• 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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• How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong

  February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …

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• Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

  HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …

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• SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

  January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

  Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

  December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

  As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …

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• Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

  November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

  In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …

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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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