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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Don’t Be the Eeyore of Digital Progress, OpenLegacy Says
June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie
The Internet continues to present powerful and compelling new capabilities that many organizations are leveraging to their advantage. But all too often, the tantalizing digital future remains out of reach for IBM i and mainframe shops due to the difficulty–either real or imagined–of engineering those new capabilities to work with legacy systems. Helping organizations overcome those challenges is one of the goals that OpenLegacy has set for itself.
OpenLegacy CTO Hans Otharsson has spent most of his career working with enterprise systems, including banking systems running on IBM i servers and mainframes, and knows firsthand the massive amount of ingenuity,
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Clearlake Sees Vision Deal As M&A Platform In IBM i Land
May 23, 2016 Alex Woodie
Clearlake Sees Vision Deal As M&A Platform In IBM i Land
Vision Solutions, the dominant player in the market for IBM i high availability software, is being sold by Thoma Bravo to Clearlake Capital Group. The transaction, which is expected to be completed by the end of June, will give Clearlake a platform for pursuing more acquisitions in the IBM i ecosystem, a spokesperson with the company told IT Jungle.
Thoma Cressey, as the San Francisco-based private equity firm was then known, obtained Vision Solutions with its acquisition of Idion Technology Holdings way back in September 2006
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Product Highlights From Spring COMMON 2016
May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
As the world’s largest gathering of IBM i professionals, COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo is a natural place to announce new products. This year’s event in New Orleans, Louisiana, is no different, as IBM i vendors unveiled new and improved wares across a range of product categories. We’ll dive into more depth on most of these products in future issues of The Four Hundred, but for now here’s a quick run-down on the products turning our heads at the show.
Fresche Legacy “Heatmap” tool
Before embarking upon an application modernization project, it’s good to know how the existing
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Townsend Brings Modern Crypto Capabilities To Legacy RPG Apps
May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
The field-level encryption capability that IBM introduced with IBM i 7.1 is a powerful tool for securing sensitive data. However, IBM i shops that have not modernized their legacy RPG applications with SQL access methods find it difficult to use. That should change with new technology coming out of Townsend Security this week at the COMMON conference in New Orleans.
The DB2 field procedure exit point that IBM launched in 2010 helped a lot of IBM i shops to encrypt their data on a field-level. The capability to encrypt pieces of sensitive data residing in particular parts of their DB2
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Manufacturer Leans In On Shop Floor Automation
May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
When Hoffmaster finally flipped the switch on its ERP migration at the end of February, IT director Rick Dittberner was nervous. Not only was the paper-goods supplier consolidating a manufacturing site on Infor ERP LX, but it was also replacing an old shop floor reporting system with a new one from Crossroads RMC. There was a lot that could go wrong for the IBM i shop.
Hoffmaster is a half-a-billion-dollar manufacturer of disposable tabletop paper products, including plates, cups, cutlery, napkins, placemats, and table covers. You can find products from the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, company’s consumer division in stores such
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Rocket Brings Mobile App DevOps Into The IBM i Fold
May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
Rocket Software is launching a new tool that simplifies the management and distribution of mobile application source code. Called Rocket Lifecycle for Mobile, the new software is designed to make it easier for IBM i shops to manage the DevOps lifecycle for today’s modern applications, which involve not only closely administered servers but also widely dispersed smartphones.
Mobile application development continues to be a hot trend in the IBM i space, as smartphones become more woven into our personal and professional lives. Four out of 10 IBM i shops have a mobile computing initiative, according to HelpSystems‘ 2016 IBM
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Zend Touts 2X Speedup With PHP 7 And New Runtime
May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
The new release of Zend‘s PHP development language and PHP runtime will run twice as fast on Intel Xeon and IBM Power servers than previous versions, the company says. IBM i customers won’t need to do anything to take advantage of the speedup except use the new runtime, which should be available in the coming weeks.
Zend, which is now owned by Rogue Wave Software, last week officially announced Zend Server 9, the newest version of the Zend runtime for Intel platforms. Zend Server 9 is based on PHP version 7, the newest version of the language, which
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Temporal Table Trouble?
May 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
One of the exciting new features in IBM i 7.3 is the addition of temporal queries in the integrated DB2 for i database. The so-called “time travel” query capability will let users ask how a particular piece of data looked at some time in the past, using good old SQL. While this new capability is included with the standard version of the database, a key feature that makes temporal useful costs extra.
The temporal query functionality was one of the big new features in IBM i 7.3 and brings the DB2 for i database up to par with the temporal
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IBM Bolsters HyperSwap to Protect IBM i Against Downtime
May 2, 2016 Alex Woodie
A new release of the HyperSwap feature in IBM‘s PowerHA Enterprise Edition will give IBM i shops better protection against IBM i downtime–in particular during planned downtime events, like operating system upgrades. IBM also released a statement of direction to bring more disaster recovery (DR) capabilities to HyperSwap, including support for a remotely located third copy of IBM i data.
HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature introduced two years ago with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The mainframe-class technology relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous data replication protocol (i.e. Metro Mirror) to replicate DB2 for
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Software Vendors Prep For IBM i 7.3, Applaud PDP for Testing
April 25, 2016 Alex Woodie
It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP).
There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic