• Infor Elaborates on Coleman, IBM i Strategy

  October 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When Infor held its annual Inforum conference two weeks ago, the new AI bot Coleman played a big part, but nary an IBM i word was muttered publically. But that shouldn’t come as a concern to the thousands of companies that rely on the company’s IBM i software to run their businesses, Infor’s IBM i strategy Ross Freeman leader says.

  “We heard the same from Syteline customers. They didn’t hear much about Syteline,” says Freeman, who heads up IBM i strategy for the LX, XA, and System 21 ERP product lines. “We have 235 products and we’re all following the …

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• Can ERP Vendors Deliver On Industry 4.0 Expectations?

  October 1, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the IT business, innovation is king. If you fail to keep up, you run the risk of falling behind and becoming stale. There’s where ERP as a product category found itself thanks to the advent of cloud computing, and now we’re on the cusp of finding out if the ERP market can deliver on the next set of emerging capabilities — machine learning, artificial intelligence, and IoT – which industry watchers have termed Industry 4.0.

  We’re at an interesting inflection point in enterprise software at the moment, in particular how well-established players react to rapid technological innovation. In the …

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• Infor Makes Mobile, Cloud, IoT, and AI Announcements — But Nothing for IBM i

  September 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Infor made several product announcements at its annual user conference this week, including the introduction of a new mobile client program, several cloud announcements, and the GA date for the AI-based assistant it announced last year. But Day One of Inforum 2018 didn’t feature any new or enhanced software for IBM i, where about 18,000 Infor customers continue to run their enterprise software.

  Do you like to “seamlessly glide between applications”? If so, then you’re liable to just love the new Infor Go mobile client, which Infor announced yesterday at the Inforum 2018 conference in Washington D.C.

  Infor says its …

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• Reader Feedback On IBM i Strategy: Technology Choices And The Vendor Ecosystem

  January 29, 2018 Dan Burger

  Hi Dan:

  While Steve Will’s vision for 5 to 15 years out is encouraging and morale-building, it’s not a commitment to the i marketplace – it’s called a “statement of direction” for a reason! I’ll nod in agreement that it’s all good while hoping IBM delivers not only on AI but on enhanced “primitive” processes necessary to make AI useful, if not valuable.

  AI is based on events, transactions, and business rules. Without the primitives — robust and high-performance database technology; extreme hardware/software platform stability; and programming technologies that support the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of complex business rules …

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• The Tipping Point For Power9

  December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market is booming as 2017 comes to a close, and IBM is looking to try to catch the tailwind and lift its Power Systems business from the doldrums and get it rising again on the IBM i, AIX, and Linux fronts. The word on the street is that the first commercial Power9 machines, the ones aimed at HPC and AI workloads, will ship sometime before the end of the year, with a fairly quick ramp of Power9 systems for more generic workloads.

  It can’t come a moment too soon, and while we wish IBM had started shipping Power9 …

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• Where’s the ‘Coleman’ for IBM i?

  August 30, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that’s bringing automation to places where it never existed, including ERP software. The latest entry into the field is Infor, which turned heads last month with a new AI bot dubbed Coleman. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your views on AI – Coleman won’t be coming to IBM i.

  Infor, which owns the biggest collection of IBM i application software on the planet, has slyly positioned itself as a scrappy alternative to Oracle and SAP in the enterprise software space. While the giants …

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• Will AI Replace ERP?

  June 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Programmers in the midrange space are used to coding IBM i applications, like ERP, supply chain, and retail management systems, using RPG, Java, and COBOL. It’s simply what they do. But what happens when machines program themselves and react to events in real time? One impact, according to prominent members of the software industry, is the end of the enterprise software business as we know it.

  Led by Web giants like Google and Facebook, the computing industry is making rapid advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The advent of deep learning techniques, such as convolutional neural networks, …

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