Category Archives: opinion

In between looksoftware’s annual user conference and the start of this year’s COMMON at Disney Land in Anaheim, California, was an unusual event: the iBelieve revival meeting for IBM i evangelisation. Dan Burger from IT Jungle was there and reported on the … Continue reading →

During one of the sessions on the new Expert Integrated Systems at COMMON, the IBM presenter mentioned that IBM Power 7 machines (ie, Power 720, 750, etc) will not go away in favor of the new PureFlex hardware that have … Continue reading →

In a fairly detailed article (though he is promising more feeds and speeds information later), Tim Prickett Morgan breaks down the new PureFlex raw infrastructure boxes and the PureApplication application server boxes that IBM announced today. Although Tim bills this … Continue reading →

IBM Systems Magazine just posted a column by Chief Architect for IBM i Steve Will on the new IBM PureSystems and IBM i. So the pre-announcement material has definitely been released. Click here to read Steve’s column called IBM PureSystems … Continue reading →

In this week’s IT Jungle, Tim Prickett Morgan muses on what might be in IBM’s Next Generation Platform system (NGP), which could be in this week’s April 11th announcement. Per Tim: Just for fun, I want to riff on what … Continue reading →

From Aaron Bartell, the sad story of a man who hoped he could buy an RPG ILE compiler with his credit card, only to discover it took IBM 12 1/2 weeks (this is not a typo) just to get him … Continue reading →

After the exultation over IBM announcing end of life for V5R4 comes one dissenting voice:

In an article published today called IBM i V5R4 Deadline Still Too Soon, Mel Beckman of the System i Network argues that there are a fair number of customers who still can’t upgrade to V6R1 before September 30, 2013. When compared with these other long-lived products that are still supported, Mel says… Continue reading →

Bob Cancilla, a familiar face in the IBM i world, has an interesting column (provocative for IBM i personnel) on his Web site, encouraging readers to drop their IBM i boxes and move to a cloud-based solution. Here’s one of his relevant points.

The total cost of cloud based operations is a fraction of what you will pay in terms of hardware, software, and people to maintain and support your own Power Systems IBM i based environment

There was a linkedin topic that reports that going rate for an IBM i system administrator is $90k per year plus in most parts of the United States. So figure about $120k total cost. That is a lot of money for any company, but especially smaller companies with small IBM i based machines! This is a totally unnecessary expense in a cloud based environment.

I’ll offer a guest blog post on joehertvik.com/ to anyone who wants to rebut Mr. Cancilla.

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Cecilia Z from Symtrax is running a LinkedIN poll right now in the AS/400 Professionals group about where do you get your IT news? It says IT News but it really means Power i/iSeries news? The interesting thing about that is she … Continue reading →