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.

• IBM Bolsters Disaster Recovery With GDR For IBM i

  May 3, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM next month plans to start selling a new disaster recovery product to IBM i shops. Called Geographically Dispersed Resiliency, or GDR, the new offering is designed to give companies an easy and affordable way to recover production IBM i LPARs on remote machines. IBM’s resiliency guru Steve Finnes gives IT Jungle the lowdown on the new tech.

  GDR provides DR protection by essentially taking a production logical partition (LPAR), also called a virtual machine (VM), from one IBM i server and restarting it on another IBM i server. The VMs involved in a GDR switch must be stored on …

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• Infor Bolsters Cloud Analytics Play with Birst Buy

  May 3, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that run applications from Infor will be interested to know that the ERP giant has acquired Birst, a business intelligence and analytics software vendor with a large cloud presence. The Birst solutions will definitely be sold into Infor’s large IBM i installed base, the company informs IT Jungle.

  Birst is a soup-to-nuts platform that provides many of the software capabilities companies need to build analytic applications that can turn large masses of data into actionable insight. The San Francisco-based company was founded as Success Metrics back in 2004 with a cloud-first strategy and a goal to target …

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• Top Ten Things To Know Before Heading To COMMON

  May 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  More than a thousand IBM i professionals from around the world will descend on Universal Orlando next week for COMMON’s Annual Meeting and Exposition. Besides the chance to “Party with Harry” (as in Potter, the boy wizard), the conference taking place from May 7 to 10 provides us all a chance to learn about the latest IBM i technologies, explore new solutions, and commiserate with our fellow midrangers.

  With more than 300 sessions on everything from RPG and PHP to Watson and the cloud, the annual COMMON get-together is the largest IBM i conference on the planet. It’s been that …

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• Optimism Abounds in VAI’s Inaugural Survey

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new customer survey released today by IBM i ERP software vendor VAI shows that companies are extremely optimistic about the future of their businesses. Besides the almost nonexistent pessimism, the survey also highlighted interest in analytics as a way to boost productivity, as well as a commitment to improve security.

  The United States’ stock market is in the midst of an historic eight-year bull run that shows no signs of quitting. Since stocks hit their low point in the dark days of March 2009, the buying spree has continued quarter on quarter, with nary a correction (defined as a …

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• Surround Tech Keeps IBM i Websites Hip to the Times

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The World Wide Web has changed considerably since the first websites went live more than 20 years ago, and many IBM i shops have struggled to keep up. One midrange vendor helping IBM i shops adapt to the times is Surround Technologies, which has morphed its Web application development environment, called Accelerator, into a full content management system.

  In today’s world, having a functional and good-looking website has become a business necessity. In many instances, the website becomes a portal that allows customers, business partners, and employees to access important documents or submit information. In others, the website has effectively …

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• Raz-Lee Tackles Excessive Authorities with Free Software

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  You can’t do anything on IBM i without the proper authority. Unfortunately, instead of using the tools IBM includes in the OS to set fine-grained policies, most IBM i shops run wide-open when it comes to user authorities. Now Raz-Lee Security hopes reign in this free-for-all with a free tool it just released.

  For a glimpse at how bad the use of authorities in IBM i has gotten, check out our coverage of a recent security study of the IBM i marketplace. It’s no secret that there’s widespread abuse of special authorities, such as ALLOBJ and SECADM, among the majority …

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• State Of IBM i Security: Seven Areas That Demand Attention

  April 24, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The latest installment of the annual State of IBM i Security was released last week by HelpSystems, and the results were about what you would expect: most IBM i servers are basically wide open for abuse.

  In a webinar last week, HelpSystems director of security technologies Robin Tatam discussed the findings of the report, which was based on security assessments conducted on 332 systems during 2016. He broke the findings down into seven core areas that should be addressed, including system security levels; administrative privileges; passwords and user profiles; data and program permissions; network access and exit programs; audit trails; …

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• Native Open Source: Why It’s Time for IBM i

  April 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When you think about open source software for IBM i, chances are good you envision PHP applications or Ruby code or even Node.js, all of which were adapted from other platforms to run on IBM i. But there’s a new movement afoot to spur more development of open source software that runs natively on IBM i.

  Make no mistake about it: getting PHP, Ruby, Python, Node.js and the others to run on IBM i is a good move by IBM. The work Big Blue has done to bring these technologies to IBM i – much of which is delivered …

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• Connecting IBM i Into A Broader Security Web

  April 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In the on-going war between cybercriminals and everybody else, there’s no place for lone wolfs. The strength of any individual company’s security is largely dependent on the collective posture of multiple groups of actors. Luckily for IBM i shops, there are defined paths to plug into the broader shield that’s constantly evolving to keep us safe.

  The idea of collective security is nothing new. Every anti-virus engine you’ve ever owned for the past 25 years is kept up-to-date by groups of security researchers who constantly stay on the lookout for new pieces of malware and new forms of attacks.

  But …

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• Assessing The Ransomware Threat On IBM i

  April 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  How would you like to be given the choice of paying a $200,000 ransom or having your server down for a month? Those are real outcomes from two recent ransomware attacks on IBM i servers, which cybercriminals may be starting to target.

  “We certainly have seen a trend recently in malware and specifically ransomware, just based on the fact that now people have figured out how to monetize infecting your server,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies for HelpSystems and its PowerTech subsidiary. “There’s certainly an increased prevalence of that.”

  Windows malware, in particular, poses a serious threat to …

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