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Alex Woodie

Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.

  • 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 …

    Read more
  • 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 …

    Read more
  • 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 …

    Read more
  • 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 …

    Read more
  • 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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  • 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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  • iTech Solutions Keeps You In The Know With VERIFi

    February 22, 2021 Alex Woodie

    “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That time-tested bit of advice from Ben Franklin has many applications, including, it turns out, IBM i systems management. And through its new VERIFi offering, iTech Solutions is set to provide many ounces of prevention by keeping customers on top of what is happening with their IBM i servers.

    iTech Solutions’ VERIFi comes in three flavors. With VERIFi Weekly Status Reporting, the company remotely monitors key aspects of IBM i server health and summarize those findings in a PDF sent once a week for $295 per year. It offers …

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  • IBM i on Google Cloud Appears To Be Stuck in Alpha

    February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Companies that want to run IBM i workloads in Google Cloud will have to wait a bit longer, as the public cloud service is still in limited alpha, with no signs that it will become generally available any time soon.

    It has been close to three years since we first broke the news about the partnership between IBM and Google Cloud. At the inaugural POWERUp conference in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2018, IBM i chief architect Steve Will publicly discussed plans the two companies had made to run IBM i and AIX instances on the Power Systems servers …

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  • IBM Unveils New FlashSystem Storage Arrays

    February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

    IBM last week took the wraps off three new FlashSystem storage devices, including the enterprise-oriented FlashSystem 5200 as well as two entry-level offerings, the FlashSystem 5015 and 5035. All three devices make use of speedy NVMe flash drives in the primary enclosure, but can be outfitted with traditional spinning and less-speedy solid state drives (SSDs) in the expansion enclosures.

    Since early 2020, IBM has been phasing out its Storwize disk array line and emphasizing the FlashSystem line that replaces it. As part of that exercise, IBM renamed existing arrays, including the Storwize V5100, which became the FlashSystem 5100. It also …

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