Well, IBM i shops hankering for some more processing oomph, Big Blue has a very big jump in performance coming your way with the future Power8 processors. Just after The Four Hundred went on vacation at the end of August, the techies who designed the Power8 chip took the podium at the Hot Chips conference, hosted by the IEEE every summer for the past 25 years at Stanford University, and revealed the major aspects of the design of the successor to the current Power7 and Power7+ processors.

As I was watching the presentation by Jeff Stuecheli, chief nest architect for

Databorough, the UK-based developer of application and database analysis and migration tools for IBM i, has been acquired by Fresche Legacy, a Canadian company devoted to helping customers modernize or migrate their legacy applications. The resulting company seeks to create a “powerhouse” in the field of IBM i application modernization.

Fresche Legacy was formed in March 2012 when Speedware bought a collection RPG migration tools from the German company Sykora and took the fresh new name. Today, the Montreal, Quebec, company has hundreds of modernization, migration, and consulting jobs under its belt, including three IBM i engagements that

Making the choice to deliver its human resources and payroll application in the software as a service (SaaS) package was a gamble for NorthgateArinso (NGA), but the idea has fit the bill for thousands of companies that are attracted by the software features and the SaaS subscription-based replacement for software licensing. Most of these companies have no idea the software runs on the IBM Power7 hardware and the IBM i platform, but it has worked out well for NGA.

Renting rather than buying mission-critical applications is still pretty rare in the IBM midrange community, but it is not the IBM

I’m about a week away from heading up to Banff and Jasper for a little mountain madness and, as departure time draws near, my motivation to work is draining faster than sinuses under a pollen attack. Like God, motivation is a universal concept, individually applied. With the exception of survival, few, if any, motivators can guarantee to consistently move the productivity needle. And those that do, won’t necessarily do so for long. For people who have already achieved a comfortable baseline and don’t aspire to piggish levels of consumption, motivation is like the tide–it comes and goes.

Mine was waning

In his keynote address at the Avnet and IBM Executive Directions meeting last month, Steve Mills told a roomful of folks in the sales channel that their greatest opportunities for future success would be in software and services. That’s not a new tune the general manager in charge of the converged Software and Systems Group was singing, but in this business setting where hardware sales is the sentimental favorite, Mills would like to make sure the choir is singing his song.

Mills carefully built a bridge that connected the old reseller sales approach that led with hardware sales by saying

With so many transitions going on in the server racket these days, it is hard to say if the ups and downs of revenues for each quarter are a leading indicator for the overall IT market anymore. But a lot of people believe server sales do portend future budgets in data centers, and so when the numbers head south, as they did again in the June quarter according to IDC, people take notice.

It is best to keep perspective. There is a lot going on in Server Land, to say the least. And the pace of change is not

Tennis fans might think of clouds as being a bad omen. Rain delays can put a quick stop to the action on the court. But clouds mean something different to those of us in computing circles, and fans of this year’s U.S. Open Championships might be surprised to learn that clouds actually had a big hand in creating a better tennis experience.

The USTA has been partnering with IBM for more than 20 years, and in that time the technology has changed a lot. Today’s tech savvy fan, whether part of the 700,000 crowded into the USTA National Tennis Center

RPG & DB2 Summit Registrations Rise, Signals Progress In IBM i Shops

The skills gap for IBM midrange professionals may be narrowing. At least there’s an indication that may be true. Tech conferences in general have reported attendance as mostly flat over the past several years and more are shriveling than blossoming. But at the same time, companies are scrambling to solve business issues and looking to IT for the answers. Solutions, in many cases, require new skills. In-house IT investment can’t be overlooked.

The most promising indicator of an upswing in skills comes from System i Developer, the

For many years, IT Jungle operated a bookstore on Yahoo and then eBay that featured technical manuals by several of our authors. We shut that bookstore down at the end of last year because it was more grief than it was worth–others have long since cornered the market in IBM i publishing–but you can still get many of the titles we used to carry elsewhere.

Specifically, if you are looking for the Pocket Guides and other programming manuals and tutorials from author Brian Kelly, he has started his own virtual bookstore at BookHawkers. His inventory of IBM i-related titles is

IBM‘s Flex System modular machines were without a doubt a reaction to the success in the data center of the Unified Computing System converged platforms from Cisco Systems. But how do the two machines stack up against each other?

According to a recent report (PDF) from Clabby Analytics that is published on the IBM Flex Systems website, there are some significant advantages with the Flex System iron from Big Blue. One of them is that the chassis allows for storage arrays to be embedded into the chassis and accessed locally instead of using external storage area networks as