• Removing The Last Governor: Core Software Pricing

  July 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This being near the July 4th holiday in America, which is a significant time for me and my life with The Four Hundred, I am going to ask your indulgence and tell you a story or two.

  When I first moved to New York City way back in December 1988, it was not the first time that I had encountered a recession. But it was an important one that changed my life and, I like to think, yours.

  My parents were the grandchildren of farmers, and their parents worked in the factories of upstate rural New Jersey – there …

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• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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• UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management

  June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.

  Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …

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• Massiello Named First Lifetime Champion for Power

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Pete Massiello has been a mainstay of the IBM i community for decades. He’s the president of iTech Solutions, a former president at COMMON, a respected technical authority on the platform, an in-demand speaker, and part of the inaugural group of IBM Champions for Power Systems in 2011. Now he can add one more title to his resume: Lifetime Champion for Power Systems.

  IBM this month announced that Massiello is the first Lifetime Champion for Power, an event for which he was not prepared. “It was a surprise to me,” he said, before quickly adding “It’s a huge honor, an …

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• Getting Hyper And Converged With IBM i

  May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The hallmark of the System/38 and its progeny, the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms, is that these machines came fully integrated with all of the operating system, database, management, and development tools necessary to run a modern business. Integrated did not mean that these pieces were all sold as a single bundle, mind you, but they snapped together with good fit and finish and allowed companies to not have to become masters of the system code and could therefore be craftsman for the application code that actually ran the business.

  The AS/400 really set the pace for …

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• Survey Paints a Picture of IBM i Community, Product Usage

  May 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The folks behind the All 400s website have published the first results of an online survey that seeks to illuminate the state of the IBM i community, ranging from possible plans to migrate off the platform to third-party product preferences. The first 400 people have taken the 25-question survey, and the results may surprise you.

  About a week ago, John Rockwell, the owner of the All 400s website (www.all400s.com) announced in the LinkedIn group “IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 Professionals” that the first set of results has been released. The survey, which is hosted by Survey Monkey, …

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• What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.

  The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …

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• A Closer Look At Enhancements To Integrated Web Services

  March 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Technology Refresh 8 for IBM i 7.2 and TR4 for IBM i 7.3 became available last week. One of the enhancements in this TR pertains to the Integrated Web Services (IWS), which Business Architect for IBM i Application Development Tim Rowe calls IWS “one of our most widely used pieces of software from an integrated perspective.”

  Web services provide the capability to expose the database to outside developers via APIs and Web services. Although that thought brings a shiver down the spine of many developers who learned the proprietary ways of the AS/400, multi-platform integration is the modern development path. …

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• The IBM i Roadmap Leads To A Familiar Place

  March 19, 2018 Dan Burger

  Reeve Fritchman is working on project that he believes might tell the future of the IBM i. It’s a complex mainframe-to-IBM i migration. The core applications were written by an in-house team of developers, many who are still on the staff but on the verge of retirement. The hardware maintenance is expensive, and a hardware upgrade would be absurdly expensive. The bills from CA for automation software are staggering.

  “The demise of the mainframe in small to medium size shops could be a precursor of what will happen in the AS/400 environment – fewer skilled workers, expensive, and better technology …

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• At Long Last, IBM i Finally Gets Power9

  February 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The most important part of the Power9 rollout for the vast majority of IBM i customers has finally happened: Big Blue has lifted the veil on the Power9-based “ZZ” systems that we have been hearing about for a few months now and that are being delivered in the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 servers.

  These are three of the six machines based on the ZZ design, and they are the only ones that can IBM i without any restrictions. Two other machines, which are called the Power H922 and Power H924, were created explicitly to run SAP’s HANA …

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