• COMMON System i Town Hall and Sound Off Recap

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The System i Town Hall meeting and the Sound Off meeting at the spring COMMON user group event in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week didn’t have a lot of new stuff if you have been reading The Four Hundred for the past several months. But there were a few interesting bits, as there always are. Mark Shearer, the general manager of the System i division, kicked off the Town Hall meeting, making jokes about all of the candid feedback that he gets before he attends each COMMON event. And, to his credit, he has now attended three COMMONs in a row,

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• Doug Fulmer to Leave IBM for Clear Technologies

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street at COMMON last week is that Doug Fulmer, who headed up the iSeries Tools Network for years and who is now the head of worldwide sales for e-business infrastructure at IBM, is going to retire from IBM. Fulmer is a vocal and ardent supporter of the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform, and has been instrumental in opening up the iSeries Tool Network so other companies that provide tools for creating, extending, and modernizing applications on the System i platform can get help from IBM to sell their products and help IBM push the System

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• IBM Sort Of Clarifies Plans for S/36 and S/38 Environments

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the January refresh of the OS/400 platform with the launch of the Power5+ System i5 machines, IBM dropped a little hint at the back of the i5/OS V5R4 announcements that caused some anxiety among many OS/400 shops. IBM said that support for certain compilers that were created for the System/36 and System/38 predecessors to the AS/400-iSeries-System i line were on the way out. Since we published that story in early February, I have been trying to get some clarification on what exactly the deal is, to no avail. Last week at COMMON, IBM briefly shed a little

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• Spring COMMON Turned Out to Be Pretty Lively

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say if the COMMON user group is a leading indicator or a lagging indicator of the state of the OS/400 ecosystem. I happen to think it might be a little of both. When things go bad, COMMON, just like the publishers who rely on advertising (as we at IT Jungle do), takes the first hit (making them a leading indicator), and when things get better, money goes into other areas first and then finds its way into trade shows like COMMON and publications like those put out by IT Jungle (making them a lagging indicator). I

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• System i General Manager Shearer: Integration Man

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You don’t get to be a general manager of an IBM division without at least three things: brains, flexibility, and ambition. And to take on the OS/400 platform and to lead the charge in its rejuvenation requires perhaps one other thing: a certain amount of optimism. I sat down for a brief chat with System i general manager Mark Shearer while he was at COMMON last week, and we shot the breeze about a bunch of things. “I am excited about the new things coming to the platform, and that partners are starting to reinvest in the platform again,” Shearer

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• COMMON System i Town Hall and Sound Off Recap

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The System i Town Hall meeting and the Sound Off meeting at the spring COMMON user group event in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week didn’t have a lot of new stuff if you have been reading The Four Hundred for the past several months. But there were a few interesting bits, as there always are. Mark Shearer, the general manager of the System i division, kicked off the Town Hall meeting, making jokes about all of the candid feedback that he gets before he attends each COMMON event. And, to his credit, he has now attended three COMMONs in a row,

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• Tachy i Syndrome: Aye Yi Yi Don’t Care What You Call It, Just Capitalize the Letter “I”

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the members of the COMMON user group have been consistent about any two complaints for the past six years, it is that IBM doesn’t do enough to differentiate the AS/400-iSeries-System i platform from other IBM servers–now called systems–as well as from other server platforms from competitors, and that it keeps changing the name of the product every couple of years. A year ago, Peter Bingaman, then vice president of marketing for the iSeries, agreed with vocal attendees of the town hall and Sound Off meeting at COMMON that IBM had changed the name of the servers too many times

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• Why American Employees Are So Unhappy

  April 3, 2006 Doug Mewmaw

  As I was flying home, I started to chuckle as I thought of my last year at my previous company. I had been there 16 years and had risen up the corporate ladder pretty successfully. The company was in turmoil as a recent merger was failing horribly. Good people were abandoning ship as no one wanted to stay around in a culture that was unhealthy and unproductive. I remember feeling how much my hands were tied, and I will never forget when I needed a director signature for a $7 set of dry erase markers . . . and I

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• 3Com, IBM Are Porting VoIP Suite to the System i5

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What’s the one thing other than a PC or thin client or twinax workstation that most end users have on their desks? A telephone. And wouldn’t it be ironic, after all of the religious wars and arguments about how to modernize the screens of hundreds of thousands of business applications running in OS/400 shops, if the next killer app to come to the OS/400 platform was a telephone? And that is just what IBM and 3Com, a networking specialist that has transformed itself into a commercial-grade supplier of Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions for enterprises, has in mind. At

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• PHP Will Soon Be Native on the System i5

  April 3, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Decades of computing has not in any way diminished the number of different programming languages in the world, which is a bit astonishing when you stop to think about it. There is always a new type of job that comes along, and more times than not, a new programming language evolves to do that job. So it is with the PHP language, which is arguably one of the most popular languages in use out there on the Web. And very soon, as we told you last year, you will be able to get it for your System i5. And, for

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