• IBM i Total Cost Of Ownership Report Updated

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  ITG is IBM‘s go-to research and analysis firm when it comes to studies comparing IBM i to its competition. These studies zero in on total cost of ownership build a favorable case for IBM’s midrange systems based on costs related to hardware purchase and maintenance; licenses and support for operating systems, databases, and other systems software, systems management and database administration costs; and energy costs. During its most recent comparison, which is dated September 2014, ITG lined up IBM Power S814 and S824 servers against two- and four-socket X86 servers powered by Intel E5 and E7 processors. One of

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• Reader Feedback On Microsoft Loves Linux

  December 1, 2014 Hey, Dan

  As you pointed out in your story, in mid-November Microsoft announced that it’s open sourcing its full server-side .NET stack, which thereby, at least in theory, expands the .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X (which is really Unix) platforms. Here are my six take-aways from that announcement: No surprise. The November 12 announcement wasn’t a surprise as much as it was a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s open source software (OSS) strategy over the last couple of years. Microsoft open sourced some .NET components (including ASP.NET MVC and its Web API) a couple of years ago. This was a

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Two Calves And Calves Not

  December 1, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  In Semitic mythology, Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai embraced an invisible God rather than one represented by a golden statue of a calf. From that pivotal moment, the followers of Moses and eventually the other people of the book, Christians and Muslims, vested their faith in software rather than hardware. A couple dozen centuries later, the resultant monotheistic civilization controls the bulk of the word’s wealth and power. This year, one of that civilization’s great industrial institutions, IBM, shifted the burden of its strategic trust from physical hardware to intangible software and cloud computing. For many

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• As I See It: Three Blind Vice

  December 1, 2014 Victor Rozek

  “Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.” So said Edward Abbey, and although he wasn’t talking about Silicon Valley, the observation is no less true for that. As the technology sector increases its global dominance, the corruptive application of power is reflective of a changing ethic in the tech community. An ethic marred by success. Leveraging the Disabled I’ll bet you didn’t know that net neutrality hurts disabled people. Me neither. But, hey, if Verizon says so, it must be true. Right? Of what possible use would equal access be to a disabled person? If you’re a disabled American

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• IBM i Shops Offloading Infrastructure

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers are gaining ground in the IBM midrange community as more organizations explore the IT strategic plan of outsourcing servers, networking, storage, and data center space. Connectria Hosting, a company with more than 15 years of managed services experience for IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 customers, is noticing the change. It’s not dependent on existing customers. New customers are coming to the cloud. “Our IBM i business is up 35 percent over last year,” says Connectria CEO Rich Waidmann. On a percentage basis, that’s on par with the 40 percent-plus increase Amazon Web Services

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• IBM i Modernization Relies On Solving Mysteries

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  By boldly stepping into an IT modernization planning strategy, Royal Caribbean, one of the world’s largest cruise lines, is altering its 20-year-old applications and database development processes in preparation for the next 20 years of business goals. It is currently in the second phase of a program designed to migrate selected, monolithic, RPG applications to Java-based Web services that will continue to run on IBM Power servers and the IBM i operating system. The current project focus is a strategic modernization of the company’s custom-designed reservation system that includes accounting, inventory, revenue management, and sales. The objectives include the creation

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• Aiming High, And Low, With Power Chips

  December 1, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, ahead of the SuperComputing 2014 conference in New Orleans, IBM announced that the U.S. Department of Energy had chosen Big Blue and hardware partner Nvidia to build two massive parallel supercomputers, nick-named Sierra and Summit. This deal, along with IBM selling off its System x server business to Lenovo Group and its chip manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries, gives IBM a tighter focus on its Power Systems line, and importantly, gives IBM the resources to focus on Power chip development and systems design. I am a firm believer in the trickle-down theory of technology adoption, but not

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• TMW Adds Dynamic Route Mapping to Trucking Suites

  November 19, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Trucking companies that rely on TMW Systems software to manage their logistics operations will now able to plan their truck routes with mapping software that’s directly integrated into the dispatching software. The mapping software comes from ALK Technologies, which, like TMW, is owned by geo-services giant Trimble. Earlier this month, ALK announced the integration of its flagship ALK Maps offering with several TMW products, notably Innovative IES, an IBM i-based dispatching system, as well as TMWSuite, its flagship Windows-based dispatching system. The integration gives users of these TMW products access to interactive street-level maps with satellite imagery and

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• TMW Adds Dynamic Route Mapping to Trucking Suites

  November 19, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Trucking companies that rely on TMW Systems software to manage their logistics operations will now able to plan their truck routes with mapping software that’s directly integrated into the dispatching software. The mapping software comes from ALK Technologies, which, like TMW, is owned by geo-services giant Trimble. Earlier this month, ALK announced the integration of its flagship ALK Maps offering with several TMW products, notably Innovative IES, an IBM i-based dispatching system, as well as TMWSuite, its flagship Windows-based dispatching system. The integration gives users of these TMW products access to interactive street-level maps with satellite imagery and

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• Oracle Takes JD Edwards Into the Rental Business

  November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  JD Edwards ERP software has been used in a lot of industries over the decades, including the manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, retail, and media industries. This month, JDE owner Oracle took the venerable brand into a new industry: equipment rental. The new EnterpriseOne Rental Management offering is a customized version of the ERP system designed for use by companies that rent a variety of gear, including heavy equipment, medical equipment, oil and gas equipment, mining equipment, and construction equipment. The software manages many aspects of running a rental business, including writing rental contacts and agreements, reservations for future rentals, inventory management,

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