• The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

  April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.

  This is not a bad thing. …

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• Reassessing IBM i Value: Worthless Iron or Legacy Goldmine?

  March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the minds of modern-day technologists, the IBM i server is relegated to the scrap bin of history, looked down upon as a vestigial organ of technology’s past with no place in the distributed future, where workloads run effortlessly on clouds and data flows seamlessly everywhere. That outlook gives the platform’s present value a low mark, but considering the recent influx of capital into IBM i ecosystem, one might want to reassess.

  Trying to assess the value of something is not an easy thing to do. When looking at the worth of the entire IBM i ecosystem, or even just …

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• Rocket Gits Hip to Emerging IBM i Tech

  January 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing traditional IBM i development environments, Rocket Software has its bases covered. But as younger technologies and younger developers find their way onto the platform, Rocket found that it had some work to do to ensure that DevOps – or application lifecycle management (ALM), if you like — runs as smoothly as its enterprise customers expect. That’s the case with the vendor’s announcement today around Git.

  Rocket Software today announced that it’s now supporting Git with the Aldon Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition), the company’s ALM product for open systems environments like Windows, Linux, and Unix. The …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• ARCAD Procures Funding To Fuel Expansion

  December 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  The financial incentives instigating investors to back companies that create software and provide services to the IBM i community continue to raise eyebrows and elicit surprise among those unfamiliar with the innovation taking place in the so-called legacy netherworld.

  Another glimpse of this appeared last week when ARCAD Software announced it received a € 2.5 million ($2.95 million in US currency) investment from the European equity firm Alto Invest. ARCAD develops and markets DevOps and modernization solutions for platforms that include IBM i, Unix, Linux, Windows and z/OS. This is the first external funding ARCAD has received during its …

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• Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

  October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.

  The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …

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