The IBM i world descended upon the Happiest Place on Earth last week for the COMMON 2012 User Conference and Expo. Aside from a major malfunction in Disneyland’s IT system that saw the point of sale system go down across the entire property for multiple days, the show went off without a hitch. An estimated 700 paying attendees found themselves comfortably ensconced in IBM i education, 75 software vendors were content with attendees’ interest in their wares, and IBM eagerly showed off the awesomeness of its new PureSystems gear.

The four-day IBM i extravaganza kicked off with the opening session

A group of RPG heavyweights, including IBM, have come together in support of the first standard pertaining to RPG Open Access. But to understand RPG Open Access, start with the importance of RPG interfacing with other technologies. That’s not all that common. RPG has a reputation for its proprietary chains. Mistakenly this stops with the topic of green screens and graphical user interfaces. In reality, it is about the separation of the user interface from the business logic.

This newly created standard, which was announced May 8, attempts to get below the surface. It is targeted at extending the

Back in March, when IBM was hot to sell some of its fairly large Power 770 servers to close out a good first quarter, the company whipped out a quick rebate scheme for the processing capacity on the machines that I dubbed March Madness. It is not clear how effective this deal was, but it has come and gone and now IBM has a similar rebate to push some more Power 770 iron here in the second quarter.

The original March Madness deal in announcement letter 312-038 gave the same discounts on two generations of Power 770 machines with

Herb Grosch was the second scientist ever hired by IBM. And he was a good hire. His resume resembled an achievement highlight reel. It included doing calculations for the Manhattan Project, and helping develop the Whirlwind computer at MIT–the first system that actually operated in real time and used video displays for output. He was also the first to formalize the relationship between cost and performance in what has become known as Grosch’s Law: “economy is as the square root of the speed.”

But perhaps his most fascinating insight dates back to the 1950s–more than a half-century ago–when he

Two things were made abundantly clear to me as I walked around the COMMON conference and expo last week, attending sessions and talking with people and listening to their complaints. The first is that just about everyone, even die-hard techies, are annoyed with the AIX-derived Virtual I/O Server that is used to virtualize disk and network drivers on Power Systems. The second thing was that we all better get used to it, because VIOS is here to stay.

If you don’t want to cope with setting up VIOS on an IBM i or hybrid IBM i-AIX box with maybe a

This message continues to be delivered to the wrong audience. Most companies that use IBM i in their infrastructure are not in the business of software development. They build apps that are based on the database of third-party solutions or extend apps they have purchased from third-party vendors–such as JDE, Infinium, Lawson, PKMS, PRMS, PRISM, and so forth. Some of these have been screen scraped, but they still utilize the same old RPG III code under the covers, sometimes converted to RPG IV.

Software companies need to build modern apps for IBM i. I don’t see that happening. It doesn’t

Weakening macroeconomic conditions in Europe and Asia made for a rougher than usual first quarter for Arrow Electronics, one of the two big master resellers in the world for systems and electronic components. However, the systems business was up and the components business was down, which is a better sign than you might otherwise think.

During the first quarter ended in March, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Systems group posted sales of $1.54 billion, up 15.2 percent compared to the year ago period and posted an operating income of $55.5 million, up 42 percent. But the Arrow components biz shrank by

Master reseller Avnet had a somewhat different quarter from rival Arrow Electronics in its most recent quarter, its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended in March. Both its components and systems groups took a hit.

In the quarter, Avnet’s Technology Solutions group, which buys systems, storage, software, and services from IT vendors and distributes them through channel partners worldwide, had an 8.1 percent revenue decline, to $2.52 billion. Sales in the Americas region for Technology Solutions fell 9.1 percent to $1.37 billion, and in EMEA they dropped 12.1 percent to $744.8 million; in Asia, sales were up 4 percent to $409.3

Two IBM i software vendors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area–with the IBM i homestead in Rochester just down the road–have user conferences planned for mid-September. You couldn’t pick a better time, weather-wise, to explore the upper Midwest, so why not pick up some technical knowledge at the same time?

Help/Systems, an automation software vendor, will set up in downtown Minneapolis September 17 to 20. RJS Software, the document management and business process company, will host its event at the company headquarters in Burnsville September 18 through 20.

The agenda for Help/Systems will include topics on IBM i operations,

For once, growing clouds aren’t a sign of gloomy days ahead. At least not for Connectria Hosting, which currently provides cloud computing, managed hosting, and custom hosting solutions to more than 1,000 customers in more than 30 countries worldwide.

IT Jungle recently reported on Connectria’s plans to host public and private IBM i clouds. Now comes news of the addition of a fourth data center at Connectria to accommodate growing demand.

The new data center will be located in a CyrusOne facility in Lewisville, Texas. The data center is a Tier 4 designated facility, which is the highest