• Responsive Design, Node.js Top BCD App Dev Enhancements

  May 18, 2016 Dan Burger

  It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of application development to any organization. It’s a simple tool, but it needs to be the right tool. When done right, it’s crucial to business efficiency. Getting it right and keeping it simple is the target, yet somehow the aim differs wildly from the result. Shoot fast but shoot straight. Don’t just hit the target. Hit the bull’s eye. BCD Software is one of several application development vendors in the IBM midrange market that can help application developers shoot fast and straight. The company has a new release of its desktop and mobile

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• Jazzing Up IBM i In COMMON’s Quarter

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie and Dan Burger

  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

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• Zend Touts 2X Speedup With PHP 7 And New Runtime

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  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

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• Free Form RPG Scores IBM i Innovation Award

  May 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  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

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• IBM Finally Gets Power8 Machines On SoftLayer Cloud

  May 16, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• AURA Hopes U.S. Modernization Crowd Has Silver Lining

  May 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  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

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• See The IBM i Access You Never Heard Of

  May 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i development team rolled out Access Client Solutions (ACS) almost three years ago. It remains a work in progress. And that’s a good thing. The IT graveyard is filled with products that were unable to show progress. Before there was ACS, there was Access for Windows. It can still be found in a great many IBM midrange shops, despite having one foot in the grave and no sign of a pulse when it comes to progress. The pace of progress established with ACS is not blindingly fast, but it’s steady and it’s an indicator of where and how

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• Temporal Table Trouble?

  May 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  One of the exciting new features in IBM i 7.3 is the addition of temporal queries in the integrated DB2 for i database. The so-called “time travel” query capability will let users ask how a particular piece of data looked at some time in the past, using good old SQL. While this new capability is included with the standard version of the database, a key feature that makes temporal useful costs extra. The temporal query functionality was one of the big new features in IBM i 7.3 and brings the DB2 for i database up to par with the temporal

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• IBM Melds FlashSystem With XIV To Scale Enterprise Flash

  May 9, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past few weeks, we have been analyzing the new flash modules and controllers that IBM has made available for plugging into Power Systems machines and significantly boosting the performance of the storage arrays under the skins of the servers. This week, we will take a look at the new FlashSystem all-flash arrays from Big Blue, which are aimed at much larger workloads that cannot fit within the system. The two new FlashSystems that IBM announced concurrent with the internal flash storage back in April are much heftier machines than it has been peddling to date, and the more

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• BCD, Midrange Dynamics Partner On IBM i Modernization

  May 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  When you think of modernizing applications to increase their efficiency and extend the original investment in the business logic that is so important to your organization, it should be apparent that the process requires some controls and management. It’s a bit like having a map and compass when going into the wilderness. That’s why we’re seeing partnerships form between the application development vendors and the change management vendors. The most recent hook-up is a partnership between BCD Software and Midrange Dynamics. BCD has created several methods for IBM midrange shops to modify, install, and distribute application changes. For the

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