Four Hundred Monitor, August 16

August 16, 2017 Dan Burger

If you read Steve Will’s blogs and follow his itinerary of speaking engagements, you wonder if the guy is on pace to set a record for promoting the IBM i platform. And we don’t even know all the behind the scenes stuff. The strategy is simple. Have Steve Will talk and blog until every IBM i customer realizes that this system is fully capable of running a modern business. But that the message has to reach beyond the IBM i faithful. By his own admission, he is reaching about 1 percent of those who should be hearing the story. He needs you to help spread the word.

Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

(i Talk With Tuohy) Executives owe it to their companies to evaluate all areas of the business IT certainly needs to be evaluated. The evaluation should be performed so the decision makers have the necessary information to make a good decision. You can’t decide to stay on the i or get off the i without supporting facts. Knowing how to build a case can sway the outcome.

(ZDNet) Here’s a survey that suggests migrations are more challenging, more expensive, and are failing more often. What’s going on? Migrations require lots of planning and coordinating a bunch of moving parts. And if you think the cloud has made things easier, you’d be wrong.

(InformationWeek) Every technology initiative — in fact many business changes — will run into resistance from people. Here are three steps to overcoming that resistance. Detailing data, enforcing the benefit to the company, and appealing to the personal goals of those unconvinced is the best way to turn naysayers to strong advocates.

(CIO) Despite new methodologies and management techniques meant to head off spectacular failures, critical technical initiatives still fall flat at an alarming rate. Here’s how IT can learn from its mistakes.

Redbooks, White Papers, and Other Resources

(IBM developerWorks) The IBM Rational Developer for i Hub is a place for the RDi community to mingle and discuss all things RDi. It also provides a library of useful RDi information and resources.

(Seiden Group) It’s not always easy to locate the official documentation for all DB2 for IBM i features. Using Google Search is hit or miss, with full-text searches often bringing irrelevant results from other varieties of DB2 or from older versions. Many people don’t know that complete reference manuals are available for almost every aspect of DB2 on i.

(Storagepipe) This white paper is a beginner’s guide to understanding cloud storage methods and terminology. It includes information on automating data protection and data recovery.

(IBM) The IBM open source wiki page includes links to a boatload of information. Topics like speakers and their presentations, developer tools, requests for enhancements, and the licensed open source offerings are just a click away.

(IBM) The details of building cognitive applications with visual recognition are covered in volume three of a seven-piece collection of IBM Redbooks titled Building Cognitive Applications with IBM Watson Services. The series includes getting started, conversation services, visual recognition, natural languages classifier; language translators; speech-to-text and text-to-speech; and natural language understanding.

(IBM) The IBM Watson developer community lives here. Getting started tutorials, finding tools, resources, documentation, and a question and answer forum—it’s all here.

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

September 6 & 7 — Rochester, Minnesota – COMMON and IBM are hosting an educational event featuring Watson and IBM i as the cognitive platform for business. It includes the IBM Bluemix cloud platform and focuses on solving problems and driving business value with applications, infrastructure and services. Cognitive capabilities include language translation, text-to-voice, cognitive searching and Watson analytics. All can be added to existing RPG applications and DB2 for IBM i data. All sessions will be taught by IBM professionals. Registration fee is $299.

September 19 — Schaumburg, Illinois – The 2017 Omni Technical Conference and Expo features IBM i on Power Systems education on important topics such as advanced RPG, DB2, SQL, application development, Web development, application modernization, security, modern toolsets, and systems administration. IBM i experts on the speaker list include Tim Rowe, Scott Forstie, Barbara Morris, and Pete Massiello. The conference will be held at the IBM Schaumburg offices.

September 19 — Costa Mesa, California – The OCEAN User Group meeting will feature the annual State of the IT Job Market presentation by Bob Langieri, director of IT recruiting at Excel Technical Services. Langieri monitors the market for IBM i jobs, particularly in Southern California, where positions are limited compared to 10 to 15 years ago and are likely to be temporary and filled by contractors or freelancers. He provides advice for both job seekers and employers. The meeting location is National University located at 3390 Harbor Boulevard. It begins at 5:30 p.m.

September 21 — Burlington, Vermont – The Vermont Midrange User Group will host its 13th Annual Technical Conference from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The list of speakers includes Alison Butterill, offering manager for IBM i; Doug Mack, DB2 for i consultant for IBM Lab Services; Aaron Bartell, director of IBM i innovation for Krengeltech; and Paul Tuohy, CEO of Comcon. A conference registration discount is available through August 28. The event will take place at the DoubleTree Burlington hotel.

September 27-29 — Virginia Beach, Virginia -The Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators (MAGIC) IBM i User Conference is a three-day event with sessions and hands-on labs and is highlighted by three presentations by IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will. Topics for the lab sessions include PHP, .NET, RDi, Git, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A complete list of all sessions, speakers and vendors is available online. MAGIC supports the IBM i users in the Mid-Atlantic area: Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, and Eastern Pennsylvania. Registration is $320 for MAGIC members and $400 for non-members.

September 27 — Westbury, New York – Scott Forstie, the DB2 for i Business Architect, will be the guest speaker at the Long Island Systems Users Group monthly meeting. Forstie will present three sessions on SQL: SQL Views for Dummies at 3:30 p.m., SQL for the Security Officer at 5 p.m., and DB2 for i Tools at 8 p.m. In between sessions two and three, there will be time for networking, cocktails, and dinner. LISUG meetings are held at the Westbury Manor located at 1100 Jericho Turnpike.

October 2-4 — St. Louis, Missouri – The COMMON Fall Conference features technical sessions, workshops, certifications, networking opportunities, and a vendor expo. The session grid and speaker lineup has yet to be posted, but you can expect a mix of fundamental skills and new technologies. An early registration discount is available and hotel reservations can be made.

October 17-19 — Minneapolis, Minnesota – The twice-a-year, spring and fall, RPG & DB2 Summit returns to the upper Midwest for its next technical conference with an agenda that expands to cover new topics such as Python for RPGers, how to bring the power of Watson to RPG applications, and SQL aggregation. It also incorporates sessions that will introduce hidden gems in DB2 for i as well as anticipated Q4 2017 updates to the database. In addition to the three-day Summit, an optional fourth day of hands-on workshops October 16, provides intensive education into four technology areas — SQL, RSE/RDi, Service Programs or PHP. Workshop attendees choose one topic for the “deep dive.” An early registration discount is available through August 31.