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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.

  • Coda on IBM i Beats Out PeopleSoft Upgrade

    December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

    When it came time for a financial system upgrade, DecoPac, the world’s largest provider of cake decorations, selected UNIT4‘s Coda package running on IBM i over an upgrade of Oracle‘s PeopleSoft, the software vendor announced last week.

    DecoPac is an Anoka, Minnesota-based company that markets and distributes a range of cake, cookie, and cupcake decoration products to professional bakeries around the world. For decades, the company has developed its own IBM i software to handle sales and distribution.

    According to DecoPac, a key consideration in its selection of Coda Financials over a PeopleSoft upgrade was Coda’s track record

    …

    Read more
  • Austrian Manufacturer Demonstrates IT Simplicity with IBM i

    December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

    The Austrian eyewear company Silhouette International Schmied AG has made a name for itself by manufacturing eyeglasses with simple designs, advanced materials, and superior technology. That ethos extends to Silhouette’s IT environment, which runs on IBM Power Systems servers and requires a minimum of manual intervention.

    Arnold and Anneliese Schmied founded Silhouette in 1964 with the idea of making eyeglasses high-tech fashion accessories. The company is best known for elegantly simple and extremely thin eyeglasses that use super lightweight materials, such as titanium, which was instrumental in NASA selecting Silhouette sunglasses as standard gear for American astronauts.

    Today, Silhouette employs

    …

    Read more
  • New Zealand TV Company Taps Zentive for ICOMS Monitoring

    December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Sky Television, New Zealand’s only pay-television provider, has adopted the 360Service Assurance product from Zentive to help it monitor its IBM i-based ICOMS customer care and billing system.

    According to UK-based Zentive, Sky Television needed a way to monitor and ensure the availability of API interfaces to its ICOMS platform. The company found Zentive’s 360Service Assurance and its Overseer for API Gateway Availability add-on to fit the bill.

    360Service Assurance is an availability and performance monitor designed for use with operations support systems (OSS) and business support system (BSS) in a telecom environment. The software can be used to perform

    …

    Read more
  • ASTI Records UDO Win in County Court’s Office

    December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

    The Sangamon County Circuit Clerk’s office recently implemented a UDO optical media storage solution from Alliance Storage Technologies (ASTI) to store court records that it manages for the Seventh Judicial Court located in Springfield, Illinois, the company announced last week.

    The road to Alliance and its Plasmon UDO (Ultra Density Optical) solutions started when Sangamon County Circuit Clerk Tony Libri’s office decided that it needed a better place to store data from an IBM i-based application from JANO Justice Systems.

    “We were looking for an archival storage solution that could meet our requirements: reliability, performance, cost-effectiveness, secure Write Once

    …

    Read more
  • SMBs Lack Cohesive Digital Strategy, IBM Says

    December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

    If you thought that bigger companies have a leg up on their smaller cohorts when it comes to having a cohesive digital strategy, you’d be right, according to a new survey from IBM.

    IBM says its global study of midmarket C-Suite leaders uncovers a “surprising” fact about most small and midsize companies: “They may not be as digitally savvy as they’d like.”

    Apparently, not only do SMBs not have as much revenue as large companies, but the small fry also lack the social media savvy of the big dogs in any particular industry. According to IBM’s survey, 65 percent

    …

    Read more
  • Open Source Is Here To Stay On IBM i

    December 2, 2013 Alex Woodie

    For years, open source software has been a bit of a redheaded stepchild in the button-down IBM midrange community. IBM i shops were hesitant to use it, and vendors were afraid to adopt it. But with so much of the computing world now running on open source, the aversion to open source has gradually melted away, and it has steadily crept into use among large corporations, and the IBM i world too.

    It is tough to measure the adoption of open source software, which flows freely across networks by its very nature. Nobody requires you to register to use open

    …

    Read more
  • Hey iDoctor, Can i Get a Walker?

    November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

    IBM is currently beta testing a new piece of software called the HMC Walker that’s designed to help Power Systems admins pinpoint LPARs that aren’t running at optimal speed. When an admin finds an underperforming LPAR, the HMC Walker interface makes it easy for the admin to drill down into the iDoctor tool to get more details on the problem.

    The new HMC Walker offering gives administrators a high-level view of all their physical systems and the LPARs that are attached to them via the hardware management console (HMC). The software works with LPARs of all types, including IBM i,

    …

    Read more
  • Free Format RPG Is Here with TR7, Context Checking Still to Come

    November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

    As promised, IBM on Friday delivered the latest update of the IBM i OS, dubbed version 7.1 Technology Refresh 7. The TR7 release brings free format coding to RPG, and big data enhancements to DB2/400. RPG programmers can get started writing free format code as soon as they install the compiler, but they’ll have to wait until next year to get free-format syntax checking in RDi.

    IBM bundled all the work it did for IBM i 7.1 TR7–including the free format enhancements to the RPG compiler, the Ruby stuff, the SQL pre-compiler, the SQL index expansion, the new database growth

    …

    Read more
  • BCD Bolsters Nexus Portal with Authentication and CMS Functions

    November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops looking for a quick way to communicate with customers and partners over the Web might be interested in the latest release of Nexus, Business Computer Design Int’l.‘s IBM i-based Web portal. With the updated release of Nexus, BCD adopted the OpenLDAP authentication software, and added support for a new visual document designer called TinyMCE.

    The Nexus portal was initially created years ago as a side project that came out WebSmart, BCD’s Web application development and runtime environment for IBM i servers. One of the very first things that IBM i shops need upon creating a Web

    …

    Read more
  • Go Ahead And Test It, Midrange Dynamics Says

    November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

    It’s tough to argue against the importance of testing new and modified applications before rolling them into production, especially with the www.healthcare.gov debacle still unfolding. While IBM i shops aren’t likely to roll out anything as big and complex as that website, they still should perform functional and regression testing, and new tools from change management software vendor Midrange Dynamics can help.

    The headliner of the latest release of Midrange Dynamics’ change management software, MDCMS version 7.1.1, is a new feature designed to make it very easy to copy production data to test environments.

    According to the vendor, developers can

    …

    Read more

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