2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Archives

IBM i Bucking The Trends, Year After Year

March 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are all kinds of stability that we consider when we choose and use systems. In the IBM i market in particular, we often talk about stability in the sense of the good programming practices that companies or their third-party software vendors have for the applications that they run. Or we might talk about the underlying stability of the operating system, relational database, or middleware software on which these applications depend. Or digging down further, we might talk about the reliability and longevity and predictability of the Power Systems hardware that underlies it all. And then, of course, there is …
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On Your IBM i Radar Now: CCPA

November 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

Companies in the United States were understandably hesitant to comply with a European law dictating how they collect and use data about customers, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But American companies won’t so easily overlook the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), a GDPR-like law that goes into effect in 2020.

According to HelpSystems‘ 2019 IBM i Marketplace study released earlier this year, 28 percent of IBM i shops adhere to GPDR. That was up significantly from 2018 (the year when GDPR went into effect), when just 12 percent of IBM i shops followed the law. GDPR was the …
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Revenge Of The Zombie Green Screen

October 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

Don’t look now, but command line interfaces – which were supposed to have been killed off years ago at the hands of superior graphical user interfaces (GUIs) – are making a comeback in the general IT scene. And the command line love appears to be spilling over into the IBM i.

Command line interfaces, or CLIs, never completely disappeared from the scene. Even Windows 10 users can summon the dark magic of the DOS prompt with a few tactical clicks of the keyboard, mouse, or (God forbid) touchscreen. But like crazy uncles and credit card debt, the CLI has largely …
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Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future.

There are many …
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Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In

March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time here at The Four Hundred thinking about the vintage of the hardware, operating systems, and applications running on the IBM i platform and its forbears. But we are also concerned, as you know, with the vintage of the people who are running and programming the systems out there in the IBM midrange installed base.

It is hard to get any quantifiable data on the people out there running the platforms – and we thank you, as loyal readers of this publication for several decades now for being in this market for even more decades …
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Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …
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IBM i Has Been Getting With The Program For Years

February 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are many things that one could constructively criticize IBM about when it comes to the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating system. But, in recent years at least, one of those things would not be – and could not be – that the company has not done enough to embrace the most important elements of the modern programming toolbox.

In fact, the company has done and increasingly good job of embracing and extending the compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and models of the programming languages that have gone mainstream since Java first took the stage at the beginning of …
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The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …
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Listen In To The 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Many of you took the survey last fall, and now it is time to go over the results and take the pulse of the IBM i customer base.

On January 17, Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host two webinars going over the results of the survey, and I plan to attend as do two other familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager, and Ian Jarman, who had that job before and is now an executive in the IBM Lab Services division – to talk it all out.

This is the …
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