• IBM Keeps Low Profile While Reaction To ‘Resource Action’ Boils

  April 4, 2016 Dan Burger

  The boiling pot that is IBM‘s workforce reduction plan continues to spill over and let off steam. After a report was released last month from the financial analyst firm Bernstein estimated 14,000 IBM workers would be losing their jobs, the reaction was explosive. Last week, on the Watching IBM website, survey results from a fraction of IBM workers added some context to what’s happening. “The survey results show what people have been saying for quite a few years. That there is age discrimination going on in the job cuts and the IBM employee evaluation system is seriously flawed. It

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• The Value Of Things That Don’t Change–And Those That Must

  March 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The wide expectation is that IBM will announce the next iteration of the IBM i operating system, up until now known as iNext and now thought to be IBM i 7.3, at its TechU conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12. That is a week ahead of when COMMON is hosting a webinar with IBM i chief architect Steve Will to talk about new features in the platform, so the cat is out of the bag. The word we hear on the street is that there will be significant enhancements to the database and to the security systems of the

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• A Peek At Upcoming Open Source Enhancements In IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Over the past 15 years, the open source community has driven a massive amount of innovation in IT. It has gotten to the point where IBM and Microsoft–two bastions of proprietary development–are now champions of open source. The open source wave is not quite as strong on the IBM i platform, but it appears that wave will gain momentum with the upcoming new release of the OS. It’s hard to quantify the value created through open source development of software. Last year, the Linux Foundation released a white paper that found the total value of the development of the

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• Observing i: An IBM Power Systems Champion Perspective

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Pete Massiello is an IBM i advocate, a past president of COMMON the world’s largest IBM i user group, and owner and CEO of a consultancy that specializes in system upgrades, performance tuning, and hosted services. The IBM midrange is his bread and butter. Massiello recently wrote a report he calls IBM i State of the Union, a perspective on the landscape based on what he has seen and what he expects to see. If Massiello was limited to five words to describe his report, they would be: Do not dismiss this platform. He acknowledges that companies are migrating

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Her Master’s Voice

  March 28, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Someday there may be a portrait of Siri, the invisible aide of Apple’s users; an image of Google’s nameless virtual servant; an illustration of Amazon Echo’s helpful Alexa; or a graphic depicting Cortana, Microsoft’s attentive assistant. By contrast, IBM’s Watson, which talked to Bob Dylan, has an icon: a Haringesque homosexual planet. None of these characters has achieved the immortality of Nipper the terrier, its attention drawn before 1900 by the recorded voice of its master. A four-ton statue of the duped pooch still adorns the Arnoff Building in Albany, New York. His

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• Healthcare Tech Trends Shape Industry And IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  The future of IBM i won’t be found in any crystal balls. And references to omens always seem so ominous, mostly because they are connected to end of the world scenarios. Predictions, in my opinion, have a greater chance of coming true when based on real world observations. What’s happening in the IBM midrange is the best indicator, but what’s happening includes all kinds of things–some good and some bad. Here’s an example. MEDHOST provides enterprise and departmental healthcare-related software to more than 1,000 hospitals. Along with traditional licensed software, it offers software as a service (SaaS), managed services for

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• Verizon Outlines Disturbing AS/400 Breach At Water District

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Cyber intruders who gained access to an AS/400 at a water district were able to manipulate the flow of chemicals into the public water supply, Verizon says in its latest Data Breach Digest. While customers served by the water district were not harmed, the episode shows the potential consequences of failure to properly secure critical systems in an increasingly connected world. Verizon dedicated five pages to laying out the disturbing breach of a water district that it referred to as Kemuri Water Company (KWC), which is not a real name. The water district had first contacted Verizon’s RISK Team to

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• No Regrets For JDE Shop Following Move To Third-Party Support

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Like most technology executives, Dean Foods CIO Brian Murphy has to balance his company’s wants and needs. Its JD Edwards ERP systems must be maintained, but at the same time, employees desire things that make their lives easier, such as a new email system. Murphy found a way to fit both items into his budget after shifting the JD Edwards maintenance and technical support duties from Oracle to Rimini Street. Dean Foods is a longtime user of the IBM midrange server that’s gone by various names over its nearly four-decade run. The Dallas, Texas-based company is one of the

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• Pathfinder Probes For Answers To IBM i Questions

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The best programmers, by their very nature, are lazy. Why write or buy something new when the function already exists? One of the most popular commercial tools that helps IBM i developers continue to be lazy is Pathfinder, a cross-reference and documentation utility developed by Hawkeye Information Systems. Now with support for RDi and free-form RPG, Pathfinder will help free a new class of developers from programming drudgery. At its root, Pathfinder is a programming tool. The software was first developed to work with the IBM System/3 back in 1976, and has been brought forward to the IBM i

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• Maxava Introduces Subscription-Based, Multi-Platform Systems Monitoring

  March 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  When does system monitoring become a big enough concern to an IBM i shop that specialized software would be considered? Often it’s when one person has the responsibility for monitoring multiple systems. It doesn’t really matter if the systems run on the same OS or if multiple platforms are involved. Multiple systems ratchet up the complexity. To take on the task, Maxava has stepped up its product development. Available now is Maxava Monitor Mi8, a cloud-based, subscription-priced, system-monitoring software for IBM i. And within two to three months, it will add the capability to monitor Windows and Linux systems as

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