iPulse 2011 Survey Results
The second annual iPulse Survey, organized by LANSA, ran during October 2011 and was promoted to the global IBM i community via email, social media and publicized by leading industry media outlets like Intelligencer Magazine, IT Jungle and MC Press Online.
This year’s survey attracted just over 1,500 participants worldwide, which is around 10% down from last year’s numbers. Although views this year were represented from farther afield, with responses received from over 70 countries – a 30% greater reach than last year’s survey.
The participants represented a cross-section of the industry whose job roles were as follows:
- Business Management – 22%
- Developer / Analyst – 40%
- Project Management – 17%
- Operations – 13%
- Other (vendor, journalist, consultant, etc) – 8%
The Secret Thoughts of an IBM i IT Manager
Guest Blogger: Paul Conte, President PCES, is a leading Application Development Strategist.
The other day I was reflecting back on what has been a long, and generally fun and interesting IT career. One thing I remember vividly was discovering the IBM System/38, the first incarnation of what would evolve into the AS/400 and the current IBM i. I was responsible at the time for a major planning process for a large university’s (hint: “Go Ducks!”) administrative computing strategy. The S/38 technology promised application flexibility and reliability unimaginable on the other platforms available at the time. The IBM i technology still does.
But, as in the early days of the S/38, this platform’s technology and benefits are a well-kept secret. There were more than a few nights I lay awake wondering whether I’d made the right decision to embark on a consulting career focused on the IBM S/38, AS/400, i world. Would the then “jazzy” Wang system, with its fairly slick, but also fairly shallow, interface capture the imagination of departmental organizations wanting to break free of the central IBM mainframe? Would the just introduced DEC-system 20 dominate, with its far greater horsepower than the S/38 and a more modern operating system than the IBM mainframe (but still years behind the S/38 architecture)? In the end only one of those competitors survived, and has in fact thrived.
So, I empathize with today’s System i IT managers who may share similar worries. But I also can offer encouragement. Before doing that, however, let me spin a story and see if it sounds familiar. I call this “The Secret Thoughts of an IBM i IT Manager.”
Continue reading “The Secret Thoughts of an IBM i IT Manager” »
Technology Trends – or Business Requirements?
How closely does the average IT shop actually follow emerging technological trends and the advice of leading industry analysts and the media in planning their budgets and projects? When Gartner says they predict large organizations will establish "cloudsourcing" teams or that future applications will be integrated with social technologies or that organizations will need to provide applications to interact with customers via mobile devices, does this impact your planning?
If you follow the industry analysts, in particular Gartner, you will be accustomed to seeing predictions about the future of Information Technology — software, applications and infrastructure — often numerically identified Letterman-style as a "Top Ten" list. I recently referenced Gartner's Top Strategic Technology list for 2011 in my blog post "Reaching for the Sky - Cloud Computing." Afterwards, I pulled the lists for the past three years to see how these trends have changed or evolved. Continue reading “Technology Trends – or Business Requirements?” »
iPulse 2010 Survey Results
The iPulse 2010 Survey, organized by LANSA, ran during September 2010 and was promoted to the global IBM i community via email, social media and publicized by all the leading industry media outlets like Intelligencer Magazine, IT Jungle, CIO Magazine and System iNetwork.
Over 1,700 participants worldwide completed the survey, representing the views from a broad range of industries across 50 different countries. The survey was taken by a cross-section of people whose job roles were as follows:
- Business Management - 36%
- Developer / Analyst - 36%
- Project Management - 12%
- Operations - 10%
- Other (vendor, journalist, consultant, etc) - 6%
Redchester is the new capital of Switzerland
I may get berned at the steak by Swiss federalists for spouting hearsay, but I've heard some stories that I must share.
Those clever Swiss folks learned long ago that being neutral can have considerable political and economic benefits. Why choose sides when you can carve out a profitable niche in the middle?
This lesson can be equally well learned and applied to making IT decisions. I often find organisations defining themselves as an AS/400 or a .NET shop as though these are mutually exclusive identities. It's true that Rochester and Redmond are at almost opposite sides of the country, but their technology stacks can come together to form a happy place that I have christened Redchester.
Redchester - a happy place
Redchester is a place where teamwork produces better results than solo endeavor. In plain English, it's where the power of IBM's midrange systems meets the personal productivity benefits of Microsoft's product suite. In Redchester data flows freely but securely between systems so that each citizen always has the information they need where and when they need it.
The best news of all is that Redchester is not a fictional place, although, I confess, it is not the new capital of Switzerland. Recently I came across a couple of real-life customer stories that brought the benefits of unifying the IBM and Microsoft stacks into sharp focus for me. Continue reading “Redchester is the new capital of Switzerland” »