Document Workflow With New Product

February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

In most organizations, work revolves around documents and the movement of those documents. Purchase orders come in from customers and they get approved or denied, which triggers the next step in the process. It’s how business has gotten done for decades, but there is room for improvement, according to inFORM Decisions, which two weeks ago launched an IBM i-compatible workflow management product called iWorkflow.

iWorkflow is a business process management (BPM) software program that’s aimed at automating much of the manual routing of documents that takes place in the average organization. The software runs on Windows, but integrates with

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