“You’re only as old as your apps feel.” I can’t get that thought out of my head. Thank you, Trevor Perry. Of all the things that were said Friday by Preacher Perry and the other ordained evangelists at the iBelieve revival meeting, those few words summed it up best for me. If the IBM i is going to escape eternal damnation in some IT closet in Hades, application developers are going to be responsible for saving its soul. Old applications, dependent on and limited by the 5250 data stream and green type on a black background must go.

I can

You can find a million places that offer you cloudy instances of Windows or Linux operating systems on X86 servers running out there on the Internet, but finding similarly cloudy slices of Power-based machinery sporting the OS/400 or IBM i operating systems can be a challenge. Especially if you don’t want to make long-term commitments and only want to buy a relatively small slice of a machine. But this week at the COMMON midrange trade show, Abacus Solutions is throwing its data center in the ring with its i in the Cloud offering.

Yeah, it would be better if they

Will the “new” Infor go public, or will it not? There are indications both ways. The location of its new headquarters, which is currently under construction a few blocks from Wall Street, sure seems to say yes. But a recent equity investment by Summit Partners casts some doubt on an initial public offering by Infor.

Infor was well on its way to an IPO of stock several years ago, former CEO Jim Schaper confirmed in press interviews. However, the economy imploded in late 2007, causing companies of all stripes to hunker down to weather the downturn in the hopes of

In late April, Google started selling the Galaxy Nexus GSM mobile phone from its Play Store, the website that dispenses Android applications. The Nexus is a developers’ phone. When it first became officially available in the United States last November in a CDMA variation sold exclusively through Verizon it was aimed at app developers who wanted an Android 4 platform. But then Google realized that it had overlooked another market, and a very important one at that: web creators. Now Google and its manufacturing partner Samsung are scrambling to educate site builders about the promise of yakju and takju on

Tossing out enterprise grade software–even if it is inadequate or too damn expensive–is never a decision to be taken lightly. Good decision making depends on good information gathering and solid planning. In IBM i shops where application development has been a vital function for many years, change management software has been essential to the creation of quality industrial-strength code. But like any other software, software change management tools are not always a good fit or automatically conducive to a pleasant vendor/customer relationship.

A term you don’t hear a lot about outside of personal conversations is company lockdown or sometimes called

In AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud, you wrote:

I really do wish IBM would realize that IBM i is already a platform cloud of sorts, just waiting for it to be deployed on its SmartCloud so customers can get access to it and use it on a pay-per-use basis. If not, maybe we can get Amazon to roll in a few thousand Power System nodes and make use of DB2 Multisystem and other features to have Amazon build a truly scalable DB2 for i database service and build EC2-like images that work as RPG and COBOL compute engines

There are more executive changes at IBM and some familiar faces in the IBM i community have been promoted to new positions within Big Blue.

When IBM launched the new X86-priced PowerLinux systems two weeks ago, I didn’t see it at first, but way at the bottom of the press release there’s a quote from Colin Parris, who is referred to as general manager of Power Systems at IBM.

Tom Rosamilia, who ran the System z mainframe business for a stint, took over the combined Power Systems and System z business back in August 2010, appointing Parris the

Infinite Corporation, a company that specializes in migrating OS/400 and IBM i applications to Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms, has targeted IBM i ISVs with a migration plan that the company says has proved to be successful in Argentina.

The migration plan provides the tools to move RPG or COBOL applications written for the AS/400 or System/36 environment to Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux (its RHEL clone) and Solaris (its Unix), and IBM AIX. Infinite’s CEO Bruce Acacio says approximately 60 ISVs in Argentina have gone through the migration process and that success led

Software giant Oracle, which is seeking a retrial of the lawsuit against defunct third-party ERP maintainer TomorrowNow and its parent, rival SAP, told the U.S. District Court that is hearing the retrial that it will seek $776.7 million in damages against SAP.

Considering how puny the TomorrowNow business actually was, this is still a very large amount of money to ask for damages. But it is far less than the $1.3 billion that a jury awarded Oracle in the first trial against TomorrowNow and SAP, even if it is a lot more than the $272 million that U.S.

Just because the IBM i has been around awhile doesn’t mean there aren’t new operators coming to the platform in need of education on how to better utilize its power. And it’s probably safe to assume there are even a few experienced operators out there who could use a brush-up on the basics.

In today’s workplace, where budgets are tight and headcounts are small, employees often have to dive in and learn on the job. So when time and money can be made available for training, companies want to know their employees are coming back with skills that can be