• The IBM i Marketplace Survey Is Open For You

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How many times a day do people tell you what you know matters? Well, it does, and I am telling you. But that knowledge of your IBM i environment is not doing anyone any good, stuck inside of your noggin. To get a realistic sense of what is actually going on out there in IBM i Land, we need you to pipe up.

  The 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and will be for a few more weeks. But we don’t want you to wait until the last minute to participate. Please …

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• We Need Some Insight From You

  October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What you are doing – and what you are not doing – with you IBM i platform is important to us. And that is why we are asking you to take the 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall.

  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.

  The data that this survey gathers is invaluable, and long-time readers of The Four Hundred know full …

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• Take A Minute, And Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  September 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, you. Yeah, we mean you. You have something we need.

  It’s information. You know, the currency of the modern era. Without it, we can’t figure out where you are and where you are going, and that means we can’t figure out where the IBM i base is and where it might be going. The 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey sponsored by HelpSystems every fall is open, and 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 …

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• 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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