• UPDATED: Content Manager OnDemand for i Lives On!

  December 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Editor’s note: This story, which was originally published under the headline “Content Manager OnDemand For i Withdrawn In 2016,” has been updated. Content Manager OnDemand for i continues to be developed and supported by IBM. “It is alive and well,” Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, told IT Jungle on December 3. Apparently, the IBM withdrawal announcement should only have been about withdrawing CMOD for Multiplatforms version 8.5, but for some reason the entire CMOD for i product was also listed as being sent out

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• Aiming High, And Low, With Power Chips

  December 1, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, ahead of the SuperComputing 2014 conference in New Orleans, IBM announced that the U.S. Department of Energy had chosen Big Blue and hardware partner Nvidia to build two massive parallel supercomputers, nick-named Sierra and Summit. This deal, along with IBM selling off its System x server business to Lenovo Group and its chip manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries, gives IBM a tighter focus on its Power Systems line, and importantly, gives IBM the resources to focus on Power chip development and systems design. I am a firm believer in the trickle-down theory of technology adoption, but not

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• IBM i Modernization Relies On Solving Mysteries

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  By boldly stepping into an IT modernization planning strategy, Royal Caribbean, one of the world’s largest cruise lines, is altering its 20-year-old applications and database development processes in preparation for the next 20 years of business goals. It is currently in the second phase of a program designed to migrate selected, monolithic, RPG applications to Java-based Web services that will continue to run on IBM Power servers and the IBM i operating system. The current project focus is a strategic modernization of the company’s custom-designed reservation system that includes accounting, inventory, revenue management, and sales. The objectives include the creation

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• IBM i Shops Offloading Infrastructure

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers are gaining ground in the IBM midrange community as more organizations explore the IT strategic plan of outsourcing servers, networking, storage, and data center space. Connectria Hosting, a company with more than 15 years of managed services experience for IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 customers, is noticing the change. It’s not dependent on existing customers. New customers are coming to the cloud. “Our IBM i business is up 35 percent over last year,” says Connectria CEO Rich Waidmann. On a percentage basis, that’s on par with the 40 percent-plus increase Amazon Web Services

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• As I See It: Three Blind Vice

  December 1, 2014 Victor Rozek

  “Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.” So said Edward Abbey, and although he wasn’t talking about Silicon Valley, the observation is no less true for that. As the technology sector increases its global dominance, the corruptive application of power is reflective of a changing ethic in the tech community. An ethic marred by success. Leveraging the Disabled I’ll bet you didn’t know that net neutrality hurts disabled people. Me neither. But, hey, if Verizon says so, it must be true. Right? Of what possible use would equal access be to a disabled person? If you’re a disabled American

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Two Calves And Calves Not

  December 1, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  In Semitic mythology, Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai embraced an invisible God rather than one represented by a golden statue of a calf. From that pivotal moment, the followers of Moses and eventually the other people of the book, Christians and Muslims, vested their faith in software rather than hardware. A couple dozen centuries later, the resultant monotheistic civilization controls the bulk of the word’s wealth and power. This year, one of that civilization’s great industrial institutions, IBM, shifted the burden of its strategic trust from physical hardware to intangible software and cloud computing. For many

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• Reader Feedback On Microsoft Loves Linux

  December 1, 2014 Hey, Dan

  As you pointed out in your story, in mid-November Microsoft announced that it’s open sourcing its full server-side .NET stack, which thereby, at least in theory, expands the .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X (which is really Unix) platforms. Here are my six take-aways from that announcement: No surprise. The November 12 announcement wasn’t a surprise as much as it was a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s open source software (OSS) strategy over the last couple of years. Microsoft open sourced some .NET components (including ASP.NET MVC and its Web API) a couple of years ago. This was a

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• IBM i Total Cost Of Ownership Report Updated

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  ITG is IBM‘s go-to research and analysis firm when it comes to studies comparing IBM i to its competition. These studies zero in on total cost of ownership build a favorable case for IBM’s midrange systems based on costs related to hardware purchase and maintenance; licenses and support for operating systems, databases, and other systems software, systems management and database administration costs; and energy costs. During its most recent comparison, which is dated September 2014, ITG lined up IBM Power S814 and S824 servers against two- and four-socket X86 servers powered by Intel E5 and E7 processors. One of

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• RPG Certification And College Curriculum Revision In The Works

  December 1, 2014 Dan Burger

  COMMON is beginning work on a new RPG certification for college graduates that IBM i shops can use as a yardstick for entry-level talent. The RPG Associate certification is expected to be ready by the next COMMON Annual Meeting (April 26-29 in Anaheim, California). COMMON Certification Steering Committee chairman Randy Dufault explained that the certification will be developed in conjunction with a revised RPG curriculum for colleges participating in the IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative program. The existing RPG curriculum is badly in need of replacement. The most prominent schools teaching RPG are not using the outdated curriculum, which does

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• IBM Adds Enterprise Power8 Systems To Trade-In Deal

  December 1, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of the launch and now the delivery of the initial models in the Power8-based Power E870 and E880 machines, IBM is adding the high-end boxes to a long-running trade-in deal. The Power Systems Trade-In Program was last modified back in June, when the scale-out variants of the Power8 systems, which have one or two sockets, were added as target machines in the deal, offering customers between $500 and $2,000 if they got rid of ancient AS/400, iSeries, System i machines or any number of other Unix and proprietary machines. The deal also covers customers who want to

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