• IBM Builds Infrastructure Resource Site

  November 10, 2014 Dan Burger

  Tom Rosamilia, the senior vice president in charge of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, knows what’s the matter. It’s infrastructure. Infrastructure matters in the new age of computing, he is fond of saying. The new age of computing, from the Rosamilia perspective, includes cloud, mobile, analytics, and social. And the inclusion of all these technologies will most assuredly require infrastructure upgrades for companies that are currently in the previous ages of new computing. IT Jungle recently reported on an IBM survey of IT executives that identified 90 percent of those executives believed their existing infrastructure was not preparedness for

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• Unlocking The Power8 Features With IBM i

  November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We talk a lot about the hardware features of the Power Systems platforms as they roll into the market, and the idea is always to look at the processors and related technologies specifically. But the performance metrics are always a lot more generic, and as we all know, the variety of applications that can be created for the system is broader than what can be modeled with the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) online transaction processing test. If there is any lesson that has been relearned by the hyperscale datacenter operators like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook that was well known to

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• Cloud Spending Dominated By SaaS In The Years Ahead

  November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are three different levels to this public cloud racket: infrastructure, platform, and software, or what are commonly abbreviated as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The higher up you go, the further you are away from the virtual iron. Oddly enough–or perhaps not at all if you think about it for a second–the distribution of revenues for future cloud acquisitions is very roughly mirroring the distribution of spending on systems and storage, middleware and databases, and application software in the industry at large. This is not something that IDC mentioned in its recent prognostications about the cloud market, but I noticed

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• SaaS Helps Lift Hospitality Software Maker Agilysys

  November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like every other software company in the world that grew up selling software licenses, professional services to customize and install the code, and technical support to support it out into the future, Agilysys is making inroads selling its hospitality applications as a service. But the transition is causes disruptions to the financials over the short term. In the company’s second quarter of fiscal 2015, which ended on September 30, the results were tweaked to take out the revenues from the prior quarter for its business in the United Kingdom to Verteda Limited, which has taken over the operations that

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• IBM i App Dev Progress: It Doesn’t Just Happen By Itself

  November 10, 2014 Dan Burger

  Some cynics would say IBM i application development progress happens at the approximate speed of a glacier. The reliance on the green-screen interface has that effect on people that have never stepped into that environment. But progress is taking place despite the cynicism. The widespread use of mobile devices accessing business applications deserves a lot of credit for accelerating application development across the board and that does not exclude IBM midrange environments. You didn’t need to be told that, but decision makers at your workplace might need to be told. The shift in interest and new trends in application development

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• College RPG Needs A Technology Refresh

  November 10, 2014 Dan Burger

  What’s being done about the shortage of young IBM i talent? Of the U.S. colleges teaching RPG and other IBM i skills, the number of graduates with more than a lunch box full of job-ready skills might not fill a single school bus. The IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative has made some progress, but it is really just a trickle when a steady stream is what is needed. The IBM i roadmap should take this a lot more seriously. One of the things that the Academic Initiative is doing to help is updating the RPG curriculum that it offers to

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Pandora’s Pithos

  November 10, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  A lot of things are going wrong at IBM. Frustrated investors, disgruntled employees, and anxious customers are trying to figure out why. They share the absurd belief that proper understanding could mitigate Big Blue’s malaise. For an individual, knowledge might cure pain caused by ill-fitting shoes; but not the agony of terminal cancer. For a vast organization like IBM, myriad woes are a concomitant of existence. Why? The myth of Pandora provides an explanation. Tricked by Zeus and trapped by her nature, Pandora unsealed a container and unintentionally beset mankind with perpetual afflictions. IBM can prevail, but not without struggle.

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• IBM And ISVs Fight POODLE Vulnerability In SSL 3.0

  November 10, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM is among the software vendors working to issue patches to address the newly discovered POODLE attack, which exploits a vulnerability in SSL 3.0 to overcome encryption and view actual content. IBM has issued a patch for Domino and is currently working on a patch for WebSphere Application Server for IBM i. IBM i ISVs are also responding to the new threat. The POODLE attack, which stands for “Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption,” was first described in September by a group of Google researchers. If successfully executed, the POODLE attack requires a perpetrator to make just 256 SSL 3.0

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• Dispatches From The IBM i MSP Frontier

  November 10, 2014 Dan Burger

  The managed service provider (MSP) business that serves the IBM i community is almost entirely IBM business partners with strong ties to the IBM i platform. Just a month ago, Doug Balog, general manager of IBM’s Power Systems business, told me there are more than 200 MSPs focused on i and there’s “a shift of i clients looking to go to MSPs.” Most of the MSP growth, he noted, comes from expanding business that the BPs established years ago. If you are a frequent reader of IT Jungle, you know I like to check in from time to time

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• First Pass On Power8 Enterprise Performance

  November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A little over a month ago, IBM launched the enterprise-class Power8 systems, the Power E870 and Power E880. The machines draw on technologies from the prior enterprise-class Power 770 and 780 machines and their predecessors, but also have some advanced scalability and resilience features drawn from the top-end Power 795. Big Blue provided a lot of insight into the architecture of the machines on launch day on October 6, but some important details were missing. One of them was what the expected performance of the systems would be. As I told you back in October, I would hunt down the

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