• Rocket Talks Up IBM i Biz in Wake of Restructuring

  February 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When Bain Equity bought a $2 billion stake in Rocket Software 16 months ago, it was largely viewed through a mainframe lens. Rocket was a mainframe software company, and Bain was investing in that mainframe business. But as the new general manager of the Power Systems Business Unit, Chris Wey, tells it, the company is getting ready to make some moves in the IBM i market, too.

  Wey joined Rocket Software at the beginning of the year, immediately following the 30-year-old company’s most recent restructuring following the Bain acquisition. Andy Youniss, who co-founded Rocket back in 1990 to capitalize on …

  Read more

• How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

  February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

  One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …

  Read more

• DevOps Transformation: Engage Your IBM i Teams

  January 27, 2020 ARCAD Software

  (Sponsored Content) Most enterprises accept the imperative to transition away from legacy waterfall-based development models towards DevOps in order to maintain their competitive advantage. However an ever increasing performance gap can be created between those organizations and teams who are stuck in the earlier stages of DevOps maturity and those who have been able to achieve scale.

  On our beloved IBM i, DevOps is absolutely “no less of a priority.” The IBM i has evolved into a truly modern platform, and generally the IBM i community has embraced the move to DevOps. There can however be certain challenges …

  Read more

• How Infor’s Coleman Strategy Is Evolving, and How IBM i Fits In

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s been more than two years since Infor unveiled Coleman, the company’s AI platform which became generally available earlier this year. It’s not on the roadmap for IBM i just yet, according to Infor. That may not sound ideal for Infor’s IBM i customers, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  Coleman was unveiled by ERP software giant Infor in 2017 primarily as a digital assistant, which is a fancy way of saying a chatbot. Just as Siri and Alexa can answer questions about the weather or sports, Coleman could answer basic questions about the business, and even handle some …

  Read more

• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

  Read more

• Talking Digital Transformation With The New And Prior CEO

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a situation that each and every IT manager and chief information officer has experienced and will continue to experience: Having a very long conversation with the president or chief executive officer of their company about how to engage in or continue with digital transformation and the application and database modernization that this entails. And sometimes, that conversation will happen as a new person takes the helm of the company.

  That’s precisely what we did this week, but with a twist or two. We are not an IT manager or CIO, but rather an observer in the boardrooms of …

  Read more

• IBM i Gets a New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform isn’t getting any younger, and neither are the thousands of individuals who work on it. But that doesn’t mean that platform as a whole should be marked by gray. To celebrate the viability of the platform’s ability to attract young people, IBM System Magazine just introduced its newest crop of “Fresh Faces.”

  IBM System Magazine has been calling attention to the IBM i youth movement since 2016, when it debuted its original crop of Fresh Faces. Liam Allan was a member of that group as a teenager, and he has since gone on to build himself …

  Read more

• Server Buying Cools, But It’s Cool – Don’t Panic

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When a market is comprised of hundreds of thousands of customers, things tend to level out and are a lot more predictable than when there are relatively few customers. Before the public clouds took off a decade ago and before the hyperscalers created such large infrastructures to support billions of users running their applications, server buying was a lot smaller and it was also more predictable. Things tended to grow slowly, methodically and they also took time to slow down because not everyone felt an economic decline or a transition to a new system architecture at the same time.

  That …

  Read more

• IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

  “Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

  On …

  Read more

• Yes, IBM i Shops Have AI Options, Too

  April 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies of all shapes and sizes are encouraged to adopt artificial intelligence these days. Most of today’s AI tech, however, was developed to run in open systems and X86 environments. But there are a growing number of AI options from IBM and its partners for customers that want to keep their data resident on the Power Systems platform.

  There’s no denying there’s a lot of hype around AI today. One can scarcely turn on the TV or open a magazine or Web page without being inundated with claims of how leading organizations are using AI to gain a competitive edge, …

  Read more

Previous Articles