• IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

  “Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

  On …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• Why You Should Join A Local User Group?

  February 4, 2019 Dawn May

  Here’s a good question: Why should you want to join a local user group?

  You can communicate with colleagues via email or instant messages. A wide array of social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, provide a way to share information. Internet searches allow you to find documentation and articles. While the interconnected world provides access to large amounts of information, you also have to determine if the information you find is accurate. Of course, you can trust information from IBM web sites, but what about posts on social media? Are they always right? I’m sure you’ve heard …

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• Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

  Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …

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• IBM Winds Down PowerVM V2, Nudges Customers To PowerVM V3

  November 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may not occur to you, but the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor that Big Blue created for Power Systems servers has a version just like every other piece of software in the world, and like all software, it ages and eventually it is retired from the field in lieu of more modern code.

  In announcement letter 918-129, IBM let it be known that PowerVM V2, of which there were three releases, will be withdrawn from marketing on February 19, 2019 and will have its support withdrawn on September 30, 2020. That may seem like a long time away from …

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• New Open Source ERP Suite Written In ILE RPG

  October 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  There’s something quite novel being introduced today at the Fall COMMON conference in Pittsburgh: An open source ERP package written in free-form RPG. Dubbed intERPprise, the software project is intended to harness core IBM i strengths – its integrated database and ILE environment – but above all, provide an example for what modern and native open source software can look like on IBM i.

  The intERPrise project (www.i-nterprise.org) was spearheaded by a group of IBM i advocates, including Chris Hird and Marinus van Sandwyk, who wanted to demonstrate what a modern business application would look like – and …

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• Raz-Lee Debuts Anti-Ransomware For IBM i

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Despite its reputation as a secure digital fortress for back office automation, the IBM i server is subject to all manner of modern security threats. That includes ransomware, which can work its way onto mapped IFS drives and render business documents stored on the IBM i server useless. Raz-Lee Security recently launched a new solution aimed at combatting the spread of ransomware on IBM i.

  Today’s business environment rewards companies that embrace openness. Companies are encouraged to open up their mainframes and IBM i servers and leverage the data and business processes they contain using APIs, microservices, and modern user …

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• Google Close to Launching IBM i Cloud Service, Will Says

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  One of the laments of Power chip types everywhere is the lack of a public cloud service for Power applications. While Linux and Windows folks can run their X86 workloads on multiple public clouds, the opportunities for hosting IBM i, AIX, or Power Linux workloads are limited to so-called private clouds. But according to IBM i chief architect Steve Will, that could soon be changing.

  While neither IBM nor Google have made any official announcements about Google running IBM i in its public cloud, Will talked openly about the relationship between the two tech giants at COMMON‘s PowerUp conference …

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• Fresche Takes $60 Million To Fuel Growth, Consolidate Market

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions is making big moves, and readying itself to make even bigger ones. With $60 million in the bank – and a line of eager equity firms willing to invest millions more – the IBM i software and services firm is poised to significantly expand operations in a bid to capture what executives foresee as a loosening of budgets and uptick in demand around application modernization.

  Fresche Solutions had just announced the $60 million financing round at the COMMON PowerUp conference two weeks ago, and its CFO was itching to get out on the expo floor. That’s where the …

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• IBM i Finds A Youthful Swagger Down In Texas

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform and ecosystem may not be what they once were. Thirty years of relentless OLTP processing will do that to you. But if COMMON’s POWERUp 18 conference this week in San Antonio is any indication, the box itself and the ecosystem it supports are far from dead.

  Signs of life in IBM i-land were evident everywhere at the Marriott Rivercenter, the hotel where about 1,000 IBM i professionals, vendors, and IBMers spent the past four days holed up for COMMON‘s annual conference, which was renamed POWERUp.

  Here are some of the highlights of the show, which …

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