But in addition to decrying the state of the platform, Cancilla offers up possibilities for keeping it alive. You’ll never guess what he suggests. Or maybe you will. That’s right, application modernization! The exact line of business that his new company is in.

Nevertheless, Cancilla has some interesting points about the IBM i platform along with some valuable insights having been there for four years. Here are a few of his suggestions:

Before joining IBM I was CTO for a major insurance company where I ran a development organization that did major in-house development. Our project funding was totally tied to current business objectives and funded by various departments or in certain cases approved by the steering committee by special corporate funding for projects that crossed organizational lines.

What I did not have was money to fund an IT technology project. Even our Y2K work had to be tied into business objectives.

I think that many of your are like I was and have to integrate your modernization initiatives into currently funded projects. I can tell you that my management would never have funded a major conversion initiative as a standalone project. The only way to fund modernization was to show a business need or financial benefit.

• Three Power-based configurations, with one, two or four processing cores activated.
• Can run IBM i, AIX or Linux using 4.2 GHz Power6 chips
• Includes a stack of systems and application software called the Smart Business Software Pack for i, which runs on the IBM i 6.1 OS

Now the Smart Cube is apparently being rolled out in the United States. The U.S. version, according to the story, has 17 ISVs that are configuring the cubes to run combinations of 45 different applications.

I just returned from the COMMON 2009 conference in Reno and the main thing I learned from listening to IBM at the opening conference is that they no longer consider the iSeries more than just an OS running on a Power systems box. Why is this a significant event ? Well, we’re starting to see a small although very real shift from some customers towards selecting ERP and other business systems that run on platforms that don’t include OS/400.

While RJS will always remain committed to the native iSeries platform we want to make sure our customers know that even if they do select another platform, our document imaging, electronic forms, workflow and report delivery products are all very capable products running in an iSeries or Multiplatform environment as well. Hopefully for those of you committed to the iSeries, you will be on the platform a long time, but if Windows or some other platform is in your future, feel free to give us a call and we can discuss how your information delivery investment is protected by continuing to choose RJS as your valued information delivery provider.

That’s called survival, and can you really blame RJS Software for doing this?

“Over the years our customers have commented that they are looking at PHP for a number of reasons,” Pavlak, a consultant for Zend Technologies, wrote. “The most common reason we are hearing in 2009 reflects the fact that open source is no longer an option or a luxury but strategic and cost effective…” Pavlak later added that “no cows are sacred in this new economy.”

As Pavlak notes, all branches of the popular open-source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) are supported on the System i. He added that other open-source software customer relationship management (CRM) application SugarCRM allows you to run business applications for free (as a side note, the Young i Professionals has now made SugarCRM available in its sandbox so you can play around with it).

As Pavlak wrote, “IBM has been moving forward with open source for years. Why shouldn’t you?”

Finally, expect some Zend-related news on the System i in the next week or so.

Paris was having some issues described in the RDi release notes, and so he decided to install the update because 1) he had only heard of issues with the update in relation to RDi SOA; and 2) he hadn’t had issues with updates in a while.

This time was different. After a few days, the application kept stalling, and Ctrl+Atl+Del became Paris’ best friend. So he decided he would roll back the change. But uh-oh:

Problem. The Installation Manager insisted that the roll back information was unavailable. Strange–we were certain that we had set the option to keep roll back data. We checked the preferences and sure enough the option to save roll back data was selected, and the dialog showed over 800 MB of saved data! So why couldn’t we roll back? Hmmm, time to check the WDSC list at Midrange.com and see if anyone else had experienced these problems. It quickly became obvious that EGL users (RDi SOA) had experienced some difficulties, but nobody was complaining about basic RDi. So we posted a message and asked if anyone else was seeing the same problems. The only reply received (to date) was from the IBM Lab’s Eric Simpson who is on the RDi team (thanks Eric, even if we didn’t like the answer). Eric didn’t have any comment on the bugs per-se but it was the rest of his news that we didn’t want to hear!

For reasons that we hope IBM might choose to explain one of these days, RDi apparently does NOT support roll back. So once you apply a fix pack, the only way you have to get rid of it is to completely reinstall the product and then re-apply the known good fixes. Not a good option and a waste of an hour or so that frankly we just didn’t have. So it’s back to WDSC for the time being until we have time to spare.

Paris warns RDi users to now wait to update until problems are fleshed out and solved in the field. Meanwhile, Paris and iDevelop plan to post any updates as it plans to ask IBM to comment on the situation.

The blog starts with its hat tips to those who have left us, including Al Barsa, Tom Jarosh, and Dick Bains, and then tips its hat to the father (grandfather?) of System i, Frank Soltis, who left us in a different way.

It then goes on to explain the merger of System i and p, the inevitable name change that came with it (and the hand wringing around it),  reworked IBM software tools and the rise of PHP on System i.

The winner in the first category, for most frightening development nightmare, went to Brad Abernathy, a senior developer for Sunbelt Rentals. In a previous position, Abernathy was a developer for a major manufacturer of bedding and towels and a colleague was working on a shipping application project. The developer started a bug when he created a logical file right on top of the production machine. The bug turned product orders for two or three towel bundles into two or three million orders. Due to a lack of quality check, the systems nearly broke down and the company had to pay a lot of workers a lot of overtime to get it fixed.

The next category was for most remarkable project turnaround. That award went to Manoj Dhamu, a senior programming analyst with DST Health Solutions. He was working on business application that handled member enrollment, claim processing and claim billing for managed care organizations. But they realized a glitch that would require them to manually run other custom programs every time they rebuilt a file. Using the Aldon software, the company was able to incorporate a bunch of important external code into the development cycle.

The Smart Cube from IBM has been getting lots of talk around the web, just not much from IBM? I want to see some real details and when I go to IBM’s web site and search for “Smart Cube”, I get nothing. Once again IBM DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MARKET ANYTHING THEY SELL!

As it turns out, IBM published an announcement letter that said it wasn’t an announcement letter. As Timothy Prickett Morgan recaps, the non-announcement letter announced (empty link) a new system called the Smart Cube Power System 520. Sounds intriguing doesn’t it?

Here’s a description of the Smart Cube in the announcement letter, according to Morgan:

The IBM Smart Cube is a powerful and integrated server (server family) designed to run the business applications (finance and accounting, ERP, CRM, IP telephony, and others) that a small to medium-sized business needs, with virtually no IT complexity. Smart Cubes remain connected to IBM’s Smart Market that offers remotely delivered services, including help desk and solution support, monitoring, backup and recovery, security, and business collaboration.

IBM Smart Cubes come with the preloaded IBM Smart Business Software Pack that includes what you need to run business applications and workloads.

• Application servers and Java support
• Database servers
• Web servers
• File and print servers
• Directory servers
• Network and application security
• Built-in backup and recovery
• Intel server with storage, memory, and more

Wow, sounds interesting. Maybe some readers would like to know more. Maybe they, like Vasta, would like to get their hands on one to test it out. Well, IBM retracted the announcement letter (which it never apparently wanted to announce in the first place), and now they are trying to roll it out very quietly, mostly in India but also with a few select customers in the United States. Some more Smart Cube details:

• Three Power-based configurations, with one, two or four processing cores activated.
• Can run IBM i, AIX or Linux using 4.2 GHz Power6 chips
• Includes a stack of systems and application software called the Smart Business Software Pack for i, which runs on the IBM i 6.1 OS
• The big launch won’t likely happen until the second half of next year

According to the announcement letter, the software “allows teams to simplify, automate, and govern application development on IBM i.” Some details:

• Includes source control, change management, build, process management and governance
• Integration with IBM Rational Developer for i
• Support for source control, change management and builds of RPG and COBOL
• Support for application development using RPG, Java and EGL
• Supports IBM i native Library file system and integrated file system (IFS)
• Build agent which runs on the IBM i operating system, running IBM i commands and call programs

Hat tip to Alex Woodie for the heads-up.

“The power of Policy Minder has really been harnessed by the enhanced interface as it provides a new level of point-and-click usability, even for a green screen power user like me,” said Robin Tatum of MIS.

Suhas Narayan of International Rectifier also tested the software ahead of its ship date, which is scheduled for Monday. He called it “security with simplicity,” adding that “the GUI interface provides an easy way to manage single or multiple systems.”