IBM is making some more moves to try to get customers using older OS/400 and i5/OS releases and older iron to move up to more modern IBM i releases and the latest Power Systems hardware. The moves follow the extension of the marketing of i5/OS V5R4 until May 27 this year and a 25 percent licensing increase on older Power-based systems for that software–announcements that Big Blue made as the new year was getting under way.

In announcement letter 211-021, IBM did a bunch of different things. First, it has formalized expanding an IBM i license transfer scheme that

Robert Seal is convinced the cost of high availability can be reduced. And he thinks that cloud computing is just the thing that will make that happen. The costs of HA–both software and hardware related–have already been squeezed in the past several years, but even the most optimistic estimates have fewer than 10 percent of IBM i, System i, iSeries, and AS/400 shops implementing this level of business resiliency. Seal says HA is ready for a growth spurt.

Seal is the president and CEO of iSam Blue, the North American distributor for Quick-EDD, high availability software produced by Trader’s

There are nature-made disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and there are man-made disasters, such as revolutions and war. In either case, an IT department will go into disaster recovery mode to get its organization back up and running as quickly as possible. But what happens when the disaster is of IT’s own making, such as the debacle unfolding in California, where a decade-old project to install a case management system has spiraled out of control, and now carries a $2 billion price tag? In such cases, the pain goes on and on.

So California is in the news again

The ironically yclept News Corp, purveyor of Fox and fishwrapper, has launched the Daily Nothing, its news service for the iPad. Fox sells the Daily Nothing as a subscription app, but most of the feed is also available for free. The pregnant possibility of Apple‘s charming but dimwitted device becoming a game-changing outlet for intertainment will bring fresh hope to indomitable IBM i shops with crusty, trusty green screen applications. Unfortunately, the often augured mass resurgence of dumb terminals, like the reported rediscovery of Prester John‘s kingdom, never turns out to be true.

The technical limits

In addition to cutting some prices on IBM i Solution Edition end user entitlements and formalizing an i5/OS and i license-sliding scheme to make licenses more fluid across machines as is reported on elsewhere in this edition of The Four Hundred, IBM also made a few tweaks to some existing deals and some other announcements that are relevant to OS/400 and i shops.

First of all, IBM has made some minor changes to two existing deals that gives customers rebates if they are installing Power Systems for the first time or replacing other iron with Power Systems. In the

I wonder what your relationship with Richard Taylor is? This is very old news and has no value of bringing it as new. The last anyone has heard from Taylor was 2005. Why did you conveniently leave out the fact that Taylor’s fractal analysis has been debunked years ago? I have seen several paintings that are clearly not by the hand of Jackson Pollock who passed his fractal test. Are you willing to put down $100 million for those paintings? And what are we going to do with some of the known works from Jackson Pollock that did not pass

Ken Olsen, the co-founder and long-time leader of minicomputer originator Digital Equipment Corporation died last week at 84. Perhaps more than any other man, all of us in the midrange owe Olsen for our paychecks and for the innovation that his engineering mind brought into being.

I was born the week before the first true minicomputer, the PDP-8, was brought into the world. At the time, the PDP-8 was noteworthy because a base configuration cost only about $18,000 with 4 kilowatts of 12-bit core memory and a teletype for input and output. After a bunch of DECies defected in 1968

As local user groups (LUGs) in the IBM i community flicker and fade away, it brings increasing attention to the survivors. What are they doing to keep the candle lit? Offering quality education and training has always been important, but maybe never of any greater importance than it is today.

The Toronto User Group (TUG) has found that a close affiliation with a local college has worked out well and the TUG membership is taking advantage of this to a greater degree than anyone might have expected.

TUG Night School classes began in 2010. The success of those courses, judged

The 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey was just released by Enterprise Strategy Group, and its findings indicate the economy is turning around in many areas of IT, with 51 percent of respondents reporting their 2011 IT budgets will increase when compared to 2010 levels.

The survey conducted by ESG, an IT analyst and business strategy firm located Milford, Massachusetts, was based on data gathered from 611 North American and Western European senior IT professionals from midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations.

In addition to a majority of respondents stating they plan to increase

IBM i development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises has turned in another explosively growing quarter, finishing out a year that saw the company acquired, focused, and growing smartly.

In the fourth quarter of 2010 ended in December, Magic Software’s revenues shot up 72.8 percent, to just over $25 million. And if you ignore a one-time capital gain of $2 million from last year’s fourth quarter, when Magic Software sold its headquarters building, then net income from the company’s core operations more than doubled, to $3.08 million. Including the sale of the HQ building, which is what you have to do