• Inside The ISV Revitalization Initiative For IBM i

  March 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server’s strengths are well known: integration, ease of programming, ease of administration, security, resiliency, and a penchant for putting up with abuse. But aside from the platform’s attributes, another factor in IBM i’s favor is the community of independent software vendors (ISVs) who write business applications. To bolster this strength, IBM recently embarked upon an ISV revitalization initiative, and it wants IBM i ISVs to know all about it.

  In many ways, applications are the face of the platform. It was fairly common for companies to select a business application, such as MRP, ERP, supply chain execution, …

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• Your ERP Contract is Worse Than You Thought

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Marcus Harris knows a bit about ERP contracts and litigation. As a former lawyer for SAP and Infor, he’s the guy that ERP customers would have gone up against in court or a mediation room when a disagreement arises. But he switched sides and now he works on behalf of clients looking to hold their ERP vendors to account. He provided some worthwhile advice at the recent Digital Stratosphere 2020 conference in San Diego.

  Like most lawyers worth their salt, Harris would rather not represent you in court. Sure, it gives his firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, lots …

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• How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

  February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

  One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …

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• Reality Reflects IBM i, Which Reflects It Back

  January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the fullness of time, the datacenters of IBM i shops will reflect the trends in the overall IT sector and in the respective industries and IT scale of their peers who have other back-end systems of record and a mix of systems of engagement. Give or take.

  That’s why we pay attention to the larger trends going on in the IT sector. The IBM i base may be coming a little slowly to true cloud compute, storage, and networking capacity, but it is getting there finally thanks to the efforts of IBM, Connectria, Skytap/Microsoft, Google, and others.

  It takes …

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• Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

  HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …

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• SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

  January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

  Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …

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• How Infor’s Coleman Strategy Is Evolving, and How IBM i Fits In

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s been more than two years since Infor unveiled Coleman, the company’s AI platform which became generally available earlier this year. It’s not on the roadmap for IBM i just yet, according to Infor. That may not sound ideal for Infor’s IBM i customers, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  Coleman was unveiled by ERP software giant Infor in 2017 primarily as a digital assistant, which is a fancy way of saying a chatbot. Just as Siri and Alexa can answer questions about the weather or sports, Coleman could answer basic questions about the business, and even handle some …

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• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

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• Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms

  October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no shortage of IBM i shops that are sitting on back releases of the operating system and related systems software, or older Power Systems iron, or both. Sometimes, it takes a little convincing to get upper management to listen about how IT operations could be improved and extended if the company would only make some investments in upgrading the hardware and systems software. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, particularly when many small and medium businesses are run by their owners and in a certain sense any money that would be allocated for an upgrade is their …

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• VAI Keeps Rolling with ERP Update, Cloud and SaaS Sales

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Scintillating growth” may not be the best words to describe the market for IBM i-based ERP software these days. But don’t tell that to the folks at VAI, who continue to develop compelling ERP software and grow its installed base, particularly on the cloud and software as a service (SaaS).

  For decades, VAI has been one of the go-to ERP providers for midsize firms in manufacturing, distribution, retail, and services. Its IBM i-based suite of software, S2K Enterprise, is trusted by hundreds of companies around North America. While many of its competitors on the platform have folded or been snapped …

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