IBM STG Technical Enablement Conference and COMMON

I'm fully into “conference season” this spring, so today’s blog must be short.

This week, the STG Technical Enablement Conference is being held in Orlando, Fla., and I’m attending to present a few IBM i topics to many of the 1,500 or so participants. I gave these same presentations in Prague in the Czech Republic just a few weeks ago, so I am confident they will go well. This conference has two tracks, and one of them caters to IBMers and business partners who may see confidential information. The other is for typical customers. As long as I don’t mix up the two groups, I should be fine.

But I won’t even be at this conference for the duration of the event, because the COMMON Annual meeting begins Sunday, May 1, in Minneapolis, and the COMMON Americas Advisory Council meets for two days before the full conference begins, so I must be back to Minnesota Thursday night.

While it’s always a hectic time of year, the true benefit of these conferences is getting to talk to people-- IBMers and customers and partners and ISVs--who want to hear about IBM i, and want to give me feedback and ideas.

I’ve refreshed every one of my COMMON presentations with new information, so I hope to see some of you at those sessions. I’ll also be participating in the Expo area, and will definitely be somewhere at the “Ask the Experts” event. Thankfully, I will have lots of company, because many Rochester IBM i developers are going to get a chance to come up for COMMON, since it will be held in Minneapolis. This means I can take all the hard questions and find a real expert to help you out if you stump me.

Look for more blogs and tweets as COMMON really begins. Meanwhile, I had better go find the rooms in which I’ll be presenting in Orlando. Oh, and maybe get some food.  And sleep. Nah, probably not much sleep.

Conference season. Gotta love it!

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi #COMMONUG, #ibmiuser

Customer Stories, COMMON and IBM i User Groups

About a month ago, I encouraged you think about what you and your company are doing with IBM i, and to submit your stories for consideration for the COMMON/IBM Innovation Awards. I look forward to seeing the finalists and the winners.

That isn’t the only way you can tell your story, though. The COMMON Annual Conference is quickly approaching–I’m quite aware of it because I still don’t have my presentations finalized–but I’m not panicking. Yet.

At COMMON this year, IBM is asking people to help compile a video that tells the value of IBM i from a customer’s perspective. If you’re a member of COMMON, you may have already received this information, but pardon me while I reiterate for you, and tell the readers who aren’t COMMON members.

IBM will be filming a new IBM i video at this year's COMMON Annual Meeting. IBM will be capturing client testimonials on what IBM i means to your company. The concept is to allow the IBM i community to tell stories about how IBM i has provided a resilient, secure, cost-effective environment for their applications ... or whatever the value story within your company is. IBM is also looking for client examples of innovation projects you may have completed recently, or have underway, to include in this new video.

The videos will be filmed in an informal format, on the Expo floor. If you’d be interested in participating in the IBM i video at COMMON in Minneapolis, please contact Guy Paradise at paradise@us.ibm.com, or 507-253-5946, and provide a short summary of your story.

Now I know what many of you are saying: “What would I say? How is my story special?” There are two good answers to that. First, just tell people, in your own words, why using IBM i is good for your shop. It doesn’t have to be a long description. In fact, it can’t be. We need short statements. Second, your story is special because it’s yours. Maybe you’re doing something new or maybe you just depend on the platform to do what it’s been doing for years. Either way, IBM i is crucial to your business. 

So, think about it. Contact Guy. Help us spread the message about you and IBM i.

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi #COMMONUG, #ibmiuser

Spring Announcements and IBM i in developerWorks

Today, April 12, is a big day for IBM i. First of all, we’re announcing a new set of capabilities. Secondly, the IBM i Technical Topic in developerWorks has been launched. I’ll briefly explain the newly announced functions, then give a bit more time to the new IBM i content in developerWorks (dW).

If you’ll recall, we’ve been preparing to be able to announce new virtualization capabilities on a regular basis by creating Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.1. There are several of these in today’s announcements. One of these is the new “virtual tape” capability. It allows a tape drive to be used by one IBM i partition when the tape drive is assigned to a second partition, without the use of PowerVM’s Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).  Another significant new virtualization enhancement is the “Suspend/Resume” enhancement, which works with VIOS to allow an IBM i partition to be temporarily suspended, then started back up again at a later time. Dawn May’s “i Can” blog will cover Suspend/Resume in detail this week, so be sure to read it for all the details.

Technology Refreshes are also used to deliver new I/O capabilities, and there are some interesting new I/O features that will be supported by 7.1 TR2 when it becomes available on May 13. These include a couple of methods for having a higher density of storage: the new 571 GB SAS disk drive, which provides a lower cost per gigabyte and more gigabytes per 2U rack space; and the new EXP24S SFF Gen2-bay drawer, which has a higher physical density, fitting 24 solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs) disks in the space that used to fit just 12.

In addition to the functions provided by TR2, the announcement letter also talks about several new software enhancements. We’re bringing back to IBM i 6.1 some Systems Director Navigator support that was initially made available only in 7.1. We also have a whole set of new DB2 for i enhancements. If you want to see the entire announcement letter, visit the IBM Offering Information Web page and search for the announcement letter numbered 211-108.

We may cover some of these in more detail in future blogs, but you’ll also be able to find out about new support by visiting the new IBM i Technical Topic in dW. 

IBM dW is a free online resource where IBM gathers technical information about many of its technologies to help developers build better software, and to help system administrators find methods for simplifying their jobs. For several years, both AIX and Linux have been featured prominently on dW in the Technical Topics section. (They called these areas “zones,” but I understand that terminology is being phased out.) While we’ve had IBM i content on dW, it hasn’t been in one place nor has it been very easy to find.

I’ve been talking to Linda Grigoleit about this for quite some time, and she says it very well:

“Our main goal is to help make our IBM i technical content easier to find and to improve the integration of IBM i, AIX and Linux technical content in one location for our Power Systems community. We have been hearing from our IBM i community they would like to see technical content in one place and it made perfect sense to us to put it on developerWorks.”

Two people from Rochester, Minn. have been working to gather and organize the technical content: Scott Forstie, who works on our IBM i development team as a DB2 expert; and Kent Milligan, who works in our IBM Lab Services and Training organization, and spends a great deal of time helping ISVs use IBM i technologies.  They’ve done a great job, so I asked Scott to tell me what we can expect to find in the new IBM i Technical Topic.

Here’s what he told me:

People who want to find technical information about IBM i, or want to connect with others in the IBM i community can visit the IBM i technical topic to access a wealth of information contained within these 6 main categories: 

•    New to IBM i
•    Technical Library
•    Forums and Community
•    Technology Updates
•    Tools and Downloads
•    Events

You’ll want to look around at all of these, but I thought I would highlight two of them: the Technical Library and the Technology Updates.

The Technical Library contains new articles on many topics. We’ve written many articles in the past, and this is a great place to gather them as they’re written. We’ll be adding to the library regularly. On launch day we have these articles ready to go:

1.    Next generation RPG documentation
2.    How to boost application performance using Solid State Disk devices
3.    Power HA System Mirror for i: Ready to switch
4.    IBM i Performance Data Investigator: Browser-based viewing of performance data
5.    MERGE ahead: Introducing the DB2 for i SQL MERGE Statement
6.    Revolutionize your application and product support: IBM Application Runtime Expert

You can check back for new technical articles or perhaps you’d prefer to use the dW subscribe capability to see updates as they happen via an RSS feed. I should add that technical articles can be contributed by anyone; it's not limited to IBMers. I encourage you to help others in the IBM i community by sharing your expertise and experiences. Just click on the "Submit an article or idea" link at the bottom of the IBM i technical topic landing page.

In the Technology Updates section we’re providing a centralized location for communicating enhancements made in between major IBM i releases. It’s in these pages where the functions announced for TR2 and the related software enhancements will initially get documented before they find their way into the Information Center permanently.

Just to set expectations, I want you to realize that only part of the information will be in the dW IBM i Technical Topic at the time of the announcement. Other information will be added over time, some of it on or around the availability date (May 13 for most of the functions in the announcement). 

The technology update material has been organized by subject matter and category of enhancement. You can enable self notification of future changes by selecting the "Notify me of Page Changes" option.

By gathering the technical information IBM development and services professionals write, and by allowing the IBM i customer, ISV and business partner community to add their own content, we hope to encourage a more agile, community-oriented method of getting useful information into the hands of those who need it.

I know this blog entry has gotten a bit longer than usual, but I think you can see we have a lot to talk about this week. Thanks for sticking with me for the duration, and please take a look at the RFA and the new IBM i Technical Topic in developerWorks to find out about the new features IBM i is making available.


Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi

YiPs, AI and IBM i: the Next Generation

I had it all ready to go. The blog for today was all written. And then … Well, it’s delayed for a week. Oh, dear readers, let me tell you. Next week’s blog will have so much to talk about, it may take two or three days to cover it all. That is, if I can find time to write it while I’m in Prague. But, the point is, the topic I had planned for today isn’t ready.

So now what?

That’s easy. I want to discuss the next generation of IBM i users and developers. 

A few weeks back, when I spoke at the WMCPA Spring Conference, I had the chance to meet Jim Buck. Jim teaches at Gateway Technical College, and he’s been helping turn out new users and programmers for IBM i for a long time. One way in which IBM works to encourage the growth of new IBM i skills is through the Academic Initiative (AI). In fact, that’s how I first came to hear of Jim Buck and Gateway. They’re one of many on AI’s long list of schools that teach IBM i in their curriculum.

I talked to Jim ahead of the conference and asked if there was a chance I could speak with any of his students while I was at the conference. Jim made it happen.

After my keynote presentation completed, a group of about 15 students and recent graduates joined me in a conference room and we talked with each other. OK, I probably talked more than they did, but I was very interested to hear how each of them got connected to IBM i and to the academic program at Gateway, and what they thought about the career they were heading towards, or just beginning. It was a fascinating and fun conversation. 

I look for chances to interact with people who are newer to IBM i. For a few years now, I’ve been an adjunct member of the YiPs (Young i Professionals), which is a group of, well, I bet you can guess.  This group doesn’t discriminate--even if some members are younger, they accept those of us who aren’t as young. What binds them together is a passion for using IBM i in new, modern ways, and helping people who are new to the platform get the information they need. They started as a group at COMMON, they’ve made trips to many conferences and local user groups, and they create and sponsor information on using IBM i in modern ways, including providing a sandbox for implementing open-source projects on the IBM i platform that hosts their site. 

Meeting new members to the IBM i community is always energizing. I encouraged the Gateway students to connect with other YiPs through their site, and by attending other local user groups, and especially trying to attend COMMON’s annual conference, if they can.

As I talk with students at Academic Initiatives schools, such as Gateway, one of the questions I’m sure to hear is whether there are jobs out there for people with IBM i skills.  I assure them there must be, because I also hear from our long-time customers that they want to find people with IBM i skills. I don’t know what it takes to put these two groups of people together, but we do have a suggestion we make to customers who express frustration about lack of new talent: Talk to local schools. Start with the list on the Academic Initiative website. Create internship opportunities. Let those schools know what kinds of skills you require from their graduates. We, within the IBM community, are trying to help schools get the material they need to teach their students. The best way for businesses to nurture young talent is to work with those schools. And if there’s no local school on the AI list, make contact at the school and with the AI team here at IBM (email powerskills@us.ibm.com).

So, until next week, I hope each of you can get to know someone who’s newer to IBM i than you are. They're out there. And they want to learn from you.

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi