• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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• Yum, Liam Allan, and the Future of the Platform

  June 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to believe, but Liam Allan has become a veteran at these things. He might be only 21 years old, but the young Englishman already has become a sought-after speaker on the IBM i event circuit and a respected voice for open source development. At COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, Allan elaborated on Yum’s arrival on IBM i, his own open source work, and the future of the platform.

  Allan first appeared on the IBM i scene two years ago, when he won the 2016 COMMON Student Innovation Award for his work on the IBM i …

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• CNX Opens Up Valence to Non-IBM i Platforms

  June 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  CNX has removed several key technological limitations in its Valence application development framework, ranging from what JavaScript libraries the software works with, all the way to what server operating systems the generated applications run on.

  Despite its numerical designation, the launch of Valence version 5.2 at the COMMON POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month was hailed by CNX as a major announcement. According to Richard Milone, CNX’s co-founder and managing partner, the company was able to complete several major development projects in time for the delivery of version 5.2.

  Four major changes accompany the release, according to Milone. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 20

  June 20, 2018 Dan Burger

  You all have an opinion about the IBM i, but how often do you get asked to give it? COMMON is in the midst of planning for its October conference in Pittsburgh and they are looking for input from the IBM i community on what they would like to see on the agenda. The catch is COMMON needs to know by Friday so if you have some ideas, you better be quick about it. You can find the link at the top of our Top Stories. Blockchain and AI continue to dominate the news around the IT community and we …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 24

  June 20, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Rochester, we have a problem. The statement below is copied directly from an IBM notice. I did not want any confusion about its contents. The SFTP services are showing up in some places already, but not everywhere. We will let you know where and when as we are informed.

  IMPORTANT: Planned changes to ECuRep upload and download server.
  • All ECuRep servers will be requiring IBM ID authentication, soon. Please make sure that you own an IBM ID and that your processes will be able to use IBM ID authentication instead of anonymous log-in. (https://www.ibm.com/account/us-en/signup/register.html)
  • We will discontinue the 

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• Q&A With IBM i’s AppDev Architect

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  During COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management at IBM, to talk about what’s going on with application development on the platform. Here’s an edited version of that conversation.

  IT Jungle: So what’s happening in IBM i application development? What’s new up there in Rochester?

  Tim Rowe: In between all sorts of fun development stuff that we got going on back in the lab, I spend quite a bit of time talking with customers. We continue to …

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• As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow

  June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.

  This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …

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• Guru: RPG’s New DATA-INTO

  June 18, 2018 Jon Paris

  In this tip I’m going to give a brief introduction to the latest addition to the RPG language. The new DATA-INTO op-code. DATA-INTO is IBM’s response to the oft-asked question: “When is IBM going to introduce JSON-INTO so we can process JSON as easily as XML?”

  DATA-INTO provides this capability, but IBM has very cleverly given it functionality that goes way beyond what a simple JSON-INTO op-code could ever have done. DATA-INTO is effectively a cross between XML-INTO and Open Access. Like XML-INTO it uses the names of items and their hierarchy to unpack the document into RPG variables. Like …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Wounding Watson

  June 18, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  CEO Ginni Rometty is highly regarded inside and outside IBM. For instance, the Forbes ranking of female executives puts Rometty in the top ten. Moreover, gender and other qualifiers aside, Rometty is one of the world’s prominent business leaders. When she does well, the results are widely broadcast; when she slips up, however, so is criticism. In the spring of 2018, media reported big layoffs in the health related activities within IBM’s Watson collection of technologies. The buck stopped with Rometty, who was undoubtedly rattled; she will recover. Watson was wounded; the prognosis is uncertain.

  The Watson problem, an …

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• Raz-Lee Debuts Anti-Ransomware For IBM i

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Despite its reputation as a secure digital fortress for back office automation, the IBM i server is subject to all manner of modern security threats. That includes ransomware, which can work its way onto mapped IFS drives and render business documents stored on the IBM i server useless. Raz-Lee Security recently launched a new solution aimed at combatting the spread of ransomware on IBM i.

  Today’s business environment rewards companies that embrace openness. Companies are encouraged to open up their mainframes and IBM i servers and leverage the data and business processes they contain using APIs, microservices, and modern user …

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• Winning The Platform War With IBM i

  June 13, 2018 Alex Woodie

  How much influence does the selection of a computer system have on a given company’s success? What about the success of all the companies that use that platform? Those are tough question, to be sure, and probably ones that graduate students could ponder on their way to getting an MBA. But according to IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will, who has a first-row seat to the platform wars, the proof of IBM i’s success is in the pudding.

  If you’re like most IBM i professionals, you get a little defensive when plans are made to migrate off the platform. You …

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• What HelpSystems Is Up To Now

  June 13, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to a slew of acquisitions, HelpSystems has become one the largest independent software vendors in the IBM i marketplace, with tools spanning operations, security, backup, high availability, forms management, and capacity planning. A company representative recent sat down with IT Jungle at the recent COMMON PowerUp conference to talk about what’s new.

  HelpSystems didn’t have a single major product launch at the COMMON conference in San Antonio, Texas, two weeks ago. Instead the company used the event to showcase multiple enhancements, and to talk about future products — such as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution and …

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• What Cloud Providers Must Do To Attract IBM i

  June 13, 2018 Lief Morin

  The cloud is a compelling platform for almost every business. It’s real, and it’s here to stay. There are many reasons cloud consumption models are attractive, starting with the big four: predictable payments and cost savings, consistency of service, almost unlimited elasticity and access to advanced services and personnel. These are the benefits that cloud service providers have emphasized most as clients try to understand how cloud services might work best in their enterprise.

  The real benefits of the cloud, however, go far beyond these three things. As the cloud matures and service providers’ offerings blur into each other, they …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 13

  June 13, 2018 Dan Burger

  Our summer publishing schedule has prevented us from catching you up on what’s been going on around the IBM i ecosystem of late, but we always have our eye on the community for you. As you will note in our Top Stories below, Big Blue has been especially busy in many different tech arenas and around the globe.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (The Motley Fool) CEO Ginni Rometty declares IBM’s new AI Supercomputer one of Big Blue’s greatest achievements as Summit makes its debut.

  (ZDNet) The clouds are rolling in as IBM creates 18 new “availability zones” in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 23

  June 13, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Here we are, back in the Wednesday issue of The Four Hundred where we belong, with the latest updates to the comings and goings of PTF patches for the IBM i platform.

  There is a new flight recorder for troubleshooting optical problems – OPT devices, including RDX attached – for IBM i 7.2 and 7.1. Check this link out if you are running any of these. It is a handy thing to know about.

  When ordering Cumulative PTF group(s), the DB and HIPER PTFs are included if the order is for your current release. If it is for a release …

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• IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

  June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …

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• Profound Logic Shows Off Innovation At PowerUp

  June 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The recent COMMON PowerUp 18 conference was a tour de force for Profound Logic, which not only showcased major enhancements to its flagship Web and mobile development tool for IBM i, Profound UI, but also swept the IBM Innovation Awards with two customer success stories.

  Let’s start with the Innovation Awards. Every year, IBM and COMMON highlight the innovative work that two companies do with their IBM i systems, including first and second place. While IBM i modernization vendors are usually well-represented in the nominations and eventual winners, we’ve never seen clients of the same modernization vendor take both first …

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• Guru: DB2 For i XML Composition And The IFS

  June 11, 2018 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike! Regarding Composing An XML Document From Relational Data, Part 1, I have built an XML document using DB2 and i. When I run the query, I get a worthless result set. How do I use the SQL XML functions to get a usable XML file?

  This question comes from reader RA, and he doesn’t exaggerate. The result set from his XML-based query looks like this:

  ....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+
  ************Beginning of data************** 
  
  XMLDATA 
  -------- 
  #CGULIB#
  
    1 RECORD(S) SELECTED.
  
   ************End of Data********************
  

  Notice that DB2 for i does nothing to make the XML attractive to human eyes as the entire XML …

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• As I See It: The Hunt For Perfect Storage

  June 11, 2018 Victor Rozek

  I have a garage so full of stuff my car winters outdoors. For all I know, D.B. Cooper stashed his loot in there, which is why it has never been found. After a fruitless hour searching for a power washer attachment, I would have been happy to set the whole mess ablaze.

  If the first half of my life was about acquiring stuff, the second half is about trying to get rid of it. Without much success. Abundance, of course, is not the worst difficulty ever to befall humankind, but like too much of any good thing, indulging yourself is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 22

  June 11, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are jumping around a bit this summer, so bear with us. We are running in both the Monday and the Wednesday editions of The Four Hundred this week to get caught up after a hiatus last week of the Wednesday issue. The news tends to be light in the summer, as you all know, so we often consolidate to one publication a week. This is particularly true after COMMON. Er, PowerUp 18.

  So here is what is going on. The Spectre/Meltdown (SM) PTFs have been rolled into the latest Security Group level for IBM i 7.3, 7.2, and …

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