• ERP Transitions Loom for SAP on IBM i Customers

  May 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Unless SAP changes its plans, the company will end mainstream support for its business software running on IBM i in five years, with an option for extended maintenance through 2030. The looming end of support for the decades-long partnership between the IBM i organization and the German software giant puts about 1,500 joint customers in the tough spot of deciding how to transition away from their current ERP platform. And one they have probably invested a lot of time, money, and effort into.

  SAP’s preferred destination for all of its ECC (ERP Central Component) and Business Suite customers – …

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• Beware The Hype Of Modern Tech

  April 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops are under the gun to modernize their applications as part of a digital transformation initiative. If the app is more than 10 or 15 years old and doesn’t use the latest technology and techniques, it’s considered a legacy system that must be torn down and rebuilt according to current code. But there are substantial risks associated with these efforts – not the least of which that the modern method is essentially incompatible with the IBM i architecture as it currently exists. IBM i shops should be careful when evaluating these new directions.

  Amy Anderson, a modernization …

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• Skytap Bullish as Momentum Grows for Cloudy Power LPARs

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Since announcing support for IBM i in late 2018, Skytap has seen interest build for its public cloud offering, which leverages Power servers installed Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud data centers. Now, thanks to an expanded partnership with Microsoft and a new certification with SAP, the company expects migrations of IBM i and AIX customers into the cloud to continue picking up steam.

  Skytap has a unique offering in the cloud hosting business, particularly as it pertains to Power customers, who have a much smaller set of runtime options in an X86-dominated world.

  The Seattle, Washington, company has a deal …

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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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• Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

  But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

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• Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.

  Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …

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• SAP on IBM i to S/4 HANA Migration: ‘No Need to Rush’

  March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that run SAP applications on IBM i servers have about nine more years of maintenance and support available from SAP, and should be in no rush to move to SAP’s preferred application environment, S/4 HANA, IBM SAP on IBM i expert Christian Bartels told the community last month. “There is still a lot of time to go, so there is no need to migrate right now,” he said in a webinar.

  The SAP on IBM i community, which numbers around 1,500 or so organizations around the world, has expressed concern about SAP’s plan for the IBM i environment, particularly …

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• How IBM i Fits Into the Evolving ERP Market

  November 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i remains a solid platform on which to run an ERP system. But with the shift to the cloud, not to mention a surge in homegrown application development on IBM i, the platform’s future for packaged ERP deployments is uncertain.

  The IBM midrange platform has a rich history of packaged ERP applications for a range of business types. From discrete manufacturing and trucking to banking and healthcare management, software vendors have targeted the IBM i platform and its predecessors to run integrated ERP systems and other similar types of business applications for over decades.

  But the go-go ERP deployments …

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• JD Edwards Co-Founder McVaney Leaves A Legacy

  September 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Ed McVaney, who emerged from a frugal childhood in Nebraska to eventually lead one of the most successful enterprise software companies in the world, died this past June at the age of 79.

  McVaney is best remembered as the co-founder and CEO of JD Edwards, the Denver, Colorado-based company that would become known as the gold-standard for ERP software on the AS/400 and its predecessor and successor machines. In 2016, more than a decade after JD Edwards was sold to PeopleSoft, McVaney founded NextWorld, a cloud ERP software company that is run by his daughter, Kylee.

  McVaney was the …

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• How IBM Stacks Power Cloud Up Against AWS And Azure

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have our own habits when it comes to thinking about bang for the buck, and it is refreshing sometimes to just think about how other companies think about it.

  As part of the July 14 announcements now almost three weeks ago, IBM not only rolled out new entry Power9 machines with higher I/O bandwidth as well as utility style pricing for on-premises gear to lower capital expenditures. IBM also did a direct comparison of the Power Systems Virtual Server running on the IBM Cloud for a memory-heavy instance and then compared that to fat memory slices running on Amazon …

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