Four Hundred Monitor, June 14

June 14, 2017 Dan Burger

An IT strategy is often a major resource strategy. Where to allocate resources and how much to allocate is a big part of it. When you are the chief architect for IBM i, you set your priorities beginning with the DB2 for i database and work from there. There are competitive strategies to take into account and collaborative strategies as well. In this article, Steve Will talks mostly about the need for collaborative strategies.

You could say open source is an important collaborative strategy for IBM i. There’s a legitimate emphasis in that direction. Building skills and increasing the IBM i workforce could benefit from an improved collaborative effort.

Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

(CBR) There’s risk involved with doing – or not doing – just about everything you can think of. But the risks of not innovating and not getting the best talent, are significant. That may be why open source software is gaining momentum in the IBM i community. And it just may be that moving to open source software is more of a cultural obstacle than a technology obstacle.

(CRN) IBM’s popular channel chief, Marc Dupaquier, is departing after 33 years with the technology giant, including the last four leading Big Blue’s vast ecosystem of global channel partners and distributors. Dupaquier was once the general manager of the Business Systems division IBM. John Teltsch will replace Dupaquier.

(ZDNet) In discussions about cloud environments, many reasons are found to run part or all of your systems in a private environment. Compliance, security, and performance are usually at the top of the list. And if you’re building a private cloud, there are many options. Each has different features, security capabilities, and costs, but in every case, you retain a great deal of security responsibility.

Redbooks, White Papers, and Other Resources

(Seiden Group) This handout from Alan Seiden’s presentation titled “PHP for Batch Tasks on IBM i” includes tips for improving Web application performance. It focuses on front-end performance including topics such as request-response protocol, caching, creating favicons, the “KeepAlive” setting, compression to decrease file size, and tips for JavaScript and cascading style sheets.

(S4i Systems) Better Object Builder is a free and open source build system for the IBM i platform that is used to build native “QSYS” objects. It compiles objects that need recompiling (i.e. new or changed source code) and understands the relationships between objects—so, if an item changes, then it and everything depending on it will be rebuilt.

(Connectria) This recorded webinar on IBM i trends and directions presented by IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will discusses the strategy for IBM i on Power Systems, the IBM i roadmap, IBM i growth, and the IBM i place in cloud computing.

(Remain Software) This report examines how business changes influence IT and how application functionality can keep up with changing business systems. It also reveals the challenges faced by software development teams, how they relate to the competitiveness of your organization and what can be done to reduce the cost of IT.

(IBM) Conventional databases designed for structured data are unable to cope with the data from a wide variety of sources – internal, external, social, mobile and sensors. This report explains the advantages of open source database-as-a-service (DBaaS) compared to traditional database deployment models.

(TL Ashford) This paper examines three approaches to automated data collection integration with IBM System i. It identifies the integration traps commonly experienced by business and examines a better approach using native IBM i labeling software specifically designed for the IBM i architecture.

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

June 13 & 14 — Virtual Conference – Twice a year, COMMON stages a virtual conference with online educational sessions featuring topics such as: open source on IBM i, Web development using RPG, XML services, accessing and managing IBM i, virtualization, high availability, and mobile access. It’s free!

June 20 — Costa Mesa, California – DB2 Web Query for i will be the featured topic at the regular monthly meeting of the OCEAN User Group. This presentation by IBM database expert Doug Mack will include how to analyze Query/400 definitions; plot data points on geographical maps; build a data warehouse or mart; connect to Watson; build visualizations over system utilization information; assess compliance with security standards; and the DB2 Web Query install package. The meeting location is National University located at 3390 Harbor Boulevard.

July 20-22 — Costa Mesa, California – The OCEAN Tech Conference is featuring more than 45 sessions and more than 20 speakers over three days. Topics include SQL and DB2, systems management, RPG, RDi, open source, cloud and professional development. Standard sessions and a vendor expo take place on Thursday and Friday. Workshops and hands-on labs are scheduled Saturday. The list of presenters includes: Ted Holt, Scott Forstie, Jesse Gorzinski, Scott Klement, Alan Seiden, Charles Guarino, Aaron Bartell, and Mike Pavlak. The conference location is National University located at 3390 Harbor Boulevard near Orange County Airport.