• We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

  March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  (Sponsored Content) While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics …

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• Guru: SELECT INTO And Arrays

  March 8, 2021 Ted Holt

  I got egg on my face again. I told a couple of colleagues that they could use the SELECT INTO statement to load multiple rows into an array data structure in an RPG program. Boy, was I wrong! I had confused SELECT INTO with the FETCH statement, of course, which retrieves data over which a cursor has been declared.

  But the matter continued to nag me. I much like the simplicity of SELECT INTO. There’s no cursor to declare, open, fetch from and close, the same reason I like the FOR loop in SQL PL. It seemed (and continues …

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• Clearlake Re-Acquires Precisely In $3.5 Billion Deal

  March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Clearlake Capital Group has regained a controlling interest in Precisely, the company it sold four years ago to another private equity firm called Centerbridge Partners. This time around, Precisely is a significantly bigger company, with a valuation of $3.5 billion and 12,000 customers.

  You almost need a flowchart to graph the on-again, off-again state of Clearlake’s ownership of Precisely and two companies that came before it, Syncsort and Vision Solutions. But we’ll do the best we can using words.

  To recap: In 2015, Clearlake takes a controlling interest in Syncsort, a Pearl River, New York-based provider of data integration solutions …

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• Ansible Automation Story Gets Better on IBM i

  March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When IBM and Red Hat launched support for IBM i with its Ansible automation software in July 2020, it provided about three dozen Ansible modules that supported specific actions on IBM i. The companies recently added another dozen or so Ansible updates for IBM i, making the software even more useful on the midrange server.

  Ansible is an open source configuration management package originally designed to enable remote administration of Linux servers. Over time, the software has been adopted to support a wide number of operating environments, including Kubernetes orchestration environments managing Docker containers in public and private clouds.

  The …

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• Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.

  2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …

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• mrc Refreshes IBM i Low-Code Dev Tool

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the latest release of mrc’s m-Power Web app development tool will find the tool easier to use and that applications can be developed faster than before, the company says.

  mrc markets m-Power as a low-code development platform that supports IBM i and other Java platforms. The software is not a full-blown integrated development environment (IDE), the Chicago-based vendor says. But if the user is looking to quickly generate Web interfaces, dashboards, reports, portals, or mobile apps for existing IBM i applications, then it is a good fit.

  The vendor says it built the new release …

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• Unit Testing Automation Hits Shift Left Instead of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Cash

  March 3, 2021 Nick Blamey

  (Sponsored Content) In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, with its dual pressures of the uncertainty of the economy at a small and global scale and the fever pitch need to rapidly modernize applications, it is hard to know where to start. Given this scale of change, as a supplier of application modernization tools that are derived from both a strong IBM i heritage and the youth and strength of open source, you might think that ARCAD Software would be most interested in selling customers its entire toolbox.

  Not necessarily – the answer all depends on your starting …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 3

  March 3, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  IBM’s attention on the hybrid cloud is common knowledge by now. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been crystal clear that he is deeply passionate about the hybrid cloud, and some weeks the hybrid cloud dominates the news cycle. Like this week. Our IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will kicked it off with his latest blog post to clear up some of the confusion he says surrounds industry cloud strategies, which you can find as our Top Story below. Then read on for the latest on the hybrid cloud, as well as the latest IBM i resources and events.

  Top Stories

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 9

  March 3, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Hello, good people of the IBM i Land. As so many newscasters all said across the United States earlier this week, it is hard to believe that it is March already. But it is March indeed, and it has been about a year since the coronavirus went pandemic. We hope you are well, and we hope you stay that way.

  In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will see that Rational Developer for i now supports an updated Java – to be specific, Java 8 SR 6 FP 15. You can find out more at …

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• Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.

  As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …

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• PHP’s Legacy Problem

  March 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  PHP is one of the most popular languages on the Web, with arguably billions of lines of code in use across hundreds of thousands of applications. But that long history of successful use exposes a problem for PHP that IBM i shops will be all-too familiar with: a severe reluctance to upgrade. A recent survey by Perforce puts PHP’s legacy situation in perspective.

  In January, Perforce (which owns Zend) published its 2021 PHP Landscape Report, which is based on a survey of 670 developers and administrators that Perforce conducted last fall. That was just before the delivery of PHP …

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• Guru: For IBM i Newcomers, An Access Client Solutions Primer

  March 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  I enjoy reading about IBM i Fresh Faces. Sure, it’s refreshing to see that it’s not just graybeards like me who are working on the platform, but what really matters is that young people are learning about, getting hands-on with, and coming to love IBM i. I appreciate that many of these stories revolve around system/application modernization and open source solutions. This gives newcomers to IBM i a degree of comfort by reducing their learning curve.

  Learning any new technology is challenging. Specifically, how do you go from learning about the concepts to actually getting on a machine and …

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• IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.

  IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …

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• Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.

  The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …

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• IBM Extends Dynamic Capacity Pricing Scheme To Its Cloud

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What if you could buy computer processing credits from a systems vendor and use the credits to run workloads on your on-premise server or in the vendor’s cloud? Better yet, what if the vendor was IBM and the workloads were IBM i applications? Because that is essentially the hybrid computing pricing structure that IBM unveiled yesterday as part of its latest Power Systems announcements.

  The new hybrid pricing option is an extension of the so-called Dynamic Capacity pricing scheme that IBM unveiled through its Power Private Cloud offering, which IBM launched in May 2020. As part of that offering, …

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• Here’s What You Should Do About The IBM i Skills Shortage

  February 24, 2021 Jason Hardy

  (Sponsored Content) A shrinking IBM i talent pool has been a major concern for years.

  Back in 2015, dwindling access to IBM i professionals was blamed by IBM’s own top brass on revenue shortfalls. A system that had been around for nearly three decades, it was only a matter of time until the veterans left for greener pastures. The problem was, and continues to be, that fewer young professionals have been eager to master the same set of skills.

  According to the latest data, not only is the IBM talent shortage getting worse by the year – it’s …

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• Matillion Founder Recounts Midrange Roots

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the mad rush to build data warehouses in the cloud, there’s one group that’s doing surprisingly well: ETL tool providers. Despite the sophistication of today’s AI and analytic endeavors, ETL tools are a critical link in the chain to the cloud. And one of the up-and-coming vendors in this space is Matillion, which last week raised $100 million in venture capital.

  Matillion was founded in 2011 to help companies build cloud data warehouses. The Anglo-American firm developed expertise in taking companies’ corporate data from on-premise systems and building data warehouse on emerging cloud systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 24

  February 24, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Seeking feedback isn’t always a joyous task. With feedback can come criticism, which can lead to hurt feelings. But it can also point us in new directions that lead to better services and products and result in improvements that might not have been part of the original plan. These are just some of the reasons we encourage all of you to use your voice when it comes to the IBM i to help make positive gains for our whole ecosystem. One of the easiest ways to be heard is to take surveys and help companies who are seeking feedback. You’ll …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 8

  February 24, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. Right off the bat, there are SMTP recommended fixes for IBM i 7.4, IBM i 7.3, and IBM i 7.2. Use recommended fixes link in the guide for your appropriate release.

  Otherwise, there ain’t much going on. Which is often a good thing.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.1:

  • Nothing here, as often happens.

  New (or Updated) Links for this week:

  • Optical: IBM i Removable Media: Optical

  … Read more

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