• What Are Your Application Priorities?

  March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Money is a proxy for intent, but the amount that companies budget for any particular application, whether it is homegrown or bought off the shelf, is not necessarily a good indicator of the value that they will ultimately derive from that investment. Still, every IT budget is a reflection of both necessity and hope. Some things you simply have to do to even be in business, and other things you do to improve the business. Most of the time it works, sometimes it ends up being a sunk cost with very little benefit.

  The analysts at Gartner were kind enough …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• The Problem With ERP

  March 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of modern business since it emerged in the mid-1990s. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into ERP implementations with the promise of enhanced business processes automation. But was it all worth it? According to new research from Computer Economics, the answer is not clear.

  Every year in its Technology Trends report, Computer Economics surveys a few hundred IT decision makers to gauge their satisfaction level with a variety of technologies. For the past two years, ERP scored dead last in terms of satisfaction and return on investment (ROI). In fact, …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• Inside The Latest ALL400s Report

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In early 2018, John Rockwell started a survey from his ALL400s website in an attempt to glean more information about the state of midrange community. Many of the questions are about which products IBM i professionals use, but the survey also digs into other aspects of the relationships that people and organizations have with the platform, including plans to migrate off IBM i.

  According to the latest ALL400s survey of the midrange community, more IBM i shops say they have no plans to move off the platform. It was a small increase — from 57.5 percent last April who said …

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• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Infor Raises $1.5 Billion, Teases An IPO

  January 21, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When will Infor go public? For years, the company has hinted that an initial public offering (IPO) of stock is in its future, but has remained mum on the exact timing. Last week, as part of an announcement regarding a $1.5 billion investment by private equity firms, the ERP software company finally came clean and solidified its public stock offering plans to the world.

  The IPO will come in 2019, the New York company says. Or maybe 2020. It all depends, according to Infor, on “market conditions.”

  With stocks last week, major indices are still flirting with correction territory, and …

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• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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