2015 was a great year for the mainframe business—and that was great news for large IT organizations running mainframe systems, as well as the companies that support these business sectors. The old myth that the mainframe is dead was countered by IBM with the launch of...
Michael Porter at the Harvard Business Review recently said that the Internet of Things (IoT) will deliver an economic boom as big as those delivered by computer automation and the internet. That may well happen, but we're going to have to figure out how we're going...
Why am I a Mainframer? It all started when my great uncle bought a Combine…. When I was growing up, my family and I made frequent trips to a farm on Manitoulin Island in Canada—about 250 miles north of Detroit—a remote place where farming was difficult and few made it...
I recently read an excellent IBM paper on best practices for achieving line-of-business (LOB) performance increases through enterprise data analytics. This is an impressive and convincing piece on how top-down planning at the enterprise level can enable positive...
You can be a botanist, a horticulturist or a gardener—it depends on how knowledgeable you want to be about what you are growing. But what’s that got to do with Big Data? Well, I was recently having a conversation with Matt Ritter from Athena Health about Big Data,...
I am lucky enough in my job to get opportunities to meet with some pretty senior people in the IT industry from the Fortune 500. Saving money is a funny thing to talk about at times. It seems like it is an obvious thing. Surely the best companies in the world must...
A few years ago, I was speaking at a conference on the west coast—attending were mostly IT executives from startup companies, and it was a lively group. Also, some IT folks were in attendance from some more established companies. Afterwards I sat beside one such chap...
Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent Can’t Get The Job Done Because They Don’t Go To Work Wearing Their Cape I am really starting to get sick of the conventional wisdom that exists out there that maintains that companies should abandon the mainframe and do all their computing...
I’ve been hearing a lot about Bimodal IT—Gartner was pumping it up recently at their Gartner Symposium, while Jason Bloomberg at Forbes.com didn’t like it and neither does Compuware’s Chis O’Malley. I don’t like it either. Bimodal IT is one of those things that I...
When people hear talk about in-memory technology, they immediately assume the discussion revolves around Big Data and analytics being run on distributed systems, and that the database part of the discussion focuses on things like SAP HANA, TIBCO, VoltDB, or even IBM...
