• Power Systems Has A New Vice President Of Product Management

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Throughout the history of IBM systems, there are executives who steer the development of hardware and those that steer the development of microcode, operating systems, and other software. Still others at Big Blue manage the processor roadmaps as well as the evolution of the systems that make use of them, including all of the peripherals that go into turning central processing units into systems.

  We have always liked these software and hardware people, as well as the multitudes who work with them and for them. They have given us valuable time and insight over the many decades that The Four …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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• Big Blue Working On Replacement For Global Solutions Directory For IBM i

  July 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is developing a website to replace the Global Solutions Directory, which it recently killed off. The new site should allow customers to search through a comprehensive list of IBM i applications serving specific industries, just like they could with the Global Solutions Directory.

  For years, IBM’s Global Solutions Directory served as the go-to mechanism for researching the wide breadth of IBM i software products available around the world. If you needed to know what kind of banking solutions existed on IBM i version 6.1 for midsized American credit unions, or what the market looked like for Indonesian construction equipment …

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• Inside IBM’s Efforts To Modernize The ISV Army

  May 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” IBM executives must feel a bit like the eminently quotable Don Rumsfeld, former Secretary of the Department of Defense, as they marshal their assets in the battle for application supremacy. While some of Big Blue’s partners have honed their IBM i applications into modern weapons, others are fielding old equipment more suitable for a previous war.

  It’s no state secret that Big Blue has a legacy problem on its hands in the IBM i world. When the …

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• The IT Balancing Act

  May 1, 2023 Bill Langston

  Medical research suggests that how well you can maintain your balance is a powerful predictor of your longevity. Balance is also a good indicator of longevity for your IBM i environment. The challenge is striking the right balance between “vertical” technology that helps your company work efficiently and accurately, and “horizontal” technology that reduces risk.

  Over the past few years, unprecedented forces shifted IT priorities and may have knocked your company’s IBM i environment off balance.

  Enabling IT Balance

  IBM i exists because of how well it runs complex business applications and manages data. We take for granted that the …

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• The IBM i Cloud Just Got More Frictionless With Virtual Serial Numbers

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the cloud is to be successful, it has to do more than provide a new deployment and pricing model for IT organizations. It has to also maintain and retain some of the important practices in use by the IT department. One of the big disconnections between on premises IBM equipment and capacity sold in the cloud has been the serial number that identifies a machine, which is a kind of birth certificate and Social Security number for each box that comes off the IBM factory lines.

  That serial number is used to identify the machine for technical support purposes …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 3

  January 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of 2022 predictions. The third (and final) round of predictions kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has a very bright outlook for the year ahead in IBM i land.

  “As business confidence and optimism rallies, IT budgets will become less restrained,” Guarino tells IT Jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and enhanced legacy systems will experience modernization pressure. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding swift …

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• M81 Speeds Backups with Flash for i

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  M81, a French independent software vendor (ISV) that develops IBM i software, recently announced a new release of Flash for i, a utility that uses IBM FlashCopy and EMC SnapShot technology to clone an IBM i disk volume in just two minutes. With version 4.0 out the door and a new partnership with an American company, M81 is looking to expands its operations in the United States.

  Flash for i is an innovative utility designed to provide an IBM i-centric way to manage the FlashCopy and Snapshot commands that IBM and Dell EMC bring to the table with their enterprise …

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• Does IBM i Need Its Own Zowe?

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Getting open source software onto platforms like IBM i and System z is a big focus of IBM, its big iron customers, and the ecosystem of tool and service providers that tread these waters. In 2018, IBM, CA Technologies, and Rocket Software collaborated to create the Zowe framework as a part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, with the goal to extend System z-based services into the greater open source IT landscape. Is it time for a similar effort on IBM i?

  When Zowe launched two years ago, the Open Mainframe Project (OMP) boasted that Zowe would “serve as …

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• 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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