New Orleans has taken on a decidedly IBM i tint thanks to the start of COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo over the weekend. An estimated 1,100 attendees are in the Big Easy for the four-day show, which began Sunday morning with remarks by COMMON president Kevin Mort, and also featured a glimpse into the future of Power Systems, courtesy of IBM Power Systems executives Steve Sibley and Stephanie Chiras.

The spring COMMON conference is still the biggest IBM i show on earth and provides attendees a chance to beef up their skills, socialize with other IBM i professionals, check

The new release of Zend‘s PHP development language and PHP runtime will run twice as fast on Intel Xeon and IBM Power servers than previous versions, the company says. IBM i customers won’t need to do anything to take advantage of the speedup except use the new runtime, which should be available in the coming weeks.

Zend, which is now owned by Rogue Wave Software, last week officially announced Zend Server 9, the newest version of the Zend runtime for Intel platforms. Zend Server 9 is based on PHP version 7, the newest version of the language, which

From the time free form RPG was introduced with IBM i 7.1 TR 7, expectations have been high. There’s been much talk about the potential for greatness, but only scattered reports of success. Finally, free form RPG is lighting up the scoreboard. Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation (AECC) is showing the way. It’s made free form RPG the cornerstone of future development, and its endeavors led to the 2016 COMMON-IBM Power Systems Innovation Award.

The award was presented Sunday at COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Exposition, which just got underway in New Orleans, Louisiana.

AECC is based in Little Rock. It

For a company that is so eager to prove the value of the Power processors at the heart of its Power Systems machines, IBM has sure taken its time getting Power8-based systems onto its SoftLayer public cloud. IBM talked about adding Power iron to SoftLayer’s datacenters in the wake of the acquisition of the hoster and cloud provider back in June 2013, and it had bold plans to double the footprint of that cloud and to make Power iron a peer to Xeon-based systems.

These promised machines are now available, and they are, in an indirect way, a significant thing

AURA Equipements CTO Sylvain Rubele says he knows of 4,000 IBM i shops that are integrating IBM i native applications within Web or desktop applications that run on Windows, Linux, and Unix operating systems. How does he know this? Because, by his count, they are AURA customers. Eighty percent of those reside in French-speaking European countries. He wouldn’t mind if that number was smaller, if the number of IBM midrange customers in the United States was larger.

With the increasing emphasis on application and database modernization, Rubele expects to do better in that market. But if wishes were fishes, we’d