It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP).

There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic

How important is data confidentiality to you? On a scale of one to 10, it should be the only double-digit number you can choose. The risks for those unable to control and protect their information are far greater than ever before. The same thing will be said each year into the foreseeable future. So when looking for innovative ways to protect information, IBM acted by adding a tool called authority collection to the new i 7.3 release.

Call it a tool, a utility, or a capability authority collection is now built into the latest OS. The simplest explanation is that

It is easy to say that the IBM we know today, or more precisely are trying to get to know as it undergoes its changes, is far different from the one that we were trying to understand two decades ago as it was going through another tumultuous transformation. The Big Blue from the middle 1990s was a systems company before and after that change, but it is harder to see the International Business Machines skeleton inside the new Big Blue.

But if you dig around, that core systems business is still there, even after IBM has completely reclassified its financials

The marriage of open source and IBM i reminds me of a marriage statistic that recently came to my attention: Approximately $6 billion in revenue is lost by American businesses as a result of decreased worker productivity linked to marriage hardship. Employees in a happy marriage, in contrast, tend to increase a company’s bottom line. From what I have seen of IBM i advocates in relationships with open source, happiness seems to abound.

Cross-trained RPG developers boasting open source language skills aren’t exactly common, but their numbers are increasing as IBM i shops with modernization intentions follow through on plans

All operating systems are not created equal, at least not when it comes to NUMA scalability. For a long time now, the IBM i operating system has trailed the scalability of its peers, AIX and Linux, on Power processors when it comes to spanning the large number of cores and threads that IBM forges into its Power machinery.

Back in the dawn of time, and many of you were there with me, it was a very exciting thing to even be able to have a two-processor, two-thread machine like the AS/400-D80, which made its debut in April 1991 and which