Alex Woodie
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Capacious LTO Gen 7 Tape Storage Comes To Market
October 12, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i shops that are feeling crunched by exploding data volumes may want to check out the latest LTO Generation 7 tape drives that will soon be available from IBM and other manufacturers. Sporting a native capacity of 6 TB per cartridge and a data transfer rate of 300 MB per second, the new LTO 7 drives and media offer twice the capacity and performance of LTO 6 gear, and present a bargain for those demanding low-cost, long-term retention of massive datasets.
The LTO Consortium unveiled the final LTO 7 specifications in September, and they were down from the original
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Keeping Ransomware Out of the VAULT
October 7, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCyber-criminals are increasingly targeting small and midsize American businesses with ransomware that encrypts the contents of a PC or a server until the victim pays $500, $1,000, or more in untraceable Bitcoin. After several of United Computer Group‘s VAULT400 customers were hit with ransomware scams, the company decided to team up with the security training company KnowBe4 to teach VAULT400 customers how to avoid falling victim to a ransomware scam.
A ransomware epidemic is spreading across the country, impacting organizations of all shapes and sizes. “Never before in the history of human kind have people across the world been
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OpenLegacy: Go from Green to GUI for Twelve Bucks
October 7, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOpenLegacy wants to modernize your 5250 screens for $12 to $20 each as part of a new service it unveiled this week at the COMMON conference. Called OpenLegacy Click, the new service is aimed at smaller companies that don’t have the budget for full-blown modernization projects, but have a business need to convert a select number of 5250 screens to Web and mobile interfaces just the same.
OpenLegacy is turning heads in the IBM i modernization space with an approach that emphasizes application re-use and open source technology. Its flagship IBM i product, called OpenLegacy iSuite, essentially models how IBM
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Rocket: We’re More Than the Sum of Our (IBM i) Parts
October 7, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOver the years, Rocket Software has bought some well-known properties in the IBM i space: Aldon, Seagull, BlueZone, iCluster. But now the Massachusetts company wants the IBM i community to think of it as a wider source of innovation for the platform, and a one-stop shop for IBM i products–including the new Rocket Mobile for i it launched at this week’s COMMON conference in Florida.
“If you look throughout our portfolio,” Rocket CEO Andy Youniss says, “we have this wide variety and spectrum of products. We’ve done a really bad job of telling that story to the i world because
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Six Signs Of The Long, Slow Decline Of ERP
September 28, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreFor the past 20 years, the class of applications known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has largely dominated the business software discussion. But that hegemony is now slipping due to a variety of factors, leading some to speculate that ERP’s heyday is in the past. The big question then becomes: What should companies do next?
If you work at a company of appreciable size (say $50 million in sales or more), chances are good you rely on an ERP system that doesn’t just plan (as the name suggests) but actually executes the business processes that make your business tick. Whether
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Unifying Mobile and Web Development on IBM i
September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIt’s hard for businesses to justify the expense of supporting multiple development teams, each with a set of specialized skills. IBM i shops know this better than most, since RPG isn’t used on other platforms. But when it comes to developing Web and mobile apps, the technology and the frameworks are in place to consolidate these previously disparate functions–in IBM i shops and everywhere else.
The rapid maturation of smartphones and tablets has captivated the attention of enterprise software developers, who are finding ever more creative ways to benefit from putting corporate data and core business processes into the hands
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IBM Tops List of Security Vulnerabilities, But What Does It Mean?
September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM has found itself atop many prestigious lists over the years–the holder of the most patents, the greenest company in IT, and the biggest server maker. But this month the cybersecurity research firm Secunia put IBM at the top of one list that Big Blue won’t be proud of: The list of software vendors with the most security vulnerabilities. But what exactly that means is the subject of some controversy.
In its “Vulnerability Update” for the period for May through July, Secunia reported that IBM was the vendor with the most vulnerable products over the three-month period. It was the
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CNX Looks Beyond RPG with Web Framework
September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCNX Corp. is putting the finishing touches on a new release of its Valence Web application development framework for IBM i. Among the compelling new features in version 4.2 is support for PHP, which will help its developers keep up with the rapidly changing times.
Valence is a development framework that’s used primarily to create new Web-based applications that run on the IBM i. When it shipped several years back, the software combined RPG service programs with a range of pre-built JavaScript components (it uses Sencha Ext JS) to enable the creation of modern Web and mobile applications.
Up to
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RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking . . . VAI Puts POS Chips on Verifone . . . OpenLegacy Signs Partner In Brazil
September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
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RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking
RPG has crept up in the TIOBE Index, a monthly ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Because RPG is still the primary language that’s used to develop applications on the IBM i platform, this is a good sign for IBM i job growth.
The TIOBE Index for August 2015 had RPG as the 42nd most popular ranking with a rating of 0.273 percent. It was in a virtual tie with Haskell and just ahead of (Visual) FoxPro. The TIOBE Index for September 2015 had RPG creeping up three spots to number 39 with
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What Does IBM’s Embrace Of Apache Spark Mean To IBM i?
September 21, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM is actively embracing a new software framework called Apache Spark as the core engine powering predictive analytics application going forward. The big data world has gone absolutely gaga over Spark, and Big Blue has even put Spark on the venerable z/OS mainframe. But where does that leave its little brother, the IBM i platform?
Apache Spark, if you’re not familiar, is hands down the hottest technology at the moment in the world of big data analytics. The open source project is so popular because it implements a relatively easy to use framework for running in-memory analytic workloads across