• IBM i Finds A Youthful Swagger Down In Texas

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform and ecosystem may not be what they once were. Thirty years of relentless OLTP processing will do that to you. But if COMMON’s POWERUp 18 conference this week in San Antonio is any indication, the box itself and the ecosystem it supports are far from dead.

  Signs of life in IBM i-land were evident everywhere at the Marriott Rivercenter, the hotel where about 1,000 IBM i professionals, vendors, and IBMers spent the past four days holed up for COMMON‘s annual conference, which was renamed POWERUp.

  Here are some of the highlights of the show, which …

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• Syncsort Talks Rebranding, IBM i Product Strategy

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Think you know Syncsort? Who the company is and what it does? Well, you might want to take a fresh peek, because the company that acquired Vision Solutions and a handful of other IBM i software firms is on the move. In fact, it used the COMMON POWERUp 18 conference in San Antonio this week to begin rolling out a long-awaited company rebranding and major product refresh – including its new Fusion unification strategy and several new IBM i products.

  First of all, the company will continue to be known as Syncsort. The executives leading the Pearl River, New …

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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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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 23

  May 23, 2018 Dan Burger

  COMMON stole the spotlight this week with its POWERUp 18 event in Austin, Texas. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie was our boots on the ground at the show, giving us the inside scoop from the opening session and what appears to be a bright future for IBM i and the Power business. And we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the continued celebrations of the 30th anniversary of our beloved platform. If you haven’t been reading The Four Hundred this week, you have been missing out. After you catch up here, take a look below at what’s happening …

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• Past And Future Collide At PowerUp 18

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  COMMON kicked off its first inaugural PowerUp conference Sunday in San Antonio, Texas, where an estimated 1,000 attendees are gathered to learn about the Power Systems platform and share their knowledge with other users. The IBM i server’s 30 years of reliable service was a big topic of discussion, but IBM executives Steve Sibley and Stefanie Chiras were determined to talk about Power’s AI future.

  Any platform that lives to be 30 years old in this day and age is doing something right. While today’s IBM i server is not the same beast as the first AS/400 that came out …

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• Big Blue Gives IBM i Shops A Special 30th Birthday Bash Box

  May 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Big Blue is in the middle of celebrating three decades of the IBM i platform, and the company has unveiled a special birthday box that commemorates the occasion. It’s essentially a Solutions Edition package with some extra bells and whistles. For those unfamiliar with the Solutions Editions, they are pre-configured systems with a choice of IBM and ISV software discounts applied. Those discounts would be unavailable when buying the systems or the software individually.

  The IBM i 30th Edition offering is based on IBM i Solution Edition Power9 Model S914, a P05 tier box, with four cores. All of the …

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• COMMON Changes Things Up With PowerUp 2018

  April 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  We are six weeks away from the first inaugural PowerUp conference, the new name that COMMON has given to its annual meeting and exposition. While the new name has drawn some feedback, the changes that COMMON is making to the conference itself are expected to be the big head turners next month in San Antonio. We check in with the user group’s president, Justin Porter, for the good news.

  Let’s start with PowerUp, a name that not only reflects COMMON‘s affiliation with IBM and its Power Systems servers, but also reflects the notion of “up skilling,” the activity most …

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• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

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• COMMON Education Gets Member-Driven Tweaks

  January 8, 2018 Dan Burger

  COMMON isn’t an organization that’s prone to making major changes. But that doesn’t mean the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to IBM Power Systems – most obviously IBM i – is opposed to improving what it has and introducing a few new ideas. During the holiday season, COMMON president Justin Porter explained to IT Jungle what moves COMMON made in 2017 and previewed some coming attractions for 2018.

  Porter says COMMON is increasing its emphasis on member-driven training and education, and one of the best examples he talked about was the new for 2017 RPG Boot Camp. The Boot Camp …

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• Lack Of Available RPG Skills Not A Hard Problem To Fix

  September 11, 2017 Dan Burger

  Running an IT department can be a grind. The reliability and manageability of your hardware and software certainly influences how hard the grind becomes, but the job becomes so much easier when you have a staff that removes much of your burden. Successfully developing that staff and creating a positive culture while dealing with turnover and “do more with less” imperatives has a huge impact on whether the CIO or IT director manages the grind or gets ground up. And once in a while, a new addition to the staff comes with a surprisingly positive impact. That leads me into …

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