• Can OpenPower Take A Bite Out Of The Datacenter?

  September 28, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not often that I give readers of The Four Hundred reading assignments outside of this publication, but from time to time, in the course of the other work I do in other parts of the IT industry, I run across things that are relevant to adjacent markets that ultimately have some bearing on the Power Systems-IBM i platform. Such is the case with a presentation that the chief for IBM‘s Systems Group gave to Wall Street recently. Tom Rosamilia, who has been general manager of the System z and Power Systems division in his long career at

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• Bootstrap Responsive To IBM i Mobile Development

  September 28, 2015 Dan Burger

  Do you know a good mobile application when you see one? I’ll bet you do. Although the IBM midrange community lives in a predominately green-screen world and uses outdated terminology like AS/400, iSeries, and System i, we see what’s going on around us. It doesn’t matter if you are an application developer, an app dev manager, or the worried owner of a company with concerns about the current state of the business applications. It’s not difficult to compare what you have application-wise with what is becoming the norm: Web applications that look better and work better on both desktop and

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• Six Signs Of The Long, Slow Decline Of ERP

  September 28, 2015 Alex Woodie

  For the past 20 years, the class of applications known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has largely dominated the business software discussion. But that hegemony is now slipping due to a variety of factors, leading some to speculate that ERP’s heyday is in the past. The big question then becomes: What should companies do next? If you work at a company of appreciable size (say $50 million in sales or more), chances are good you rely on an ERP system that doesn’t just plan (as the name suggests) but actually executes the business processes that make your business tick. Whether

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• RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking . . . VAI Puts POS Chips on Verifone . . . OpenLegacy Signs Partner In Brazil

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking RPG has crept up in the TIOBE Index, a monthly ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Because RPG is still the primary language that’s used to develop applications on the IBM i platform, this is a good sign for IBM i job growth. The TIOBE Index for August 2015 had RPG as the 42nd most popular ranking with a rating of 0.273 percent. It was in a virtual tie with Haskell and just ahead of (Visual) FoxPro. The TIOBE Index for September 2015 had RPG creeping up three spots to number 39 with

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• CNX Looks Beyond RPG with Web Framework

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  CNX Corp. is putting the finishing touches on a new release of its Valence Web application development framework for IBM i. Among the compelling new features in version 4.2 is support for PHP, which will help its developers keep up with the rapidly changing times. Valence is a development framework that’s used primarily to create new Web-based applications that run on the IBM i. When it shipped several years back, the software combined RPG service programs with a range of pre-built JavaScript components (it uses Sencha Ext JS) to enable the creation of modern Web and mobile applications. Up to

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• IBM Tops List of Security Vulnerabilities, But What Does It Mean?

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM has found itself atop many prestigious lists over the years–the holder of the most patents, the greenest company in IT, and the biggest server maker. But this month the cybersecurity research firm Secunia put IBM at the top of one list that Big Blue won’t be proud of: The list of software vendors with the most security vulnerabilities. But what exactly that means is the subject of some controversy. In its “Vulnerability Update” for the period for May through July, Secunia reported that IBM was the vendor with the most vulnerable products over the three-month period. It was the

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• Stimulus Grants Are An IBM i Community Service

  September 23, 2015 Dan Burger

  The collaboration between the Maxava iFoundation and the IBM i community is expanding and showing some impressive results. The most recent round of grant funding benefited 34 organizations, according to according to information we received from Maxava, the disaster recovery and high availability vendor. Now in its fifth year, the Maxava iFoundation offers grants to organizations focused on developing the IBM i community by promoting skills enhancement and the recruiting of business professionals to work with the IBM midrange platform. Each year, the grant awards have totaled in the neighborhood of $50,000. The majority of that amount winds up

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• Unifying Mobile and Web Development on IBM i

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard for businesses to justify the expense of supporting multiple development teams, each with a set of specialized skills. IBM i shops know this better than most, since RPG isn’t used on other platforms. But when it comes to developing Web and mobile apps, the technology and the frameworks are in place to consolidate these previously disparate functions–in IBM i shops and everywhere else. The rapid maturation of smartphones and tablets has captivated the attention of enterprise software developers, who are finding ever more creative ways to benefit from putting corporate data and core business processes into the hands

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• IBM Issues HiPER And Security Patches For V5R4

  September 21, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a weird one. Last week, IBM released PTF patches for OS/400 V5R4, also known as i5/OS 5.4, the venerable release of OS/400 that came out in February 2006 and that was withdrawn from marketing in May 2011 and had its standard Software Maintenance ended in September 2013. Extended maintenance is still running for those customers who pay for it, and will continue to do so until September 30, 2016. While this Program Support Extension (PSE) support does offer tech support for the V5R4 stack on Power Systems and earlier machines, it has always been my understanding that Big

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Land, Hope, And Glory

  September 21, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  The remarkable Edwin Land was a persnickety inventor who wove science and art, a college dropout who never stopped learning and teaching. Land and his Polaroid Corporation built a tower of brilliant things; the SX-70 camera stood at its pinnacle. His life and work inspired Steve Jobs, mastermind of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes app store, and the magnificent, inimitable Apple Inc. After Land left Polaroid, it withered into a husk. Since Steve Jobs died, Apple, IBM’s only hope, has struggled. If Apple eventually collapses as Polaroid did, its demise will accelerate the ruin of IBM. Jobs’

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