Articles about IBM

To mark the start of US National Hurricane Preparedness Week this week, The Weather Company, an IBM Business, is releasing not just its 2019 hurricane forecast, but also analytic data that looks at how weather affects preparedness, emotion and consumer habits.

In addition, through its Code and Response deployment initiative which aims to put open source technologies to use for social good, IBM is taking action to help save the lives of people in communities that are vulnerable to natural disasters.

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So IBM is buying Red Hat (home of the largest Enterprise Linux distribution) for $34 billion and readers want to know what I think of the deal. Well, if I made a list of acquisitions and things to do to save IBM, buying Red Hat would have been very close to the top of that list. It should have bought Red Hat 10 years ago when the stock market was in the gutter. Jumping the gun a bit, I have to say the bigger question is really which company’s culture will ultimately dominate? I’m hoping it’s Red Hat.

The deal is a good fit for many reasons explained below. And remember Red Hat is just down the road from IBM’s huge operation in Raleigh, NC.

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Red Hat Inc. is a great example of how a company can be successful with open source. Hell, Red hat is a billion dollar company -- yes, billion with a "B." Its contributions to the Linux community are invaluable -- RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are important and indispensable.

That's why I'm a bit scared today. You see, International Business Machines has acquired the open source darling, Red Hat. I suppose IBM could be a great Red Hat owner from a financial standpoint, but IBM's leadership has been questionable over the years. I'm sure I am not alone is fearing that IBM could ultimately ruin Red Hat and its offerings. With that said, IBM has long been an open source proponent, so maybe it will work out well.

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During his keynote speech today at the Jamf User Nation Conference in Minneapolis, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn announced that IBM is going to open source its Mac@IBM code.

Designed to streamline the integration of corporate-owned or BYOD Apple Mac devices and applications into the enterprise while delivering a personalized experience, Mac@IBM has seen the number of IBMers using Macs increase from 30,000 in 2015 to 134,000 in 2018.

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A new survey of senior IT decision makers at some of the world's largest organizations that still rely on legacy mainframe systems reveals that most want to move away from the technology due to the high cost and inflexibility that it has brought to their business.

The study from Microsoft and LzLabs surveyed IT leaders in the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany, and finds concerns about the skills crisis limiting number of mainframe professionals left in the market, and the importance of being able to leverage cloud deployment, agile development, and open source initiatives.

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IBM's i operating system -- originally known as OS/400 -- is still popular in many larger and mid-sized organizations, and it is of course subject to the same security and compliance challenges as other systems.

Big data specialist Syncsort is launching additions to its Syncsort Assure family of products to help i users achieve compliance with GDPR and other legislation, and strengthen security with multi-factor authentication.

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Over the past decade, DevOps techniques have helped to transform software development teams with a new and more agile approach.

But now companies are starting to move beyond the standard DevOps approach in what is being called 'Day 2' DevOps, a world that emphasizes scalability and teamwork. In such environments, development teams shift one way, operations teams shift the other and together they can deliver and manage multiple, complex applications at the same time.

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Despite changes brought about by the cloud, edge computing and distributed systems, the mainframe remains for many businesses, the most stable, secure and mature environment to support IT initiatives including the proliferation of blockchains.

IBM is launching its newest cloud ready mainframe -- the IBM z14 Model ZR1 and IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper II, the latest additions to its family of z14 mainframe technology announced in 2017.

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It’s time to wrap up all these 2018 predictions, so here are my final three in which Apple finds a new groove, IBM prepares for a leadership change, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gives up a dream.

Apple has long needed a new franchise. It’s been almost eight years since the iPad (Apple’s last new business) was introduced. Thanks to Donald Trump’s tax plan, Cupertino can probably stretch its stock market winning streak for another 2-3 years with cash repatriation, share buy-backs, dividend increases and cost reductions, but the company really needs another new $20+ billion business and it will take every one of those years to get a new one up to scale.

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Mainframes are still vital to many larger businesses and a new report from Syncsort highlights some key trends including the mainframe’s role in strategic projects.

The results show the mainframe remains strategic to businesses, with 57 percent of respondents saying it will continue to be the main hub for business-critical applications this year. It will run revenue-generating services for 43 percent. Cost control is a priority though, 51 percent say they plan to cut IT costs by optimizing mainframe resources.

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The increase in the number and variety of connected devices has made enterprise IT environments much more complex.

Maintaining security and compliance is a tricky problem and IoT security specialist ForeScout is integrating with IBM Security solutions to offer users stringer endpoint protection and automated risk mitigation.

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While public cloud adoption continues to grow, organizations, especially in regulated industries like finance and health care, are continuing to use private clouds to quickly launch and update applications.

To tap into this market IBM is launching a new Cloud Private software platform, designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development.

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IBM has looked to take the pain out of transferring currency across territories with the creation of a new cross-border blockchain payment solution.

Built in partnership with KlickEx Group and Stellar.org, the solution should improve efficiency and reduce the cost of global payments for both consumers and businesses.

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Google and IBM, together with a few other partners, released an open-source project that gathers metadata that developers can use to secure their software.

According to an IBM blog post, the goal of the project is to help developers keep security standards, while microservices and containers cut the software supply chain.

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Businesses looking for a quicker and easier way to move VMware workloads to the cloud will soon be able to benefit from a new deal between IBM and Vodafone.

At the VMworld Europe event in Barcelona today, the two companies revealed  the launch of a service that they claim will help tackle one of the biggest issues affecting IT departments that use VMware services.

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