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Digitally Transform Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It
August 17, 2020 Alex Woodie
The coronavirus pandemic and economic lockdown has laid bare, with ruthless efficiency, the differences between digital natives and brick-and-mortars. In short, companies that are either entirely online or have figured out a way to emulate them are winning and gaining share, while those dependent on physically being present in buildings are losing. That’s leading experts to recommend that businesses hit the gas pedal on their digital transformation plans, or risk permanent dislocation.
It’s tough to overestimate the impact that COVID-19 is having on the American way of life, for both work and play. Entire industries, such as travel and hospitality, …
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Accelerating DX Does Not Necessarily Mean Spending More Bucks
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is important to not confuse activity with the money it generates. While activity and money can sometimes be proportional as well as rising and falling together, it is not always the case that they point in the same direction. And particularly when it comes to IT spending during a pandemic-induced recession that the world has not seen in a hundred years. Equally important to consider is that overall IT spending is not necessarily an indicator of how spending in any particular area will rise and fall. All boats definitely do not rise together, especially in the choppy economic waters …
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Lotusphere Coming into View; Social Business Looms Big
January 17, 2011 Dan Burger
… Read moreSocial networking has become a significant factor in the business world. Companies are lining up to tell their “Fastest gun in the West” success stories on a multitude of networking sites. The IT industry can’t do enough to help these stories be heard. IBM‘s Lotus division, for one, is doing all it can to promote “social business.” With Lotusphere coming up the end of this month, there will be a hail of social businesses bullets ricocheting around the Web.
There are several business objectives that command a lot of attention in conversations about what it is that social networks
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Data Warehouse Mistakes Begin with i Avoidance
April 5, 2010 Dan Burger
… Read moreIf you ask Greg Veal what platform is best for creating a data warehouse, he’ll tell you it’s whatever platform you are using for your operational data. For readers of The Four Hundred, that platform is the IBM AS/400, which is officially referred to as the Power System running IBM i these days. Veal is intimately familiar with the IBM i. His experience dates back to the System/32, but his ideas are thoroughly modern.
From the viewpoint of a consultant who specializes in data warehousing projects and works on those that are big enough to warrant the hiring of
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iManifest Regroups, Plans to Meet at COMMON
April 5, 2010 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM i For Business enthusiasts led by Frank Soltis, Jeff Olen, Mike Pavlak, and nine software vendors are hopeful the iManifest U.S. project can still take flight. During a conference call last week, members decided to gather at the COMMON conference in Orlando next month to reinvigorate the program, which is designed to promote the i operating system as a thoroughly modern, extremely capable, and smarter alternative for running business applications.
Since taking shape in July 2009, iManifest has managed to gain only limited corporate support from the independent software vendors that are crucial to the organizations goals. The vendors
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Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?
June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie
IBM currently competes with a slew of independent IBM i clouds with its Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) offering. But as IBM’s PowerVS grows bigger and more capable, there is still a question: Can the independent IBM i clouds survive?
Clouds have been around in one form or another for as long as the IBM midrange server has existed. Whether it’s termed co-location, a computer bureau, an application service provider (ASP), a managed service provider (MSP), or the cloud, people have been running IBM gear on behalf of other people for a very, very long time.
Since the online bookseller Amazon …
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Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline
May 5, 2025 Donna Westmoreland
Downtime is costly, impacting productivity, revenue, and customer trust. For retailers and financial institutions, even a few minutes can mean significant losses. This is why enterprises rely on IBM i Db2 for mission-critical systems. IBM i offers 99.999 percent availability, high stability, robust failover strategies, and real-time monitoring to reduce unplanned downtime.
However, planned downtime for critical updates and projects is also necessary. The challenge lies in scheduling this maintenance and upgrades without disrupting business applications. So, how can we utilize new functionality and optimize systems with minimal disruption?
Database File Updates
It is not surprising that businesses tend to …
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Coming To You Live In A Datacenter Very Near You, Or One Far Away, Too
February 24, 2025 Ash Giddings
We are at a pivotal moment in IBM i history regarding migration options. Public cloud solutions like IBM Power Virtual Server and Skytap on Azure have matured to the point where they are now viable for production workloads, shedding the novelty value that surrounded them during the era which coincided with the launch of IBM’s Power9 machines, to a lesser extent, Power10 iron.
Additionally, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) worldwide are well equipped with Power10 hardware and the expertise to support both migrations and ongoing operations. Furthermore, on-premise Power10 delivers impressive price-to-performance benefits, with Power11 poised to raise the bar even …
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Stop Coding In C and C++, Feds Say
December 2, 2024 Alex Woodie
Two federal agencies asked the IT world last month to stop developing applications in memory unsafe languages like C and C++ and to come up with roadmaps to migrate existing apps. While the security alert is unlikely to have a major impact on IBM i application development, the C family of languages does have a presence on the IBM midrange server that will be very tough to remove.
Organizations should immediately stop developing new applications written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) warned last …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 21
June 21, 2023 Jenny Thomas
Today is the official first day of summer. Depending where you live, it may not feel like it, or you may think summer is already in full swing. But summer isn’t measured by temperatures and sunshine, it is considered to be the first day of summer in astronomical terms, as today is the summer solstice. In terms of daylight, this day is 4 hours, 19 minutes longer than the December solstice. In most locations north of the equator, the longest day of the year is around this date. But before you head out to enjoy those extra daylight hours, catch …
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