• Mad Dog 21/21: Not As Big Blue

  May 18, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  In 2011, IBM‘s revenue exceeded $106 billion. Every year since, the company’s intake has fallen, sliding 10 percent to under $95 billion by 2014. Analysts at investment bank Credit Suisse predict IBM’s 2015 revenue will drop another 9 percent to $86 billion. The CS analysts believe IBM’s revenue will dwindle to $81.6 billion by 2018. Despite this, most investors are hanging tough. The same cannot be said of IBM’s customers, who are impressed by superior systems engineering not clever financial engineering; they understandably see IBM’s failures in the server business as a danger. In 2014, according to IDC,

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• Mobile Access To IBM i Makes The Grade

  May 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  When a Technology Refresh gets rolled out, we find all sorts of things rolled in. Some of the items, like those picked by IBM execs Steve Will and Alison Butterill two weeks ago in an IT Jungle story, are the front runners for most valuable enhancements. But the list goes on and opinions vary. Tim Rowe puts the addition of mobile support for IBM i Access for the Web, SQL services, and new REST-based Web services at the top of the list. A big part of the IBM i reputation is its easy access to its file system, to printers

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• State of IBM i Security? Still Horrible, After All These Years

  May 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When you talk to IBM about the IBM i-on-Power platform, the word “security” is used extensively, and appears frequently next to other power words like “reliability” and “availability.” But when you talk to the security software vendor PowerTech about the state of IBM i security, you might be surprised to hear words like “wide open” and “breach fatigue.” Then again, if you have been an IT Jungle reader for very long, you may not. Last month, PowerTech released its 12th annual State of IBM i Security Study. The 25-page report, which you can download from the company’s website,

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• Is There No Midrange In The IBM i Midrange?

  May 18, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, IBM has indeed launched the four-socket Power E850 server that has Power8 engines. They run AIX. And of course they run Linux. The have support for the PowerVM hypervisor and they do not require the PowerKVM hypervisor that only supports Linux. The one thing that they do not support is the IBM i operating system and integrated database. This is a remarkable moment in the history of the IBM midrange, and it is perhaps one that reflects the reality of the IBM i market or one that shows IBM is, once again, giving

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• COMMON Still In The Red; Trend Is Favorable

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  It’s a fact that professional associations are struggling to sustain themselves in the modern work environment. What organizations need to do to remain relevant is a never-ending question. Solutions come from what has always worked, but they also require new strategies and a break from the past. The COMMON user group finds itself in this position. So do 95 percent of the professional associations representing everything from doctors to dog catchers. And in most cases, the success of the association comes down to members and money. The greatest tangible benefit for the COMMON user group is its Annual Meeting and

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• LANSA Bets On Windows Mobile Acceptability

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  On a scale of one to 10, the expectations for business-focused mobile applications are somewhere in the teens. Business apps, mobile devices, and remote workers are on a steady climb. Although Appleand Android devices dominate the mobile landscape, LANSA just announced it has added Microsoft Windows to its write-once-deploy-many strategy for native application development. The long-time IBM i software vendor believes Windows will soon be an important mobile choice. Windows mobile? Are you kidding me? That’s pretty much what I asked Steve Gapp, president and CEO of LANSA, when we got together at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition

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• IBM i Shops Not In A Hurry For HANA

  May 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community has always looked to IBM for evidence that it is protecting its collective investment in the platform. Lately it seems the IBM i executives are playing up the investment angle more than usual. At the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and I talked about that topic. Nelson played a key role in the recent Power-SAP Summit in Rochester. The event was primarily for IBM i business partners and SAP end users and their interest was in roadmaps. There’s an existing perception among the SAP on IBM i community that

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• Where IBM i’s Double-Digit Growth Is Coming From

  May 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM just completed the best quarter for IBM i revenue in recent memory. While Big Blue no longer releases hard sales figures for the platform, the company did let it be known that the IBM i side of the house enjoyed double-digit revenue growth during the first quarter, which is great news for the platform. You might be wondering where that growth is coming from, and so are we. With support for i5/OS V5R4 (finally) winding down and Power8 servers ramping up, now is as good a time as any for IBM i shops to get current with their setups.

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• New Power8 Midrange, PurePower Kicker To PureSystems

  May 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is hosting its Edge2015 Power and System z conference in Las Vegas this week, and with the System z13 mainframes already launched in January to help that ramp get underway and bolster the company’s hardware sales, that leaves the final rounding out of the Power Systems line with Power8 processors as the star of the show. As expected, IBM is indeed launching its Power E850 four-socket midrange system, complementing the Power E880 high-end system that IBM let fly early (for some reason) ahead of the event. IBM is also including a new preconfigured cluster called the PurePower System, something

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• Maxava Building Its Own Cloud For IBM i High Availability

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Maxava is no newbie in the cloud. Indeed, it counts hundreds clients whose IBM i data and applications are protected by business partners who run Maxava’s high availability software in their own data centers. But those business partners don’t provide complete coverage around the world, and so Maxava is building its own HA cloud to serve them. “We’re filling a bit of a gap,” Peter Kania, director of technical services and development, said at a press conference during the COMMON conference held at Disneyland last week. “We’re starting to get into that space ourselves.” The New Zealand company is installing

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