Fresche Legacy is making a name for itself in the IBM midrange business. Today the company announced it is acquiring looksoftware, one of several successful third-party application development tool vendors. The transaction creates a unique modernization-focused company. One year ago, Fresche Legacy purchased Databorough, a company with strong database technology. What’s taking shape is a company with an expanded modernization strategy designed to help companies solve modernization puzzles.

The marriage of application modernization and database modernization is something new for the IBM i software community, where application modernization has gained a foothold while database modernization struggled for attention.

Two software powerhouses with extensive software portfolios aimed at proprietary IBM systems are coming together with Micro Focus shelling out $1.2 billion and assuming a bunch of debt to acquire Attachmate. The combination will create a software giant with just under $1.4 billion in sales and 34,000 customers between the two of them.

Micro Focus, which is perhaps best known for its COBOL application development tools, is oddly enough the smaller of the two companies, so it might seem unusual for Micro Focus to be doing the buying. But it was always assumed that the private equity owners who

American-style capitalism is a rough-and-tumble sport where new markets and businesses are seemingly created out of thin air, and disappear just as easily. The IBM‘s midrange marketplace, as a whole, has been remarkably resilient to change. But the list of vendors that have gone out of business or been acquired is long and getting longer every year, and today we’re likely down to fewer than 1,000 vendors.

There usually isn’t a lot of fanfare when a company goes out of business. No press releases are issued after the money has run out, and CEOs aren’t eager to get on

“What’s next?” It’s a question best left to deities and fortunetellers because our current pace of change tends to pour havoc on the prediction business. These days stability, to the degree it exists at all, is of the high-wire variety, always vulnerable to the next gust of wind. Even the near future can be elusive since drastic changes often occur in modest timeframes. Someone observing the American scene in this century, for example, might well be surprised to find how quickly social media came to dominate the collective consciousness. Or, for that matter, that Janay Palmer actually married Ray Rice.

COBOL and RPG are brothers of different mothers. They share many characteristics, not all of them bad. Both languages have powered enterprise-grade applications for a long time, relying on strength in their early years and stamina as time marched on. Both are capable of handling massive workloads, despite being classified as garage sale relics by promoters of lighter weight systems. And modernization strategies and academic initiatives have been designed to steer companies with COBOL and RPG dependencies into the future.

COBOL workloads on IBM midrange systems are not abundant. But they are out there. Ed Airey, product marketing manager for

The answer to the “i conundrum” comes from basic marketing rather than technology!

For years, IBM followed a “generic server” strategy that pushed the IBM brand rather than the attributes of any one processor family. That might have been a good strategy for commodity servers, like the xSeries, but was death for highly differentiated computing platforms like the iSeries . . . that the public was not educated to understand the value proposition. The Linux push is, unfortunately, a continuation of that failed strategy!

Now that IBM has exited the commodity computing business, it is time to reverse its marketing

Gaining a favorable place on Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant is as good a reason as any to bake a cake and have a party.

IBM‘s Worklight application development portfolio an amalgamation of developer tools for creating, deploying, managing, and securing mobile applications was recently judged worthy of Magic Quadrant “Leader” status after an assessment with other selected tools.

Worklight is the mobile application development platform component of IBM’s MobileFirst enterprise mobility program. The Worklight platform includes analytics, testing, integration, security and management. IBM built Worklight to create hybrid apps, but it’s also a capable tool for building Web apps

Well, the IT industry just got a whole lot more boring, or maybe not. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of software giant and now systems player Oracle, turned 70 recently and has decided that he no longer wants to be CEO of the company. The news that he is stepping down as CEO to assume the role of executive chairman and chief technology officer comes just as Oracle has come up a little bit short in its latest financial results and as the company is preparing for its annual OpenWorld shindig, which will bring over 60,000 people to San Francisco.

When IBM talks about its cognitive computing brainchild Watson, words like “the future of computing” tumble out of press releases like peanuts from a box of Cracker Jacks. But don’t blame Watson if he comes to the party wearing a hyperbole suit. He’s not just another ordinary language-based cognitive robot. He’s the face of business computing. And he has a last name now: Analytics.

Watson Analytics took a bow looking like a billion dollars, which coincidentally is the amount of money IBM claims is invested in the Watson platform. Since 2011, when young Watson was a mere computer system packed

In general terms, we know the IBM i community pretty well. It’s a little frustrating, however, that so many of the specifics that are lacking. Anecdotal stories abound. Generalities are applied with impunity. IBM, even with big data and analytics as cornerstones of its modernization marketing messages, claims it knows almost nothing about its IBM i customers when it comes to hardware and software implementations. Meaningful data is either not being collected or not being shared if it is collected.

It’s easier to believe the second of those options as opposed to the first.

Therefore, I’m in favor of