• IBM i In The Cloud: A Beginner’s Guide to Taking Your First Step

  February 19, 2024 Tom Horan

  The cloud isn’t just for startups anymore. Businesses of all sizes and industries, including those reliant on IBM i systems, are recognizing the transformative power of cloud computing. Modernization is key to staying competitive, and that often means embarking on a cloud migration journey. While the concept may seem daunting, it doesn’t have to be.

  This guide empowers IBM i beginners to understand the process, address common concerns, and navigate a successful migration with the help of experts.

  From Apprehension To Excitement

  For IBM i users, questions and anxieties regarding cloud migration are natural. Security remains a top concern, with …

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• The IT Balancing Act

  May 1, 2023 Bill Langston

  Medical research suggests that how well you can maintain your balance is a powerful predictor of your longevity. Balance is also a good indicator of longevity for your IBM i environment. The challenge is striking the right balance between “vertical” technology that helps your company work efficiently and accurately, and “horizontal” technology that reduces risk.

  Over the past few years, unprecedented forces shifted IT priorities and may have knocked your company’s IBM i environment off balance.

  Enabling IT Balance

  IBM i exists because of how well it runs complex business applications and manages data. We take for granted that the …

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• Focal Point Buys UCG Technologies, On The Hunt For More IBM i Deals

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a wave of acquisitions underway in the managed service provider (MSP) and technical support services businesses of the IBM i market, with companies trying to amass the skillsets to provide a more complete stack of services to IBM midrange shops. The acquisitions are also being fueled by a business model of cross-selling across merged company portfolios and getting the size necessary to expand into new geographies and to find new customers as IBM i shops confront the growing complexity of their infrastructure and looming shortages in skilled IBM i personnel.

  That, in a nutshell, is why Focal Point …

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• ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

  July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

  While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

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• IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

  IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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• It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

  June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

  For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

  It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …

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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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• SEA Adapts Messaging App For MSPs

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing workloads and applications, managed service providers (MSP) have a unique set of requirements. Due to these requirements, MSPs that run IBM i workloads often end up building their own systems management and monitoring software. With a new release of its message management software, Software Engineering of America (SEA) now has an out-of-the-box solution for MSPs.

  Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady uptick of interest in private cloud environments hosted by MSPs. In the IBM i space, there are now dozens of MSPs operating in the market, including many former IBM business partners …

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• Cloud Provides A Third HA Option

  September 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In the third part of our series on IBM i high availability options, we’re looking up — to the cloud, that is.

  If you’re in the market to implement an IBM i high availability solution – and the best data we’ve seen indicates that many IBM i shops are shopping in 2017 – then you basically have three options to choose from: logical replication software solutions, IBM’s Power HA hardware solution, and a cloud-based HA solution.

  We covered the first two offerings in previous stories (you can find our story on logical replication here and our story on PowerHA here …

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• IBM i Shops Seeking More Services

  March 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  Many folks view managed services as a replacement for processes that company employees used to do. Like backing up data, for instance. Slow backups and nearly closed windows for planned downtime have more organizations looking at the managed service providers for improved efficiencies and the opportunity to add a disaster recovery plan that makes sense.

  That used to be a big part of managed services, but the definition has greatly expanded in the past few years. As IT complexity has soared, there are many pieces in the IT puzzle that are missing or a bad fit in organizations that struggle …

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