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.
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State of Resilience? Not So Great, Vision Says
January 30, 2017 Alex Woodie
More than eight out of 10 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan or lack total confidence in their plans, according to the 2017 State of Resilience report recently published by Vision Solutions. The main culprit appears to be increasing IT complexity, the high availability software provider says.
For the past decade, Vision has conducted an in-depth survey to explore the state of resilience among its customer base and prospects. In addition to exploring HA and DR topics, this year’s report, which is based on responses from about 1,500 technology professionals, examines company activities in the areas of migrations, …
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What Was Discussed At the Big LUG Meeting
January 25, 2017 Alex Woodie
About 100 representatives from the biggest IBM i shops in the world are at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, this week for the first of three meetings of the Large User Group (LUG) scheduled for 2017. Judging by the agenda for the week-long meeting, security and storage concerns will dominate the agenda.
The LUG is one of the most influential user groups in the IBM i community, if not one of the most secretive. The group is composed of about 100 of the biggest companies to use the IBM i server. Their exact names aren’t known, but you can …
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More IBM i Predictions For 2017
January 25, 2017 Alex Woodie
The great thing about crystal balls is everybody gets their own view. One man’s (or woman’s) view of the future is different from the next. When prophesizing about the IBM i platform, people tend to have different viewpoints, which is part of what makes this exercise so much fun (well that, and all the extra coffee and donuts we editors enjoy while letting you do all the work).
We gave you a taste of things to come with our first installment of 2017 IBM i predictions. Back by popular demand, here’s round two of IBM i predictions, beginning with the …
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Linoma Gets Graphical With Journal Entries
January 25, 2017 Alex Woodie
Prolific is one word that describes the IBM i platform’s aptitude at writing journal entries. The volumes are truly astounding. But searching through this machine-generated data using a green screen is a tedious task that’s better for inducing eyestrain than generating results. That’s why Linoma Software is proffering up a new graphical interface for working with journal entries in Surveyor/400.
Surveyor/400 is a handy multi-tool that does a little bit of everything for programmers, administrators, and end-users alike. The Java-based product lets users explore IBM i through a Windows Explorer-like interface; query DB2 for i data with a File Editor; …
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UCG And HelpSystems Make Acquisitions
January 25, 2017 Alex Woodie
A common prediction for the New Year is that we’ll see more mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity in the IBM i marketplace. That refrain struck a truthful note just a week into 2017, with two IBM i vendors, UCG Technologies and HelpSystems, making deals of their own.
UCG Technologies wheeled and dealed to buy E-Safe Technologies, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based provider of IT services that counts IBM i as a specialty. Formerly known as Premiere Technologies, E-Safe was founded in 1989, and had more than 250 customers located from Pittsburgh to the Great Lakes area, including a good number …
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Doctor Frank Talks Power With Vision
January 23, 2017 Alex Woodie
Vision Solutions landed a pretty popular guest for the inaugural episode of its new PowerTalk podcast last month. Former IBM chief scientist Doctor Frank Soltis, the Father of the AS/400, shared stories about the sudden popularity of memory-oriented architectures, the limitations of the System/38, and the origins of the MIMIX product.
Becky Hjellming, Vision’s director of product strategy, was excited to have such a distinguished IBMer on her very first PowerTalk podcast. She started out by asking Soltis about his recent COMMON Europe tour, during which he made several predictions about how the computing world is about to change in …
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What Will This Year Bring For IBM i?
January 18, 2017 Alex Woodie
A hearty if belated welcome to 2017! In what has become something of an IT Jungle tradition, we’re turning the microphone over to you, the IBM i community, to share your thoughts on what the New Year may bring to the platform, what it may mean to the vendors that play the market, and how it will impact the people who make everything possible.
Trevor Perry, an IBM i evangelist and consultant with IBM i modernization vendor Fresche (which acquired looksoftware several years ago), leads off our new round of predictions.
“We’ll see more talk about blockchain, especially in …
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The IBM i Year In Review
December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie
With another year almost in the books for the IBM i community, we thought it was time to reminisce on the top stories of 2016. Security vulnerabilities, hacked AS/400s, blockbuster acquisitions, new releases of the operating system, and major conferences all garnered their share of digital ink. Here’s a rundown on the top IBM i-related stories making news this year.
It started innocently enough, way back in. . .
January
. . .When we asked “what should you do with your spare CPWs?” After all, you can’t take ’em with you. But with so much processing oomph on those brawny
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Rocket Adds IBM i Support to Backup Reporting Tool
December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that find it difficult to track the state of their backups across IBM and non IBM platforms may want to check out the latest product news from Rocket Software. Last week the company announced that its Servergraph Professional product now supports IBM i, thereby enabling customers to view BRMS backup status alongside that of other backup tools, like NetBackup and TSM.
Considering the amount of data stored by the average enterprise these days, it’s clear that backup has transformed into a major application workload in its own right. Ensuring the integrity of backups has always been
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New LUG Spreads ‘MAGIC’ In The Mid-Atlantic
December 12, 2016 Alex Woodie
Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging.
If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,