Reporter’s Notebook: COMMON Spring 2017
May 10, 2017 Alex Woodie
Harry Potter sightings remain at an abnormally high level here at the COMMON conference, which is taking place in the heart of Universal Orlando. The young wizard appears to be everywhere – in sessions, by the pool, at the Expo, buying raffle tickets. But it’s left some wondering: Can he program in ILE?
The COMMON conference wraps up today after a four-day run here at the brand-spanking-new Lowes Sapphire Falls Resort. The site has mostly lived up to the expectations of COMMON’s management, who booked the event before the massive construction project was even finished. You just can’t fake that new hotel smell….
Attendance has been a matter of some confusion. A rumor that 1,500 people attended the year’s biggest IBM i show was quickly quashed by COMMON management. The actual number came in just shy of 1,000 souls, which is on par with last year’s show in New Orleans…
The Chicago-based organization is already gearing up for the next annual COMMON shindig in San Antonio in May 2018. Meanwhile, the fall COMMON tent will roll through St. Louis in October 2017. The World Champion Cubbies will be in town to play the hometown Cards just before the conference, COMMON president Jeff Carey (who we have on good authority is actually not Pete Massiello) informs us…
COMMON management is understandably attracted to tourist destinations like Orlando, New Orleans, and St. Antonio because it ostensibly helps to boost attendance by letting members combine work and a family vacation in one fell swoop. However, vendors aren’t necessarily thrilled when attendees avoid the Expo to “go be tourists,” as one vendor frustrated by low traffic numbers told IT Jungle…
COMMON is ramping up a new training program. Next month the organization will debut two new bootcamps that offer IBM i professionals a chance to bone up on essential skills. Details to follow…
The show delivered some (but not much) IBM i product news. That includes the new Web Management Console from IBM that insists will absolutely, positively include management capabilities at some future date…
Potter and his merry band of wizards from the Hogwarts academy may have been ubiquitous, but it was IBM Watson who stole the show. IBM is obviously eager to connect its flagship product for Cognitive with its most popular business computing Platform (that’s IBM i, you should know). IBM executives Stephanie Chiras and Steve Sibley featured Watson heavily in their opening keynote Sunday morning…
But Big Blue’s Watson excitement left some COMMON-goers wondering what practical use they would actually have for deep learning and artificial intelligence back at home. These jack-of-all-trades are being asked to do more and more with less and less every year. Perhaps fixing security, shoring up disaster recovery, or doing something about those unsightly green screens should take precedence over “doing Cognitive,” which seems to many like the latest technology fad…
The COMMON Expo has resembled Christmas Day for this newsletter in years past, providing IBM i news fodder that lasts long into the dry summer months. This year, not so much. While there were many updates to existing products, there was a decided lack of brand new products…
IBM i juggernaut HelpSystems previewed one of the few (if not the only) net-new products at the show. Tom Huntington, the vice president of technical services (and an IBM Champion), showed IT Jungle Access Authenticator, a forthcoming product that will deliver multi-factor authentication, which you will remember is soon to be a PCI requirement…
Modernization was a major topic at this year’s show, as it has been in years past. Among the vendors formally announcing updates to their IBM i modernization plays were Fresche Solutions, Profound Logic, and CNX Corp. Other vendors showing off their wares in the Modernization Challenge were LANSA, Rocket Software, and Surround Technologies. Stay tuned to The Four Hundred for more coverage of product updates…
High availability continues to be a hot topic in the midrange, along with security. The COMMON Expo floor was full of HA software vendors, including Vision Solutions, Maxava, BCS Group (which sells Trader’s Quick-EDD line in the United States), HelpSystems, and Shield Advanced Solutions. Oh, and we can’t forget IBM, which is growing its PowerHA product at a 5 percent quarterly clip. Sorting out all the various HA options is not easy, but it’s a topic that the IT Jungle will fearlessly (or perhaps foolishly) dive into…
One of the great things about COMMON is the chance to see old friends, and even some young ones. (Apologies for that decidedly ageist comment, but we’re all getting older, except for Liam Allan, who is actually getting younger)…
It’s been years (decades?) since we’ve heard anything from Pentasafe, the AS/400 security software company from Houston, Texas. They had a collection of very well-respected security and auditing tools before NetIQ locked them in the basement and threw away the key (NetIQ is now owned by Micro Focus, which owns several IBM i properties but was not at the show, apparently because they’re too busy absorbing Hewlett-Packard‘s software division)…
The good news is Pentasafe’s tools are now resurfacing. Longtime Pentasafers Tony Perera and Pauline Ayala escaped the doghouse and co-founded Trinity Guard, which has a deal with NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus to resell existing Pentasafe products, namely the IBM i auditing tool, now called TGAudit. New products are also in the works. Stay tuned to IT Jungle to hear the full plans…
The COMMON Expo was full of managed service providers (MSPs), reflecting the upward trend toward cloud computing. Among the MSPs getting attention was a local Florida firm called Champion Solutions Group. The Boca Raton company expanded into the IBM i hosting business in July 2016 with the acquisition of Midrange Support & Service, Inc. (MSSi), a Delray Beach, Florida-based business partner with a 20-year history in the midrange. Champion has an upcoming webinar with the IBM i performance experts at Midrange Performance Group (who was also at the show) to explore the performance analysis engagements that are being offered free of charge via IBM. You just can’t beat free — especially when it’s from IBM…
Another IBM i MSP that you’ll be hearing about in the future is APSU.com. The UK-based company expanded into the US last September and now runs more than a 1,000 IBM i LPARs from its data center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company has a contract with IBM’s resiliency group to provide DR and HA services to more than 150 IBM i shops. According to company executives, the company actually answers the phone as IBM…
Software vendors certainly dominate the COMMON Expo floor, although there’s a smattering of hardware sellers, too. One of the only pure-play services businesses at COMMON is Silveredge Consulting. The Chicago company has been a regular at COMMON events for decades, and it boasts of being the biggest consulting company in the country that has a singular focus on the IBM i platform. The company has seen its share of IBM i successes, not to mention migration failures. Stay tuned to IT Jungle for a full profile of this unique firm…
The final item in this reporter’s notebook concerns one of the many meetings that took place over the past four days. During the ISV Advisory Council meeting, IBM shared with independent software vendors a 15-year roadmap for the IBM i platform (yes, you read that right: fifteen years). If computer years are like dog years, that’s the human equivalent of a 105-year plan. No word yet on how many times the platform’s name will change over that span…
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What do you mean by, “Can he program in ILE?” — no one can program in ILE, because ILE is not a programming language. WTF is wrong with you?