• VAI Pours Business Intelligence Into Midmarket ERP

  October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

  During the past several years, VAI has rerouted its ERP software roadmap with a modernization plan that included Web and mobile development, cloud-based managed services, and now business intelligence analytics. At the company’s user conference last week in New Orleans, it provided a peek at the BI component in S2K Version 6, which is in the hands of a few customers now and is expected to be generally available in Q1 2017. VAI’s S2K software is running core business applications in approximately 1,500 IBM midrange shops, primarily in the distribution, manufacturing, and retail industries. The privately owned and family operated

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• IBM’s Power Systems Stalls A Bit As Power8 Wanes

  October 31, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power9 chips slated for some time in the second half of next year, and the Power8 systems not being upgraded with a formal Power8+ variant, it is not surprise to us that sales of Power Systems iron based on the Power8 chip that launched in April 2014 are waning. It is the nature of every product cycle to have its ramp, its peak, and its slide. The slide is just a way to extract profits, with the ease of sales and improving yields on chips compensating for the fact that Big Blue has to discount more to move

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• Knowing Node

  October 24, 2016 Dan Burger

  Node.js is not just one of many open source components that are riding in the IBM i bus these days. It is the one that is most talked about these days. There are many notable IBM i open source passengers on the bus including, the Apache web server, Java, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Python, and Perl. IBM has done a good job making the platform less proprietary. But Node.js is the one to watch. If you haven’t been introduced to Node.js, the first thing to know is that it is mostly referred to as Node. The .js, which is a reminder

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Achilles And The iPhone

  October 24, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  In the 5th century BC, a Greek philosopher named Zeno invented clever, paradoxical puzzles. In the most famous, he argues that swift Achilles, racing a turtle that has been given a very modest lead, can never catch that torpid tortoise. Twenty-one centuries later, two geniuses simultaneously and independently used Zeno’s view of infinity and the infinitesimal to create calculus. It took another 500 years for Steve Jobs’s magnificent iPhone to newly define the infinite as Apple sold more than a billion devices, spawned a trillion dollar business, and inspired new forms of social and economic organization. Zeno’s inspirational

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• Cross-Platform Development Targets Code Management

  October 24, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i platform has a reputation that is both good and bad. It is powerful, dependable, securable, manageable, but highly proprietary. Being proprietary means the system and the people who support it on often on their own island. That wasn’t a problem for many years and some shops can still live with that. For others, the “doesn’t play well with others” description doesn’t cut it any more. So IBM is working to change that. You probably noticed. Going from proprietary to open is not a quick fix. But compared to the days when almost everything in enterprise computing was

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• IBM Opens Up Coherent Protocols For Power Chips

  October 24, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you did not get the memo, IBM is dead serious about promoting the Power architecture as a credible alternative to the Xeon architecture from Intel and the various upstarts that want to take a piece of the processing action in the datacenter. The OpenPower Foundation, formed a little more than three years ago, is the center of gravity for the Power push, but Big Blue has aspirations for some of its technology that go well beyond its own chips. That is why IBM is forming the OpenCAPI Consortium, a group of like-minded IT suppliers and customers who

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• Don’t Overlook These Network Auditing Improvements in IBM i 7.3

  October 24, 2016 Alex Woodie

  What is going across those network cables connecting your IBM i server to the outside world? It’s not always easy to tell, and IBM hasn’t exactly made it easy. But thanks to new security event types and exit points released earlier this year in IBM i 7.3, you can get deeper visibility into network traffic and make your company’s SIEM system work better with your IBM i along the way. The focus over the past few weeks has been on IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.2 TR5. There is a lot of good stuff in there,

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• Zend Preps Speedy New PHP and Runtime for IBM i

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Zend today will officially launch the beta program for Zend Server for IBM i version 9 and the new PHP 7 language running on the Power Systems platform. The combination of the new language and runtime, which are being unveiled at the annual ZendCon 2016 show in Las Vegas this week, is expected to give customers a big boost in performance for their PHP applications, provided they don’t run into backward compatibility breaks that Zend built into the framework. Performance is the definite headliner for the new PHP 7 language and Zend Server runtime. As we told you back in

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• Agilysys Delivers Upgrades to Back Office and Customer-Facing Software

  October 19, 2016 Dan Burger

  The notion that what goes on in the IT departments of companies in the gaming industry translates into IT departments of every other business is not a long-shot bet. The gaming business–casinos and their tentacles that reach into restaurants and lodging–is as customer-focused as any business you can name. And, as many of you know, it’s a bastion of IBM midrange computing–an important niche in the IBM i ecosystem. Developments here often fan out to other industries when business efficiencies and increased revenue generation opportunities have been demonstrated. Agilysys, with its property management, inventory and procurement software Stratton Warren

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• Customers React Positively to IBM i Alerting Tool from Kisco

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Kisco Information Systems launched its $400 alerting tool in 2015, there were questions whether a relatively simple product would resonate with IBM i shops. A year later, Kisco is delivering a second version of iEventMonitor, and customers are singing its praise. Kisco launched iEventMonitor in March 2015 with a basic premise: provide monitoring and alerting of key IBM i resources like QSYSOPR and QSYSMSG queues, the job queue, message queues and storage and CPU monitoring. While other vendors developed tools that could automatically respond to events on an IBM i server, Kisco eschewed the extra functionality that would increase

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