Alex Woodie
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2016 Predictions for IBM i: Round Two
January 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreLast week, we ran our first roundup of 2016 predictions from various CEOs and other prominent members of the IBM i community (see “2016 Predictions For IBM i: Cautious Optimism”). As promised, here we go for a second round, which continues the optimistic note, for both the platform and the community as a whole.
Jim Oberholtzer, CEO at Agile Technology Architects
“I think the biggest play for IBM in the new year will be the open source movement on Power, and specifically on IBM i. IBM has been laying the groundwork for a major push in those technologies
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2016 Predictions For IBM i: Cautious Optimism
January 11, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreFor the first time in many years, a cautious optimism seems to be creeping into the IBM i community. Driven by a somewhat vigorous Power8 server refresh cycle, which has at least given IBM server sales a pulse, Big Blue enjoyed last year the first consecutive quarters of revenue growth in what seemed like forever.
Here’s our first batch of IBM i predictions from the community, edited for clarity and brevity. Stay tuned next week for another round of forecasts.
Pete Massiello, president at iTech Solutions Group and immediate past president of COMMON
“Could 2016 be the year that
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2015: An IBM i Year In Rear View
December 9, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHere we are, at the end of the year, and the last issue of The Four Hundred for 2015. We can all celebrate the fact that the IBM i platform and community survived another 12 months in a ruthless IT market that’s hell-bent on disrupting entire industries. So give yourself a pat on the back, sit down and get ready to revisit the highs and lows of the IBM i platform and community over the past year.
January
The new year began with–what else?–another IBM reorganization. CEO Ginni Rometty decided to make IBM Systems group a single unit that included
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The Secret to Award-Winning IBM i App Development
December 9, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe British software house Proximity recently won a second industry award for its IBM i-based application, called STREAM. With demand for its modern logistics software growing, Proximity appears to have hit upon a winning formula that blends PHP, HTML, IBM i, and RPG. But what is the company’s secret to success? Proximity’s managing director Dave Pickburn recently shared the goods.
Proximity first caught the eye of IT Jungle earlier this year when the company won the SHD Logistics Award 2015 for STREAM, the IBM i application that it developed and implemented for Scandinavian House, a small European furniture company.
This
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Clearing Up IBM i Security Confusion
December 9, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i is a mature operating system that gives enterprises several ways to accomplish tasks. But sometimes this richness can generate confusion over the best way to accomplish something. For example, when should you use adopted authority in your applications, and when should you use user profile swapping? IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury recently addressed some of these questions.
“I will often get questions about things like adopted authority or swapping profiles, and what’s the difference or are they the same,” Woodbury, the former OS/400 security architect at IBM, said in a recent “Coffee with Carol” Webinar hosted
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ISVs In Denial About Software Licensing
December 7, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read more“The only constant. . . is change.” That cliché is enough to induce a vigorous eye roll from hardened IT pros, but it’s actually apropos for the IT industry, which feeds off disruption like the Kardashians feed on media attention. Now, a pair of new studies indicate a large number of software vendors are ill equipped to handle the current round of cloud- and mobile-induced IT chaos.
The rise of powerful smartphones and tablets has eliminated the need to have a Windows PC or laptop to access many enterprise software applications. That’s a huge win for enterprise software users and
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IBM Patches Pair of Security Flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1
December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last month revealed the presence of a pair of security vulnerabilities in iAccess for Windows 7.1, including one that could allow a local cybercriminal to take control of the Windows PC running the iAccess software, and another that could be used to launch a denial of service attack. Big Blue patched both flaws with a PTF.
IBM provided some details of the security flaws with a Security Bulletin N1020996 published November 18, which is the same day it released PTF number SI57907 to fix the flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1.
The buffer overflow flaw that was given the
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Urgent Need for Application Modernization Seen at the Federal Level
December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreSecurity breaches. Downtime. Poor performance. These are some of the problems federal IT managers expect to encounter if they continue to run legacy applications as they now exist, according to a recent study from MeriTalk. But instead of ditching the old applications and writing new ones from scratch, MeriTalk advocates a selective modernization approach that blends new and old.
MeriTalk, a public-private partnership that addresses IT issues in the federal government, recently tackled the topic of legacy modernization with a report titled “Future Ready Applications: The Modern Legacy.” The November 18 study involved responses from 150 federal IT managers,
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Quadrant Doubles Down on Simplicity with Formtastic 10
December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreComplexity is a killer in this brave new electronic world of ours. If your product or service is hard to use, don’t expect the masses to come knocking at your door. That ethos of simplicity echoes across all industries and businesses, and it’s the driving factor in a major new version of Quadrant Software‘s Formtastic output management software for IBM i.
Quadrant made two important changes to grease the wheels of simplicity with Formtastic 10, the first major new version of the product in years. First, it overhauled the Windows-based design tool that Formtastic customers use to create and
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HATS Now Hooked Into BlueMix Cloud
December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i shops adopting the latest release of IBM‘s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) product will be able to create and run their modernized interfaces on BlueMix, Big Blue’s cloud service. Support for the latest Rational development tools and improved security round out HATS 9.5, which shipped in November.
When it comes to application modernization, IBM i shops have a number of options available to them. Many of those modernization tools come from third-party vendors that you have read about in past issues of The Four Hundred and the discontinued Four Hundred Stuff, which included more than 3,000