• It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and if we hope to get some insight into what is going on in the base and report back on it in January 2023, we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.

  This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base. …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

  August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

  The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

  This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …

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• IBM i Licensing, Part 2: Subscriptions Change Everything

  June 13, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a very funny way, the licensing of the IBM i platform is coming full circle with the advent of subscription pricing – with some funny curlicues along the way with over three decades of software licensing history and an even longer history of Big Blue renting, rather than selling, its software. When IBM first delivered its punch card machines, way way back, they were only available for rent, not for sale. The long arm of the law taught IBM to have some optionality, and it thus sold mainframes and minicomputers as well as leasing and renting them.

  But before …

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• IBM i Licensing, Part 1: Operating System Subscriptions

  June 6, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every vendor that sells systems and/or the systems software that runs atop that machinery has had to cope with myriad transitions in product packaging and pricing with the establishment of the cloud. The transitions are difficult for both companies and their customers, but in the long run, pricing will be more flexible and equitable – and far more predictable for both vendors and users alike.

  Big Blue has offered several licensing models over the years for the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i platforms. In the early years, every piece of software had a perpetual license tied to a machine, usually …

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• IBM Delivers More Out-of-the-Box Security with IBM i 7.5

  May 11, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s often said that IBM i is one of the most securable server platforms on the market. But all too often, customers don’t take the time to properly configure it, leaving their applications and data at risk. With IBM i 7.5, IBM is taking aim at security and delivering a system that is more secure when it ships from the factory.

  From default settings to the elimination of some options, IBM has taken several steps to make IBM i more secure by default. IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury, a former security IBM architect for OS/400 and now the co-founder …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …

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• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

  March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21^st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.

  So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.

  IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …

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• Talking IBM i Shop With New Power Systems GM Ken King

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every new general manager of the AS/400 division and its successors all the way up to the current Power Systems division – which hopefully is no longer called Cognitive Systems in the financials but nowhere else – inherits a unique configuration of that business in time and space and after one, two, or three years leaves it in another configuration.

  In all of our years of writing The Four Hundred, we have made an effort to get to know each and every one of them. Last July, ahead of the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business in November, …

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