• HelpSystems Gets New Investors, CEO

  October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, as HelpSystems recently announced that it has a pair of new investors, as well as a new CEO. The software company has also made strides in the security space with a pair of new offerings, including one that supports IBM i.

  Let’s start with the man – or should we say, the woman – at the top. Kate Bolseth, who was most recently the COO, has taken over the top job at HelpSystems. Bolseth was the general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems when IT Jungle interviewed her last …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What To Pack For The Digital Transformation Journey

  October 16, 2019 Emmanuel Tzinevrakis

  Welcome to a new column called Thoroughly Modern. The name is meant to convey the idea that we need to define the desired – if ever-evolving – end state of our businesses and the people, processes, and programs that encapsulate how everything works when we get there.

  It is a given that everyone understands that digital transformation is sweeping every industry, with incumbents being challenged by upstarts – and each other – as they try to create new and better ways to provide products and services to customers in a modern, digital world. We accept this as a first …

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• Syncsort Expands IBM i Integration with ServiceNow

  October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to take full advantage of cloud-based IT management services may be interested in hearing about a new offering unveiled by Syncsort last week. With the new release of its Ironstream for ServiceNow product, Syncsort is making it easier for companies to push IBM i and mainframe event data into ServiceNow Event Management.

  ServiceNow is barely five years old, but the company has already made a big mark in the burgeoning fields of IT service management and AIOps. With $2.6 billion in revenue and more than, 5,000 software as a service (SaaS) subscribers, the publicly traded …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 16

  October 16, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  It’s a big day for IBM. Big Blue will be reporting its Q3 earnings this afternoon and there are a lot of expectations on what results may, or may not, be seen from the Red Hat acquisition, among other possibilities. Of course, you can expect to see some slicing and dicing of IBM’s numbers, as well as what it may mean for our IBM i ecosystem, in future issues of The Four Hundred, but until then, please read on to check out what’s been happening around IT this past week.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (Barron’s) IBM will …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 41

  October 16, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  We were busy at IBM Systems Technology University in Las Vegas last week and also had to chew through the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4, so we are not our normal chatty selves here at the IBM i PTF Guide. Please do forgive.

  So what’s new, you ask? There are new HIPER groups on all four releases. Yes, even IBM i 7.1, with MF66663, which deals with hard disk issues. That’s enough excitement for one week, really.

  New (or Updated) Links this week: None this week, busily gleaning useful tidbits from TechU calls material! …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

  October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

  “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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• Need Help Approving A Modernization Project? Try A Business-Led Approach

  October 14, 2019 Ajay Gomez

  (Sponsored Content) Getting momentum and buy-in for a modernization project can be tough. I’ve lived through this and fought the battle many times. What makes it difficult is that the problem is not obvious and needs to be explained to people outside of IT. For example, it’s not obvious to a business leader that RPG II code should be modernized to RPG ILE. In fact, if we were to modernize the underlying code without telling them, they wouldn’t notice a difference. The business doesn’t see the effects of modernization unless it’s UI modernization, which is why it’s tough …

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• Guru: Move Objects with Access Client Solutions

  October 14, 2019 Dawn May

  Sending objects from one IBM i partition to another is a common task. Access Client Solutions’ IFS task makes it simple to copy or send objects. The IFS task was introduced in ACS in July 2016, so this is not a new development, but it may not be widely known.

  Perhaps you need to send a save file to another IBM i partition. There are several ways to do this. FTP and Secure FTP are often used, but using FTP to transfer IBM i objects involves all sorts of complications. The IBM i Knowledge Center dedicates an entire section on …

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• An 11-Core Power9 Makes The Rounds, And Other Hardware Enhancements

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who go way back in the IBM midrange are used to rhythm in hardware announcements. In the early days, there were several announcements per year as new processors were rolled out across the product line and new peripherals for various kinds of storage and networking were rolled out. The pace was brisk back in the day, with nearly annual processor upgrades and associated updates to systems.

  These days, systems are really updated every three years or so, but still, there is the vestigial spring/fall announcement cadence when Big Blue now does Technology Refreshes for the IBM i …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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• IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

  October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

  We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

  First of …

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• Raz-Lee Asks ‘What If’ With Firewall

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Security administrators who feel challenged to keep up with the volume and variety of log data emanating from the IBM i server may be interested in the new “What If” features that Raz-Lee Security recently added to Firewall, its exit-point management solution for IBM i.

  Firewall helps to guard network access points to IBM i servers, including TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, DHCP, and other protocols. The software lets administrators set global and specific access rules for groups of IBM i servers and users, as well as controlling access to IBM i objects and providing the ability to set exceptions for specific …

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• IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

  We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

  In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 9

  October 9, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The term “DevOps” dates back to 2008. The idea behind the word is that organizations bring together development and operations teams to create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches. DevOps on IBM i certainly isn’t a new concept, but it seems to be on everyone’s minds this week. As we look at the news of the week, “DevOps” kept popping up and this seemed like as good a time as any to take a look at why it’s gone from a concept to mainstream priority in IT departments everywhere. Check out …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 40

  October 9, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s time once again to peruse and ponder the updates Big Blue is making to the IBM i stack. As we report elsewhere, the Technology Refreshes have been announced for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, which are coming out in the middle of November. And as always, there are some things to check out inside the IBM i PTF Guide for other stuff that is going on – and in this case, this was stuff that happened before the TRs were announced on Tuesday concurrent with IBM Systems Technology University, or TechU, being held in Las Vegas.

  The big warning …

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• Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help

  October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.

  These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, And IBM i Modernization: Part 1

  October 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What’s the best approach for application modernization: Maintain the monolithic architecture, or break it into individual microservices? This is an important question, especially for IBM i shops that are looking to take their considerable investment in encoded business logic to the next level.

  At first blush, the answer seems obvious: Monolithic architectures are bad, and microservices are good. Monolithic architectures, which are still quite prevalent in the IBM i world, proliferated from the 1970s well to the 2000s thanks in part to the popularity of packaged ERP suites that automated a multitude of processes and also to the programming inclinations …

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• Guru: Edit Result Sets in Run SQL Scripts

  October 7, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Before getting into the detail in this article, I want it to be clear that I do NOT (in any way) advocate the direct editing of data in a production database. But when it comes to a test database, then the ability to directly edit data is invaluable.

  Back in the days of System i Navigator, you could right click on a table, select the Edit option and a window would open containing the contents of the table. You could directly edit the contents of any cell. Rows could be inserted or deleted using the Rows option on the menu. …

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• Automation For The Masses – Here Come The Bots

  October 7, 2019 Richard Schoen

  Have you ever heard of using a robot to assist in completing your daily work? Or maybe the concept of eliminating redundant manual data entry and re-keying of info you didn’t think was possible? Let’s talk about bots, as these software robots are known, and how they are coming to an IBM i shop near you and how your IT and business teams can leverage this technology to get work done more efficiently.

  Many people in the IBM i world have never heard of the acronym: RPA. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, the current buzz word for implementing software …

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• Power7 And Power7+ Will Truly Be Dead At The End Of 2020

  October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are five dates that define the life of a piece of software and hardware: When it is announced, when it is generally available, when it is withdrawn from marketing, when service is withdrawn on the product, and when extended service (which is limited and which costs a lot more money than regular service) is dropped and the product is truly done for.

  With software, IBM sometimes provides service, service extension, extended service extension, and even extended-extended service extension. I am not making this up, and yes it sounds like the Monty Python SPAM skit. Take a look:

  As you …

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