• AWS: A Temperate Zone Among A Global Climate Of Other Clouds

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might feel like Amazon Web Services has a monopoly on the cloud, but it does not. As it turns out, AWS does not even come close to having a monopoly, which means having somewhere north of 80 percent of the revenue and probably damned near all of the profits in any given market according to our definition.

  Synergy Research has just put out its latest quarterly report on cloud revenues by vendor, and AWS is amazingly consistent over the past six years with about a third of revenues across the hundreds of suppliers of infrastructure services, platform services, and …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.

  Hal Schwartz, president at CloudFirst, got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in San Bernardino back in 1988, and worked in sales at CAC Leasing outside of New York City before starting his own leasing company, called …

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• Connectria And Curbstone In Payment Tie-Up

  June 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Connectria, which operates an IBM i cloud out of several data centers and is arguably one of the largest IBM i cloud providers in the world, has inked a deal with IBM i card payment firm Curbstone that will see the two company’s become business partners.

  Curbstone is a Jasper, Georgia-based company that develops IBM i software that allows merchants to process debit and credit card transactions directly on the IBM i server. The software is fully PCI DSS compliant and features scores of integrations with various payment networks as well as IBM i applications like those from Infor, …

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• Infor CM3 to Provide On-Prem Alternative to Cloudy M3

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  For years, Infor has been leading with the cloud when it comes to M3, the ERP system formerly known as Movex. But now, the software giant is readying a new hybrid deployment option called CM3 that will run in a Linux or Windows container and IBM i.

  Long before Infor completed its Lawson acquisition in April 2012 — even before Lawson finished its acquisition of Intentia in 2006 — plans were solidly in place to migrate the core RPG code underpinning the Movex suite to Java, thereby opening the software to run on platforms besides just IBM i, its historical …

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• Systems Of Record On Premises, Systems Of Engagement In The Cloud

  April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess it all depends on the words, and the picture. But sometimes, when you see a bit of market data that displays an industry trend, it nails exactly what the anecdotal evidence suggests is going on in the real world. It saves a lot of words in that regard, particularly if you are looking for some kind of confirmation that your own strategy is one that is prevailing out there in the IT market at large.

  So it was with a chart that we came across recently in …

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• Connectria, Now A Top AWS Partner, Primed For Hybrid Push

  April 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services has lots and lots of servers and storage — enough to supply the IT needs of more than 1 million customers around the world, including one rather large e-commerce site. The cloud giant also has more than 125,000 business partners helping it to scale out to meet those customer needs. Now, thanks to a recent promotion, IBM i hosting specialist Connectria won’t get lost in the AWS partnership jungle.

  Last week, Connectria announced that AWS has named it a Premier Consulting Partner, the highest echelon in the AWS Partner Network. With just 120 members, the move into …

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• IBM Ships ACS Version 1.1.9.0

  April 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM this week delivered an update to Access Client Solutions (ACS), the popular Java-based utility that many IBM i professionals use to interact with the platform. IBM is delivering several enhancements with ACS version 1.1.9.0, some of which came through the request for enhancement (RFE) process. It also defaults to opening IBM’s new Navigator for i, rather than the old one, which is susceptible to the Log4j security vulnerability.

  ACS is the universal Java-based utility that IBM unveiled 10 years ago this August to replace older Client Access products, including the ones for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The software, which …

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• Cloud-Based Stock Optimization Solution Integrates With IBM i

  April 11, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Since COVID-19 struck two years ago, we have seemingly jumped from one supply chain problem to another. First, it was toilet paper and cleaning supplies that were flying off the shelves, then it was shortages of anything with a microchip. The shortage du jour: baby formula. Now a Georgia company called Thrive Technologies is using machine learning technology to help distributors stay on top of supply chain disruptions.

  Thrive Technologies has been developing inventory planning solutions since it was founded in 2001 by CEO Rick Morris. The company says it picks up the inventory slack where ERP solutions typically …

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• If It Can Move To Cloud, It Will; If It Can’t, It Won’t

  March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Cloud is a distribution model more than it is a technology transition in the datacenter, and even before Amazon Web Services launched in March 2006, a lot of us were contemplating returning to the time-sharing, utility model of compute. It was a natural thing after enterprise IT shops dealt with decades of best-of-breed computing and systems integration as well as a wave of outsourcing. If you could pay IBM to run your IT shop as it is, why not just pay someone to create a better one and put it on their books?

  This cloud thing – which has the …

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• How Technical Debt Can Affect Your Business In 2022

  December 15, 2021 Dave Willis

  IBM’s Power Systems is its own ecosystem. Businesses that have been on a platform like IBM i for an extended period of time, from years to decades, can run into challenges that stem from accumulated technical debt.

  At a high level, technical debt typically refers to what happens in software development when choosing an easy solution, rather than taking the time when coding and designing business applications. Over-customizations and old code that your business has relied on for so long, may be less expensive, solve an immediate problem, and help in the short term, but end up hurting your business …

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