Alex Woodie
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OpenLegacy’s Modernization Approach Impresses New Partner
April 15, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWith its commercial open source business model, OpenLegacy is breaking the rules when it comes to the traditional ways that IBM i and mainframe software vendors sell their wares. But according to Treehouse Software‘s chief business development officer, it was the underlying technology in its application modernization suite that ultimately led it to become one of OpenLegacy’s first North American business partners.
Treehouse Software’s Wayne Lashley first encountered OpenLegacy about two years ago, when the company was still in its infancy. “I was intrigued by the idea,” he tells IT Jungle. “But I felt they were a little
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Going Off the Grid with IBM i Mobile Apps
April 15, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIf you’re going mobile with your IBM i apps, you’re not alone. Every day, IBM i shops are giving their users the ability to access core applications from Android phones, iPads, and even the occasional Windows Mobile device. This can give your company a big productivity boost, especially considering that wireless Internet signals can be found everywhere–well, almost everywhere, anyway.
Despite the claims made by AT&T and Verizon, there are still regions in this big country of ours that aren’t yet bathed in cellular and Wi-Fi signals. Not only will your mobile Facebook and Twitter apps cease loading critical updates
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Has Cloud ERP Reached a Tipping Point?
April 13, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreFor years, we’ve been told that most server workloads will eventually move to the cloud because of the economies of scale advantages that it brings. So far, the big daddy of corporate computing–the centralized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suite–has mostly resisted the cloud. But according to Nucleus Research, ERP is now finally succumbing to the siren call of cloud computing.
We have reached a tipping point with cloud ERP, according to Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research for Nucleus. “A lot of companies are getting to the point where their next ERP upgrade is almost a re-implementation, so they’re
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Winning PHP App Pops IBM i Precepts
April 6, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i is often portrayed as out-of-date platform for running ancient applications long since placed into maintenance mode. If you want real innovation, the mainstream thinking goes, you’d best look to more “modern” platforms. But if the award that two European companies recently won for a PHP-based logistics application is any indication, that preconception deserves to be popped, posthaste.
In late March, Proximity and Scandinavian House took home the SHD Logistics Award 2015 in the Innovation Technology category. The award was granted for STREAM, the PHP-based application that Proximity developed to provide order, delivery, and transportation management capabilities.
Scandinavian House,
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Zend And BCD Get A Little Closer For PHP
April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreZend Technologies and BCD have been working together for about three years to help IBM i shops adopt PHP for developing new applications. Under a new partnership agreement unveiled recently, Zend will be referring customers to BCD for custom PHP-on-IBM i development work. But that’s not all the two vendors have up their respective sleeves.
After analyzing the existing relationship between Zend and BCD, executives with the companies realized that a regular reseller model was not going to cut it, says Jeff Lovette, vice president of global sales and channels for Quadrant Software, which acquired BCD last year.
“What
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SoftLanding Latest ISV To Add iASP Support
April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe issue of whether to support independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) in your IBM i setup is not one to be taken lightly. For starters, just migrating from traditional ASPs to iASPs can be a major project, and your software will need to be tweaked to support it. While IBM i shops are moving to adopt iASPs, the growth is slow and steady rather than a mad dash. But for SoftLanding Systems, demand for iASPs was enough to justify modifying its change management tool, Turnover, to support the technology.
iASPs debuted with the platform way back in 2001 with
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Quadrant Simplifies Path To FoIP Glory
April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOne of the biggest challenges in setting up a virtual fax over IP (FoIP) system is getting the telephony settings right. Screw up one of the dozens of settings in a typical install, and you’ll quickly be on the phone to tech support. With a new release of Quadrant Software‘s QuadraDocV FoIP software, the vendor added a graphical wizard that significantly simplifies the setup process.
Quadrant launched QuadraDocV two years ago to provide a virtual FoIP solution, primarily for its large base of existing IBM i customers. As a replacement for its popular FastFax “black box” appliances, QuadraDocV installs
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Tributary Flashes Backup To 60 TB Per Hour
March 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreFlash storage is not something you will find in the typical IBM i shop, which doesn’t get all worked up over shiny new technologies. But if a recent test that that pitted an IBM i host against an IBM FlashSystem 840 storage array–with Tributary Systems‘ Storage Director 5.0 managing traffic in the middle–is a sign of things to come, then flash may be here sooner than you think.
Storage Director is virtual tape library (VTL) software that’s typically installed on an X86 server. This VTL appliance appears to its various hosts (IBM i servers, mainframes, OpenVMS, NonStop, etc) as
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IBM Patches BIND and OpenSSL Flaws in IBM i
March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM has patched several security vulnerabilities in the IBM i OS recently, including some lingering problems with OpenSSL, as well as new ISC BIND Delegation Handling vulnerability. The vulnerabilities affect multiple releases of the IBM i OS, and could enable an attacker to successfully crash impacted servers, so go get your PTFs applied as soon as possible.
The more critical vulnerabilities are related to the ISC BIND Delegation Handling vulnerabilities, which impact the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software, specifically the Domain Name Service (DNS). Two BIND-related flaws were discovered in December 2014, according to the Internet Systems Consortium,
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IBM Unveils ETL Solution for DB2 Web Query
March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM next week will begin delivery of DataMigrator for i, a new extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution unveiled in February that’s designed to work with DB2 Web Query software. DataMigrator for i will give customers a better and more automated way to feed their IBM i-based BI and analytics applications with data originating from (gasp!) outside the platform.
The ongoing explosion of data is driving organizations to adopt new business intelligence and analytics solutions designed to help grow sales, reduce costs, improve marketing, and increase customer satisfaction. While the IBM i server is typically utilized for transaction processing, it