• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Syncsort Snags EView for Log Data Hooks

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort bolstered its capability to harvest log data originating on IBM i and mainframes yesterday with the acquisition of EView Technology, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company that builds big iron connectors for mainstream systems management tools.

  EView Technology didn’t occupy a prominent seat in the IBM i auditorium, but it did carve out its own little niche as a purveyor of connectivity tools used by systems administrators at some of the biggest IBM i and mainframe shops in the country, such a Ford, Kraft, TD Bank, Discount Tire, Waste Management, HSBC, FedEx, and REI.

  The company’s claim to fame was …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• Bain Buys Rocket for $2 Billion

  October 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software announced yesterday that Bain Capital Private Equity has agreed to acquire a majority stake in the company for $2 billion. The company’s management team will remain intact following the transaction, which is expected to be completed this quarter.

  Rumors have been swirling in recent months that Rocket had put itself on the market and was looking to sell itself or its products. The investment by Bain Capital should put an end to the speculation, as Rocket CEO and president Andy Youniss says the company is embarking upon its fourth decade of growth.

  “This new relationship will allow us …

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• Debunking Legacy Myths

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the rush to modernize IT and digitally transform our businesses, legacy systems like IBM i and System z come under increased scrutiny, which is fair. After all, blind loyalty to a particular platform – even Big Blue’s historically stable ones — is a recipe for failure in a dynamic business environment. But when technology providers make questionable claims about the nature of legacy systems in an attempt to sway decision-making, those claims should bear as much scrutiny as the platforms do themselves.

  Which brings us to the recent e-book published by First National Technology Solutions and co-sponsored by Dell …

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• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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• Power Systems Posts Growth In The First Quarter

  April 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for four long years for the Power9 ramp to begin in earnest, and the merest hint of it happened Big Blue finished off its first quarter. That was when the “ZZ” Power9 entry systems announced back in February finally started shipping and IBM finally started booking some revenue for this new iron.

  IBM did not provide much in the way of information about the Power9 system sales in the first quarter ended in March, which was only a week and a half after the ZZ systems started shipping. Jim Cavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer for the …

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• SEA Launches New Job Scheduler For IBM i

  March 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it’s not talking System z mainframe tools, Software Engineering of America (SEA) has traditionally involved itself with IBM i security and messaging tools. But the New York software firm has expanded its repertoire to IBM i job scheduling with the recent launch of absScheduler.

  The new software was developed by SEA to be a “next-generation” job scheduler that can handle batch workloads across one or more IBM i partitions or systems. The software, which was developed by the same IBM i development team that developed the absMessage product over a decade ago, features both a 5250 green-screen interface and …

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