• Fresche Makes Bold Move In IBM i Modernization Arena

  June 13, 2016 Dan Burger

  Another IBM midrange earthquake was reported last week as two of the big application modernization vendors joined forces to create a single source of a wide range of products and services. Throughout the IBM i community, windows rattled and light flickered as Fresche Legacy–now known simply as Fresche–announced it was purchasing Quadrant Software. According to Fresche, it now has a client base totaling more than 22,000 IBM i customers. Financial details of the acquisition were not reported, as both software companies are privately owned. Fresche’s CEO Andy Kulakowski said the purpose of this acquisition was to allow Fresche

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• Talking IBM i Ecosystem With HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim

  June 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There has been a flurry of acquisitions in the IBM i marketplace in the past several years–you might even call it a blizzard. That got me to thinking last week about the changes in the OS/400 and IBM i ecosystem that we have seen in the past several decades, which I talked about in an essay last week. HelpSystems has built one of the largest software business dedicated to the IBM i platform. Infor could have a larger one, and Vision Solutions might, too, but they are all private companies so we can’t tell. Fresche, with its recent

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• Learning From Experience

  June 6, 2016 Dan Burger

  I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ll give you the good news first. We’re never too old to learn something new. The bad news? Don’t ever expect to graduate. Learning is a never-ending process, or at least is should be. Taking breaks from learning is a good idea, but calling it quits is not. My mother used to tell me: What counts most is what you allow yourself to learn after you think you know enough. While attending the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans, I met with Kevin Mort and Manzoor

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Qubit’s Rubes

  June 6, 2016 Hesh Weiner

  In May, IBM said it would give the public a free taste of quantum computing: IBM is providing free access to a five-qubit quantum processor in the cloud, surrounded by support facilities to enable friendly experimentation. The offering has garnered a lot of favorable press coverage. This stunt is reminiscent of the unveiling of Angler, an augmented cell phone first shown at Comdex in 1992 to press acclaim. Two years later, in August 1994, Angler had evolved into an actual IBM product, the Simon Personal Communicator. Six months and 50,000 units later, Simon was gone. IBM Simon:

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• Modernization Prioritization Based On Observation

  June 6, 2016 Dan Burger

  Amidst all the chatter in the IBM midrange community, nothing rises above the catch-all category of modernization. Just about anything that’s done to the system, including brushing the dust off an old AS/400, seems to qualify as modernization. But, after separating the wheat from the chaff, there is real modernization being done and with it comes the realization that the IBM i is as modern as you allow it to be. After years of Earl Scheib paint jobs–We’ll paint your car for $99–modernization efforts have become better planned, better executed, and better suited for a future that extends

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• HelpSystems Fills Encryption Gap With Linoma Buy

  June 6, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Despite all the IBM i security vendors that HelpSystems has bought over the years–and there have been at least five of them–the company has lacked one key security capability valued by enterprises: encryption. With last week’s deal to acquire Linoma Software, the Minneapolis software vendor has finally obtained that encryption capability for IBM i. HelpSystems has been experiencing heavy demand for IBM i encryption capabilities, says CEO Chris Heim. “I wouldn’t say we lost sales because of it, but we definitely wanted to offer a full solution to our customers and that’s why we wanted to check that encryption

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• For Sale: IBM i Is A Buyer’s Market

  June 6, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is an old adage that it is 10 times as expensive to acquire a new customer as it is to keep an existing one happy. I think that whoever lived in those times and coined that phrase did not live in an economic period dominated by the cheap money that was made available–some would say necessary–to keep the global economy humming along or recovering relatively quickly when it falters. I think it is maybe a hundred or a thousand times easier to buy a company with a set of established customers than it is to acquire them one at

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• Don’t Be the Eeyore of Digital Progress, OpenLegacy Says

  June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The Internet continues to present powerful and compelling new capabilities that many organizations are leveraging to their advantage. But all too often, the tantalizing digital future remains out of reach for IBM i and mainframe shops due to the difficulty–either real or imagined–of engineering those new capabilities to work with legacy systems. Helping organizations overcome those challenges is one of the goals that OpenLegacy has set for itself. OpenLegacy CTO Hans Otharsson has spent most of his career working with enterprise systems, including banking systems running on IBM i servers and mainframes, and knows firsthand the massive amount of ingenuity,

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• ARCAD ‘DROPS’ Deployment Management Into DevOps Pack

  June 1, 2016 Dan Burger

  If you could improve your application and systems software management, what would be the overall effect on your organization be? Greater efficiency and higher productivity come to mind. And the ripple effect touches nearly every employee, customer and business partner. In organizations that depend on the IBM i running on Power Systems, the focus typically begins on the system and on technical components. For the greater good, a multi-platform approach that focuses on functions is the better choice. Application development is the backbone of many IBM midrange shops and managing that function has led to greater efficiencies through the planning,

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• CNX Widens Reach with Sencha Deal, Focus on Modernization

  June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Look out: CNX is going global. The Chicago-based provider of IBM i development tools just signed a partnership deal with Sencha that will see the Silicon Valley firm distributing Valence around the world. CNX also just released Valence version 5, which brings a number of new features, including a stronger focus on modernizing RPG applications. Scott Mullarkey, Sencha’s vice president of global alliances and professional services, says CNX’s desire to have a global footprint led to an extension of the OEM partnership the two companies signed in 2008. “Ninety-five percent of their [CNX’s] business is U.S.-based. They do not have

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