• Assessing IBM i’s Role In Digital Transformation

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  There comes a time in every application’s life when its owner must take a hard look at its continued viability and ask the tough question: Will the application continue to meet the business’s evolving needs, or should the whole thing be scrapped for something new? These business and technology assessments can be especially tough when the software runs on the IBM i server.

  Many companies these days are looking to modernize their aging IT systems in the hopes of gaining more agility and flexibility. Whether you call it digital transformation or application modernization, the goals are often similar: Simplify the …

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• Meet The 2019 Champions For IBM i

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s a new year, which means a new crop of champions has emerged from IBM. More than 600 souls can call themselves IBM Champions this year, but only 64 identify as IBM Champions for Power Systems. We whittled away the AIX and Linux experts to leave you with the folks who will lead the IBM i charge in 2019.

  IBM does not have a specific category for IBM i Champions. Big Blue breaks out its System z leaders, along with champion categories for Data & Analytics, Cloud, Collaboration Solutions, Storage, Watson IoT, Blockchain, and Security.

  For the Champion program, IBM …

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• Maxava Adds New Products, Partners, And Users Around The World

  November 12, 2018 Marco Govender

  (Sponsored Content) Maxava, a worldwide developer of best in class disaster recovery and high availability software for the IBM i platform have been busy rolling out their bundled offering that includes their new products Mi8 for Cloud based monitoring, Mi7 for Cloud based security monitoring, and CPR, which is a recycle bin for the IBM i.

  Simon O’Sullivan, senior vice president at Maxava, says: “Our strategy of having all these products designed to work together in concert has been a great move for us as a company. We are winning new partners and new customers around the world.” …

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• Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

  November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

  In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …

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• The Cloud Changes Things, But Not Everything

  October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the slowest things in the world is the pace at which risk averse enterprises change their information technology. We have been talking about computing on demand and utility computing for more than two decades, and Amazon Web Services made the cloud a real thing with the launch of its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service back in March 2006. Fast forward 12 years, and EC2 is the foundation of a vast business that made $21.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, and it has utterly transformed the way people want to configure IT infrastructure so it …

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• Google Close to Launching IBM i Cloud Service, Will Says

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  One of the laments of Power chip types everywhere is the lack of a public cloud service for Power applications. While Linux and Windows folks can run their X86 workloads on multiple public clouds, the opportunities for hosting IBM i, AIX, or Power Linux workloads are limited to so-called private clouds. But according to IBM i chief architect Steve Will, that could soon be changing.

  While neither IBM nor Google have made any official announcements about Google running IBM i in its public cloud, Will talked openly about the relationship between the two tech giants at COMMON‘s PowerUp conference …

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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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• Syncsort Acquires Townsend’s IBM i Encryption Software

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort has acquired the bulk of Townsend Security’s products in a bid to bolster its burgeoning suite of security software for IBM i. The big get for Syncsort (formerly Vision Solutions) is AES/400, Townsend’s well-respected database encryption software for the IBM i platform. Meanwhile, Townsend Security will continue developing and selling encryption key management software for open systems and cloud platforms.

  When it comes to database encryption on the IBM i server, there are few options. There are various encryption solutions available from IBM, including Cryptographic Services, which is the mainstream offering today. But when it comes to third-party …

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• Ensono Embiggens With Wipro Data Center Deal

  March 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Ensono isn’t the most well-known datacenter operator in the world, either in the open systems or mainframe/IBM i space where it currently operates. But thanks to its recently announced deal with Wipro to buy eight Wipro data centers for nearly half a billion dollars, the Chicago-based company is putting itself on the map.

  If the name Ensono is news to you, you are not alone. The company was formed just two years ago when Arkansas-based Acxiom spun out its IT Outsourcing (ITO) division to create a standalone entity with four data centers in the US, three in Europe, and $300 …

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• Linoma Takes GoAnywhere MFT to the Public Cloud

  June 7, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new release of Linoma Software’s GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) software lets customers move files to and from cloud repositories in the same way they handle transfers with on-premise systems. The cloud support reflects the major on-going shifts to public cloud infrastructure, and also addresses a previous shortcoming in the GoAnywhere product.

  Last month, Linoma announced that GoAnywhere version 5.5 now supports deployments on public cloud systems, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. The new feature allows GoAnywhere customers to securely transmit files to and from remote cloud locations, while maintaining control and audit history from the central MFT …

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