• Sundry Power Systems Withdrawals, New I/O Tweaks

  March 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a bit quiet out there in Power Systems land, but IBM is getting its house in order and making a few changes as it moves solidly into the Power8 era and puts older systems out to pasture. IBM also announced a few minor upgrades to the networking and virtualization features in the Power Systems line last week, and withdrew a key piece of WebSphere software from its catalog that might affect IBM i shops. Let’s go over the tweaks to the Power Systems line first, which were detailed in announcement letter 115-043. IBM is partially fulfilling its

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• Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community

  March 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM midrange ecosystem was built on ISV applications. When the first AS/400 was ready to be shipped, more than 2,500 applications were available. That was a huge number then and it’s a huge (but undetermined) number now. So much has changed in the past 25 years. Who would expect the AS/400, now the IBM i, ISV community to resemble what it once was? And a fair question to ask is: “Should it?” As long as the software remains vital and diverse and modern, the platform survives. A weak ISV community will sap the strength of the system. True. But

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• CYBRA Getting Creative With RFID Solutions

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Ten years ago, when Wal-Mart first started mandating that its suppliers use RFID tags in product deliveries, the unit cost of RFID tags was seen as the biggest barrier to adoption. Fast forward to 2015, and improvements in manufacturing have dramatically lowered the cost of RFID. But it’s been the adoption of new business models that has led to an explosion of RFID use cases, according to the folks at CYBRA. CYBRA has closely monitored the evolution of radio frequency identification (RFID) in the consumer processed goods supply chain. Back in 2003, CYBRA jumped at the chance to help

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• Considerations For Implementing Encryption On IBM i

  February 18, 2015 Leo Salvaggio

  Although it started out as a technology aimed at the financial industry, data encryption has become the standard among all industries. Think about it: health records, social media accounts, and state and local records all contain personal information. At the same time, security breaches are becoming commonplace. According to the “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States” by IBM and Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of a data breach is $5.9 million. That is a big price tag for an organization to pay for something that could have been prevented. That cost does not even take into

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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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