• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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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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• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle

  December 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  And now we come, once again, to the holiday season here at IT Jungle. This coming year, which we are already planning for, we enter the 30th year of publishing news, tech tips, strategy, and tactics concerning the AS/400 and its progeny. It has been such an education for all of us, and a privilege and an honor to serve the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i communities all those years, as well as those many shops who hung back in the early years on the System/36 and System/38 platforms while we are thinking about it.

  We are …

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• Modern Lessons From A Fresh IBM i Developer

  October 8, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization is a big nut to crack on IBM i. That is to say, there are many ways to tackle the problem, from the code and business logic to the databases and user interfaces. But when it comes to the type of developers you should look for and how they should spend their time, Kody Robinson has a few pointers that may be worth keeping in mind.

  Robinson was a member of the first batch of “Fresh Faces” that IBM put forward in 2017 to showcase the fact that young people are building careers on the platform, and that …

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• Getting Hyper And Converged With IBM i

  May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The hallmark of the System/38 and its progeny, the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms, is that these machines came fully integrated with all of the operating system, database, management, and development tools necessary to run a modern business. Integrated did not mean that these pieces were all sold as a single bundle, mind you, but they snapped together with good fit and finish and allowed companies to not have to become masters of the system code and could therefore be craftsman for the application code that actually ran the business.

  The AS/400 really set the pace for …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?

  October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

  “A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …

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• IBM i Slow to Catch On, But What Does It Mean?

  October 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s been nine-and-a-half years since IBM rebranded the name of the platform from System i to IBM i on Power Systems. However, many people in the IBM midrange community call the platform by something other than its official name, according to anecdotal evidence and Web search data. Is this evidence of continued name confusion, or is there something else at play?

  IBM has been running from the iSeries name since its 2006 rebranding exercise, which replaced iSeries with System i. That name went by the wayside in April 2008, when IBM announced the Power Systems platform and the merger of …

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• Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In days gone by, IBM used to have a great amount of insight into what was going on at AS/400 shops. But somewhere between the iSeries and through the System i down to Power Systems running IBM i and what is, apparently, being called Db2 instead of DB2 these days, with or without i, Big Blue stopped having the kind of insight that helped us not only understand the trends in our community, but how they related – or didn’t – to the larger IT community.

  This community, which is more than a marketplace but still encompasses that, has always …

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