Why would you attend iBelieve? The marketing tagline for iBelieve New England was “IBM i - A future you can believe in”. Given that most people attending events don’t read the “abstract”, is that tagline enough to make you want to go?
Maybe you did read it and still did not attend?

Some years ago, customers wanted graphical user interfaces from the AS/400. In March 1992, the News 3X/400 magazine printed an article titled “GUIs - The Dawn of a New Age”. In July 1995, the Midrange Systems newspaper printed an article titled “The Final Word on GUIs”. Yet, in 20i3, customers are still using green screen applications!

COMMON North America has a long and treasured history among the IBM i community.

From humble beginnings, through platform changes, over more than fifty years, the organization continues to provide relevant education for not only the IBM i platform, but adds more AIX and Linux education each year. While the audience of Linux and AIX attendees is slowly growing, the majority of attendees remain IBM i customers.

On March 5th, 2013, looksoftware and Maxava held an event in downtown Melbourne. The original invite can be found here: http://www.looksoftware.com/home/ibmi-melbourne.aspx 

Attended by many IBM i customers, the event was a little marketing and a little evangelism. Similar to the longer iBelieve events being held by looksoftware in North America over the last year, none of the sessions were a vendor pitch. This seemed to resonate well with the audience, and the Q&A session was simply not long enough to satisfy their curiosity. From my perspective as the emcee, it was a successful event given that the questions raised may be the start of a dialog in the local IBM i community.

Green screen applications have one single advantage over any other kind of application available today - they appear to be quite fast.

Historically, this was not always the case, and response time was something that users would complain about regularly. As the servers running IBM i applications have increased in performance, regardless of how bad (or good) the underlying code is, performance appears to have improved, and quite substantially. Having been a speaker on performance tuning a decade ago, and watching the shenanigans played by so-called performance ‘experts’, I always ask when speaking at conferences about how many people have performance issues on their IBM i. The count used to be almost every attendee, today it is rarely more than one attendee occasionally.

Most of us find we are not keeping up with our job...

...there is not a moment to breathe, we work long hours, we are rarely finished on time, and the pipeline is endless. Whether it is maintenance, or new projects, we are overcommitted. And, unfortunately, this means that in general, I.T. has a reputation of rarely finishing anything on time. Ultimately, that responsibility is ours, yet we get caught up in the same cycle of development, and rarely step back to look at the bigger picture.