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.

• New IBM Champions Reflect on Their Journeys

  February 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM has rolled out its new list of Champions for Power, and on the list are eight men from the IBM i community who have been named Champions for the first time. Among the honorees is the Four Hundred Guru himself, Ted Holt.

  Ted Holt – IT Jungle/Profound Logic

  

  Holt’s day job is working as a senior software developer for Profound Logic. But at night he becomes the IT Jungle’s Guru, dispensing IBM i code and snippets of hard-won wisdom as a senior technical editor of The Four Hundred. He also tweets from @TedHolt00000.

  Holt was kind enough …

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• Rocket Talks Up IBM i Biz in Wake of Restructuring

  February 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When Bain Equity bought a $2 billion stake in Rocket Software 16 months ago, it was largely viewed through a mainframe lens. Rocket was a mainframe software company, and Bain was investing in that mainframe business. But as the new general manager of the Power Systems Business Unit, Chris Wey, tells it, the company is getting ready to make some moves in the IBM i market, too.

  Wey joined Rocket Software at the beginning of the year, immediately following the 30-year-old company’s most recent restructuring following the Bain acquisition. Andy Youniss, who co-founded Rocket back in 1990 to capitalize on …

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• A Lifeline For CIOs, The Toughest Job In IT

  February 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Let’s hear it for chief information officers, who have the toughest jobs in IT. If you’re good enough and lucky enough to succeed with your initiatives, you get to keep your job another year. But if the plans fall through, then you’re out on the curb. It’s a lonely job, but thanks to the CIO Summit event that Alan Seiden puts on with System i Developer, the CIOs at IBM i shops at least have a lifeline for support.

  Research shows that CIOs have among the shortest tenures of any position in the C-suite. The management consulting firm Korn Ferry …

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• FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

  February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

  Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …

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• Your ERP Contract is Worse Than You Thought

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Marcus Harris knows a bit about ERP contracts and litigation. As a former lawyer for SAP and Infor, he’s the guy that ERP customers would have gone up against in court or a mediation room when a disagreement arises. But he switched sides and now he works on behalf of clients looking to hold their ERP vendors to account. He provided some worthwhile advice at the recent Digital Stratosphere 2020 conference in San Diego.

  Like most lawyers worth their salt, Harris would rather not represent you in court. Sure, it gives his firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, lots …

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• Security Still the Top Concern as Privacy Regs Loom

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For the fourth year in a row, security is the number one concern of the IBM i installed base, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey. IBM i shops are clearly concerned about the need to prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. But security’s first cousin, data privacy, also stands to gain more attention with the recent passage of data privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA.

  HelpSystems released the results of its latest marketplace survey last month, as it has done for the past six years. And just as it has for every year since 2017, security …

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• Why Koch Is Buying the Rest of Infor

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Koch Equity Development last week announced that it has bought the remaining shares of Infor that it didn’t previously own. The move puts Koch Industries in charge of the world’s third largest ERP software company, and the IBM i market’s biggest vendor. But what, exactly, drove the $110-billion industrial conglomerate into making such an investment is the subject of some speculation.

  Infor, which has been flirting with an IPO for years, appeared to be on the fast-track for a Wall Street listing in January 2019, when it raised $1.5 billion in what, ostensibly, would be the last private equity …

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• NGS Breaks Scalability Barrier With OLAP Client

  February 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New Generation Software is putting the finishing touches on an overhaul of its OLAP client, called QPort SmartView, that it says removes limitations on the amount of data IBM i shops can analyze. The Windows program gives users the ease of use and flexibility of Excel on the front-end, but utilizes the scalability and OLAP processing heft of IBM i on the backend to analyze substantially larger data volumes.

  Typically, New Generation Software plays it down the middle when it comes to business intelligence and analytics on the IBM i platform. On the one hand, the company’s predominantly midsize clientele …

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• How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

  February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

  One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …

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• Google Launches Power Systems Cloud, But Not Yet for IBM i

  January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Google last week officially unveiled IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud, a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that will allow customers to run AIX, Linux, and IBM i workloads and manage it from their familiar Google Cloud accounts. Google says that AIX and Linux are ready to go, but says that IBM i customers will have to wait just a little longer to get in on the cloud action.

  The general availability of IBM Power Systems on Google Cloud has been years in the making. Google was one of the earliest enrollees in IBM’s Open Power initiative, and …

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