Back in October, PowerWire.eu urged our readers to take part in a new survey of the IBM i market conducted by HelpSystems. The reason was simple. Since the i was subsumed by the wider Power Systems brand and midrange publishers both in Europe and the States fell by the wayside, there had been a dearth…

A German developer has combined the Power i’s strength with Watson’s savvy to carve out a niche in the hotel market. Kaufering-based IT consultant Rainer Ross used a Power 720 and IBM’s Watson Content Analytics software to create a new hotel search engine called myhofi (pictured). In a new report from Big Blue, Ross says:…

The UK’s i-UG will hold an action-packed conference on Thursday, February 19 at the Mercure Norton Grange Hotel in Rochdale, Lancashire (pictured). Seminars include a look at the latest version of DB2 Web Query, a presentation on the real-world benefits of Power8 hardware and an intriguing-looking demo of the latest in 3D printing technology. PowerWire…

Common Belgium is kicking off its 2015 schedule with a close look at security. The IBM i user group will hold its first major meeting of the year at the IBM Client Centre in Brussels on March 11. In his invitation to the event, Shirang “Ranga” Deshpande, the group’s vice president and events organiser, says:…

Last week, IBM launched its new z13 mainframe (pictured above). Apparently, it had hurried the announcement along so that it came before its latest set of earnings. This move was rewarded by acres of virtual newsprint by the press. The oldest tech giant of them all is reportedly going through a painful transformation. The Big…

India’s Council of Agricultural Research has made the jump from paper-based processes to an Oracle-on-Power ERP system supporting well over 100 sites. The ambitious project is something of a coup for IBM’s Global Business Services division. Partly funded by the World Bank, it is one of the first national ERP implementations by central government in…

America’s HelpSystems has bought British systems management specialist Halcyon Software for an undisclosed sum. In a press statement yesterday, HelpSystems, which is headquartered in Minneapolis and has its UK offices in Fleet, Hampshire, said that the acquisition would strengthen its range of solutions for managed services providers. The purchase also expands its cross-platform systems management/monitoring…

IBM’s OpenPower Foundation appears to be going from strength to strength as it heads into 2015. The consortium Big Blue formed around its Power processor technology found its 80th member last week in the form of major cloud vendor Rackspace. The Texas-based company has data centres around the world and has apparently been investigating Power…

Ethiopia’s biggest bank has undertaken a huge expansion and modernisation programme based on model 795 and 770 Power Systems. Founded in 1942 and headquartered in Addis Ababa (pictured), Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has more than eight million account holders and annual revenues equivalent to $586 million. It now operates 868 branches across Ethiopia and…

Halcyon Software has launched Exit Point Manager, a rule-based security solution for IBM i. Halcyon’s new security tool protects the main exit points on i-based machines and uses a range of criteria to determine system access including users, IP address, date, time and other datasets. It logs all activity and provides a complete audit trail…

HelpSystems‘ ShowCase division has released a new version of its eponymous IBM i BI tool. ShowCase10 includes new executive dashboards, dynamic drill-down analysis, improved reporting and a redesigned interface. Its creators say that a new ShowCase Deployment Bundle expands basic ShowCase into an ideal data access tool for both technical and end users. With a…

IBM has made a number of tweaks to its Power Systems lineup. First up, buyers of its new 4-core or 6-core Power S814 models (pictured) have the option of choosing IBM i Express Editions. Similar to the old model 720 Express Editions, these work out cheaper but have some restrictions. Secondly, the maximum memory of…