• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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• White Hats Completely Dismantle Menu-Based Security

  February 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Think menu-based security can prevent cybercriminals from accessing the most important parts of your IBM i system? Think again, as the white hat hacking group Silent Signal recently demonstrated in a real-world penetration test of a bank’s IBM i system through a seemingly restricted green-screen interface.

  Life was demonstrably simpler for midrange administrators before the Internet took off. Before we had all these different protocols providing access to applications and data – ODBC, FTP, SQL, Remote Command, etc. – an administrator could feel somewhat confident that users weren’t accessing things they shouldn’t by simply configuring their menus in a restrictive …

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• Cloud Software To Drive Enterprise Application Growth

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even with something on the order of 242,100 layoffs at the top 40 tech companies in 2022 and another 106,950 layoffs in January alone, according to the analysts at Jefferies, it is still very difficult to find talent to update and extend application software. And that is one reason why the market researchers at IDC think that enterprise software sales will continue to grow in the coming years.

  To be specific, IDC reckons that worldwide revenue for enterprise applications – meaning real applications, not systems software that underpins applications – accounted for $279.6 billion in sales in 2022, and will …

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• How Do You Stay In Touch With The IBM i Community?

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i community is global and diverse. There is a lot of things going on in our part of the IT industry, and it can be tough to keep up with everything that is going on with the IBM i platform.

  But it is nonetheless important for us all to understand how people are keeping up to date on new technologies and other cultural and corporate things that are happening in our community. Which is why Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra (formerly known as HelpSystems), did a quick poll during the 2023 IBM i …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 6

  February 6, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  American airspace had a new security vulnerability last week in the form of a Chinese balloon loaded with who knows what, and here are the new security vulnerabilities you need to worry about for the IBM i platform. There are three new ones that you need to shoot down over the ocean, just like U.S. Air Force did with that “surveillance” balloon after it traversed the heartland of the country from Montana to South Carolina.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2023-23477), which you can find out more about …

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• Security Still Top Concern, IBM i Marketplace Study Says

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security continues to be the number one concern of IBM i shops surveyed for the annual IBM i Marketplace Study conducted by Fortra. Application modernization surged ahead from last year’s finish to make the race for number one interesting, while HA/DR and IBM i skills rounded out the top four concerns.

  Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) formally released its 2023 IBM i Marketplace Study last week, making it the ninth straight year that the company has released the study. This year’s study, which you can access here, is based on surveys taken last year by about 300 individuals from the IBM …

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• Bob Langieri Shares IBM i Career Trends Outlook for 2023

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to career trends in the IBM i community, there are few who have a better sense of what’s going on than Bob Langieri. The longtime CEO of Excel Technical Services in Orange County, California, has his fingers on the pulse of the job situation, which is why we turn to him for an outlook on 2023 trends.

  The economy started out on a down note last year before picking up momentum towards the end of 2022, Langieri notes. Those forces are still with us today, the tea leaves are inconclusive.

  “A recession is defined as two consecutive …

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• Kisco Brings Native SMS Messaging to IBM i

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Kisco Information Systems recently launched a new IBM i product designed to facilitate native SMS messaging on IBM i. Pre-integrated with Twilio, kConnect will not only keep administrators aware of security and other events occurring on IBM i, but it will also help streamline the configuration of two-factor authentication (2FA) setups on the box.

  Kisco’s newest IBM i utility allows users to send SMS messages to recipients directly from an IBM i application, which can be useful for a variety of reasons. The product supports sending messages via a command line or directly from their custom IBM i applications, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 1

  February 1, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  We’re just a month into 2023, and we can already see a lot of action from IBM. Our Top Stories this week all revolve around IBM activity, some of which is good, and some of which less so. (Layoffs are never good news, but especially so in the current economy.) But like we said, there is lots of good happening, both in and around the industry. Check out the Calendar below, which is becoming loaded with new events, so be sure to take a look. You will notice that the virtual option appears to be here to stay, and is …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4

  February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.

  Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …

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• Power Systems Did Indeed Grow Revenues Last Year

  January 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September, when Blue Blue took a huge write-off to offload some of its pension and retirement burdens to an independent third party, it posted a pretty hefty $3.21 billion net loss. But IBM’s underlying business was functioning about as well as it could under the circumstances and it was reasonably profitable and looking ahead to pretty good Power10 and System z16 upgrade cycles. We forecast that IBM would actually grow revenues for Power Systems for 2022, and according to our model, IBM indeed has done it.

  And by a much larger margin than the company has grown overall, …

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• The IBM Power Trap: Three Mistakes That Leave You Stuck

  January 30, 2023 Jason Hardy

  IBM Power has long been known as a stable, reliable hardware platform and as a result companies have leveraged it to run their most critical business applications. For many, it has become so ingrained in their business that they would never choose to migrate away from it.

  But for some, IBM Power has become a trap from which they can’t escape. This is not a malicious trap that suddenly jumps up and grabs you but rather a trap that is triggered by a series of decisions made over time with each compounded by the previous. So, what are these decisions …

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• Big Blue Decrees Its 2023 IBM Champions

  January 30, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM this year celebrates a bumper crop of IBM Champions, those technology experts who also display “extraordinary advocacy” for IBM products. In total, there are 839 IBM Champions hailing from 60 countries around the world, while in our little neck of the IT wood, there are about 90 members from the global IBM i community who gained the honor.

  IBM launched the IBM Champions program in 2008 as a way to honor IBM customers and business partners who not only are subject matter experts but who also are active in the community. Today, there are 11 categories for the IBM …

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• As I See It: The Good, the Bad, And The Mistaken

  January 30, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Writing a comprehensive history of IT would prove daunting if not impossible. The milestones are well documented, but not the steps between. From the legions of unsung programmers who developed the systems we take for granted, to the effects of social media that are both private and collective, IT is a complex swirl of the good, the bad, and the mistaken.

  Since hindsight lends itself to clarity (albeit flavored with arrogance), let’s start with the mistaken. The grandest of all IT prediction fails belongs to none other than IBM’s legendary Thomas Watson. Back in 1943 he opined that, “There is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 5

  January 30, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here’s a question for you: Are you using encryption to download software fixes from IBM? You may not know, and worse yet, you may not know how to figure that out. This is important because as we warned you last fall, IBM’s Electronic Fix Distribution and Fix Central systems will end support for unencrypted fix downloads starting on February 15 of this year.

  That gives you two weeks and a day to figure it out. And this document from IBM helps you figure it out and tells you what to do.

  Aside from this, it has been pretty quiet in …

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• N2i Gains Traction Among IBM i Newbies

  January 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The YiPS made a big push to inject youth into the IBM i community over a decade ago. But when the youthful vigor ran low, members of the community regrouped, re-energized, and rebranded into a new group called New to IBM i (N2i). And judging from N2i’s recent success, the group has hit on something.

  N2i has its roots in the YiPS, according to Marina Schwenk, who was a YiPS member back in the day and now is active in COMMON and the WMCPA. But there’s a crucial difference between N2i and YIPS, she says.

  “The group that we’re …

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• Realizing The Promise Of Cross Platform Development With VS Code

  January 25, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  An integrated development environment is like a tractor or a truck, or indeed any other kind of tool. There are farmers who want a tractor from John Deere or Ford or Massey-Ferguson, contractors who want a Ford or Dodge or GMC truck, and carpenters and electricians who use Dewalt or Milwaukee Electric or Makita cordless tools.

  No matter the choice of tools, ultimately these blue collar workers are going to farm and build things, and the choice of tool should not interfere with that effort. White collar – or far more likely no collar T shirt – programmers are no …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 3

  January 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security. Cloud. AI. The IBM i installed base moves with the general IT tide, which makes these hot topics for all. But what about specific IBM i things, like the availability of IBM i jobs and the difficulty in finding a good RPG developer? These are topics we are tackling in our third – and final – round of 2023 predictions.

  Bob Langieri, the IBM i recruiter who owns Excel Technical Services, has his pulse on the IBM i job situation, particularly in his Southern California region. 2023 looks to be a mixed bag, job-wise, he says.

  “In the …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 25

  January 25, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Have you noticed there is national day for just about everything? Just in the month of January, we have national chocolate-covered cherry day, national bean day, national houseplant appreciation day, and national dress up your pet day, to name just a few. As it turns out, we are now in the middle of a week that our industry should probably be celebrating a little bit louder. Data privacy week, which runs from January 22 through 28, was created by the National Cybersecurity Alliance to help spread awareness about online privacy, and educates citizens on how to manage personal information, and …

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• Join The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webinar Tomorrow

  January 25, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall, many of you took part in the 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that is done by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems. And on Thursday, January 26, Fortra will host the webinar covering its results at 10 a.m. Eastern. A whole bunch of us will be on hand to present historical trends and analysis on those results.

  You can sign up for the webinar at this link, which is free and which will last for an hour.

  Among the many topics that will be covered are:

  • Power10 adoption and future plans
  • How organizations continue to

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