• 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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• LANSA Bought By Software Conglomerate Idera

  January 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA, one of the oldest independent software vendors targeting the IBM midrange server and arguably one of the most successful, has been acquired by Idera, a growing conglomerate of software companies that also owns Sencha, and which is owned in part by the same private equity firm behind HelpSystems.

  LANSA was founded in 1987 by Australian businessmen Peter Draney and Lyndsey Cattermole to create and sell software development tools for the IBM System/38. When IBM launched the AS/400 a year later, LANSA supported it with its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment. It hasn’t looked back, and today the company, …

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• Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

  November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.

  They have no choice, living in the future as we do.

  The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …

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• The Cloud Changes Things, But Not Everything

  October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the slowest things in the world is the pace at which risk averse enterprises change their information technology. We have been talking about computing on demand and utility computing for more than two decades, and Amazon Web Services made the cloud a real thing with the launch of its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service back in March 2006. Fast forward 12 years, and EC2 is the foundation of a vast business that made $21.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, and it has utterly transformed the way people want to configure IT infrastructure so it …

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• Can ERP Vendors Deliver On Industry 4.0 Expectations?

  October 1, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the IT business, innovation is king. If you fail to keep up, you run the risk of falling behind and becoming stale. There’s where ERP as a product category found itself thanks to the advent of cloud computing, and now we’re on the cusp of finding out if the ERP market can deliver on the next set of emerging capabilities — machine learning, artificial intelligence, and IoT – which industry watchers have termed Industry 4.0.

  We’re at an interesting inflection point in enterprise software at the moment, in particular how well-established players react to rapid technological innovation. In the …

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• IBM Global Financing Deals To Push Power E950 And E980 Sales

  September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we have pointed out many times before, Big Blue is not just a creator and manufacturer of technology, but as one of the largest renters and lessors of equipment with vast access to capital and a relatively strong balance sheet, it is also effectively a large bank focused on IT. And more times than not, it takes IBM Global Financing – and the economic might that parent IBM brings to bear – to close the deal, as much as any hardware or software technology does.

  At the moment, IBM is focused on increasing sales of the midrange “Zeppelin” and …

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• UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management

  June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.

  Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …

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• Here’s What’s Next for the Enterprise Software World

  May 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thirty years ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) was a hot new technology promising to help streamline business processes. While ERP continues to generate billions in revenue, it’s mostly for keeping complicated systems up and running. Now the daughter of the founder of JD Edwards is sharing a bold new vision for how her company, called Nextworld, plans to take enterprise software to the next stage.

  We first got wind of Nextworld venture about a year-and-a-half ago. We knew the Colorado company had big plans and a stream of funding from Kylee McVaney’s father, Ed McVaney. However, since Nextworld was …

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• Keep Your IBM i Baby, Not The Bathwater

  May 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the quest to modernize computer systems, some IBM i shops cease being IBM i shops. Wholesale migrations or complete rewrites of applications on different operating systems are sometimes necessary and beneficial, and sometimes they do more harm than good. When King III Solutions set out to enhance its advanced replenishment system, it managed to create a modern Web front-end that resonates with millennials without giving up its rock-solid IBM i back-end.

  Based in Marietta, Georgia, King III Solutions, or K3S, develops software that helps wholesale distributors and retailers better manage their inventory, in part through a collection of …

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• ERP Caught Up In Cloud Updrafts

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but ERP software is headed up – into the clouds, that is. That’s according to the latest ERP survey from Panorama Consulting, which says more than four times as many users reported adopting cloud-based or SaaS ERP than deploying on-premise enterprise software.

  A quick look at Panorama Consulting‘s 2018 ERP Survey shows that cloud/software as a service (SaaS) and on-premise deployments of ERP effectively switched from 2017 to 2018. In 2017, the survey found that 67 percent of users reported deploying ERP on premise, while 33 percent reported using SaaS or cloud ERP.

  In 2018, Panorama …

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