On Wednesday Steve Will, IBM's CTO and Chief Architect for the IBM i operating system, announced on social media that an updated version of the "IBM Power 10 performance optimization for IBM i" had been published.
The timing could not have been better as the company I work for is installing their new Power 10 server next week.
I have read the guide and am impressed with all the advice that is offered.
You can reach the guide by using this link here.
Forrester Consulting was commissioned by IBM to perform an assessment of the benefits of the IBM i operating system. The result was one of Forrester's trademark "Total Economic Impact" assessments, determining the cost savings and business benefits of using IBM i.
The report can be read by clicking on this link here.
I have already downloaded and emailed this to my Vice President and CIO to reinforce the benefits of continuing to enhance our IBM i strategy.
If you work amongst naysayers who keep saying "The AS400 is dead", this would be a useful document to have and share with your management to show that IBM i needs to remain part of your employer's business strategy.
In their annual awards of products are services The Channel Company, via their website CRN.COM, recognized a Power10 server as the Product of the Year in the Industry-standard servers category.
The Power10 chip and servers first announced in September 2021. Followed in July 2022 by the mid- and small-size servers.
SAP, probably the world's best known ERP vendor, performed their own tests pitting the top end Power10 server against the top-of-the-line Dell Intel based servers. The Power10 outperform the Dell server. You can see their findings:
About a month ago I was contacted by Paul Tuohy and asked if I would consider being interviewed about this blog, RPGPGM.COM, for his iTalk with Tuohy podcast for the IBM Systems Magazine. I was very flattered that he considered me worthy, as he has interviewed members of IBM's IBM i and PowerSystems teams, and many of the IBM Champions.
Yesterday the interview was published on IBM Systems Magazine's website, with the title Simon Hutchinson on RPG Code and RPGPGM.com, in both text and audio. You have all read how I write, now you can hear what I sound like.
I just want to thank Paul for making the interview so comfortable, I feel I could have continued talking for a lot longer than the allotted time.
This is a short video that Steve Will, IBM i's chief architect, made for OCEAN user group of Southern California about what is coming in 2017.
This compliments his earlier blog post about the future of IBM i.
Last month the Swedish publication Data3 published an interesting article about the future of our beloved plaform. Two students working at the Handelsbanken AB were asked to investigate the IBM i and its future. They interviewed developers, technicians, and managers from the bank and other companies, asking them about the platform and how RPG compared to other servers and programming languages.
Their conclusions were very positive for both the IBM i and RPG:
I found an interesting post written by Hans Boldt, who was part of the team that developed RPG/free at IBM in Toronto, Canada. In it he gives us a brief glimpse into some of the decisions and processes involved in creating RPG/free.
It all started more than twenty years ago, back when RPG IV was being designed. At the time, there were two distinct schools of thought. On one side, there were people who insisted RPG should have a fully free-form syntax. On the other, were those who strongly believed that RPG should remain in its traditional fixed-form layout.
He reminds us that RPG/free is no longer new as it was released 12 years ago in V5R1, and ILE RPG/RPGLE/RPG IV 18 years ago in V3R1.
You can read it here: A Short History of Free-Form RPG