Alex Woodie
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RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC’s Earnings Miss
February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreDepending on where you live in the world, there’s either a shortage or a surplus of RPG programmers at any point in time, a dynamic we have covered here in IT Jungle. But rarely has the availability of IBM i programming talent so publicly affected a company as it did last week, when the CEO of Computer Sciences Corp. blamed his company’s $230 million-plus revenue shortfall in part on a shortage of RPG coders.
Mike Lawrie, the president and CEO of CSC, said “execution missteps” related to personnel recruitment were partly to blame for a revenue shortfall in the
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iFD Streamlines Document Workflow With New Product
February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn most organizations, work revolves around documents and the movement of those documents. Purchase orders come in from customers and they get approved or denied, which triggers the next step in the process. It’s how business has gotten done for decades, but there is room for improvement, according to inFORM Decisions, which two weeks ago launched an IBM i-compatible workflow management product called iWorkflow.
iWorkflow is a business process management (BPM) software program that’s aimed at automating much of the manual routing of documents that takes place in the average organization. The software runs on Windows, but integrates with
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CYBRA Getting Creative With RFID Solutions
February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreTen years ago, when Wal-Mart first started mandating that its suppliers use RFID tags in product deliveries, the unit cost of RFID tags was seen as the biggest barrier to adoption. Fast forward to 2015, and improvements in manufacturing have dramatically lowered the cost of RFID. But it’s been the adoption of new business models that has led to an explosion of RFID use cases, according to the folks at CYBRA.
CYBRA has closely monitored the evolution of radio frequency identification (RFID) in the consumer processed goods supply chain. Back in 2003, CYBRA jumped at the chance to help
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Startup OpenLegacy Open Sources App Modernization Tool
February 16, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreA company called OpenLegacy is beginning to gain momentum with a suite of free and open source tools for modernizing IBM i and z/OS applications. Besides giving away most of its technology (it charges for support in its professional edition), the company is also unique with its API-driven approach to giving older apps new life with Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces.
OpenLegacy was founded in Israel about a year ago with the goal of helping organizations expose their IBM i and z/OS assets in new and useful ways. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Romi Stein, is a former IBMer and
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VAI Rides a Rocket. . . 2015 IBM i Predictions from Raz-Lee. . . New Storage Solutions from Quantum. . .
February 12, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe IBM i predictions for 2015 keep rolling in, this time from the folks at Raz-Lee Security. The folks at VAI have a lot of experience with application modernization, but you’ll never guess which technology they’re using now. We’ll also take a look at some of the IBM i topics that will be covered at IBM’s upcoming InterConnect 2015 conference.
VAI Rides Rocket to the Web. . . and Beyond
Over the years, VAI has tried many different technologies to modernize the user interface of its RPG-based ERP application. Not all have panned out, and today it appears it has
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Orchestrating Your API-Enabled Assets On IBM i
February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOK, so you’ve API-enabled your IBM i applications and joined the ranks of modern applications. You are definitely going to benefit from simplified integration for both data and application. But now there’s a bunch of SOAP and REST calls flying all around, and it’s getting hard to keep track of them. That’s an area that CM First Group is hoping to address with a new business process management (BPM) tool imported from Europe.
CM First is now reselling the Axon.ivy BPM Suite, a business process modeling and management tool originally developed by its business partner, AXON IVY of Germany. The
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Vision Reflects on Clouds, ‘Shadow IT’ in Latest Resilience Report
February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe cloud has become pervasive in the business IT world at most organizations. However, the rise of “shadow IT” services living on the cloud threatens to undermine companies’ data and application resilience strategies, particularly in light of the increasingly complex, hybrid cloud/on-premise setups that are becoming popular today, Vision Solutions says in its annual State of Resilience report 2015.
According to Vision’s survey, 62 percent of IT executives report using cloud services at their organization. Apparently, the old debate about whether an organization should adopt “the cloud” is over. Cloud-based services are clearly popular and are here to stay, and
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IBM’s Licensing Practices Under Scrutiny
February 9, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBuying enterprise software is never easy. But the complexity and heavy-handedness that IBM and the other megavendors bring to software licensing and enforcement hurts everybody involved. That’s the opinion of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, which recently announced that it is going to step up its analysis of Big Blue’s licensing practices.
The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) last month announced that it is stepping up its research of IBM and SAP software licensing strategies in hopes of helping customers navigate overly complex structures and pressuring the vendors into simplifying their policies. To that end, the UK-based firm held
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BCD Bolsters RPG OA Support in Presto 6
February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBCD Software has been supporting the RPG Open Access technology in its Presto modernization tool for less than a year, and it’s safe to say that most Presto customers are still using the traditional 5250 access method. But the software vendor is moving strongly to cement its capabilities in the RPG Open Access arena with some slick new features in Presto 6, which was just released.
Presto, if you’re unfamiliar, is a tactical modernization tool that automatically transforms green screens into Web interfaces that can be accessed from any Web browser. BCD ships a number of pre-defined “skins” that give
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How Trek Solved Its IBM i-to-Cloud Data Integration Challenge
February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen the bicycle manufacturer Trek started looking for a CRM system several years ago, the cloud beckoned loudly. While the company has happy with its on-premise ERP system running on IBM i hardware, the new CRM would live in the cloud. But getting data back and forth between the two systems wouldn’t be easy. Luckily, the company found a tool that made data integrating cloud and on-prem data simple.
From its headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, Trek Bicycle Corp. makes and sells hundreds of thousands of bicycles every year to customers around the world. The privately held company, which in 2006