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.

• Google Close to Launching IBM i Cloud Service, Will Says

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  One of the laments of Power chip types everywhere is the lack of a public cloud service for Power applications. While Linux and Windows folks can run their X86 workloads on multiple public clouds, the opportunities for hosting IBM i, AIX, or Power Linux workloads are limited to so-called private clouds. But according to IBM i chief architect Steve Will, that could soon be changing.

  While neither IBM nor Google have made any official announcements about Google running IBM i in its public cloud, Will talked openly about the relationship between the two tech giants at COMMON‘s PowerUp conference …

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• Fresche Takes $60 Million To Fuel Growth, Consolidate Market

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions is making big moves, and readying itself to make even bigger ones. With $60 million in the bank – and a line of eager equity firms willing to invest millions more – the IBM i software and services firm is poised to significantly expand operations in a bid to capture what executives foresee as a loosening of budgets and uptick in demand around application modernization.

  Fresche Solutions had just announced the $60 million financing round at the COMMON PowerUp conference two weeks ago, and its CFO was itching to get out on the expo floor. That’s where the …

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• IBM i Finds A Youthful Swagger Down In Texas

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform and ecosystem may not be what they once were. Thirty years of relentless OLTP processing will do that to you. But if COMMON’s POWERUp 18 conference this week in San Antonio is any indication, the box itself and the ecosystem it supports are far from dead.

  Signs of life in IBM i-land were evident everywhere at the Marriott Rivercenter, the hotel where about 1,000 IBM i professionals, vendors, and IBMers spent the past four days holed up for COMMON‘s annual conference, which was renamed POWERUp.

  Here are some of the highlights of the show, which …

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• Syncsort Talks Rebranding, IBM i Product Strategy

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Think you know Syncsort? Who the company is and what it does? Well, you might want to take a fresh peek, because the company that acquired Vision Solutions and a handful of other IBM i software firms is on the move. In fact, it used the COMMON POWERUp 18 conference in San Antonio this week to begin rolling out a long-awaited company rebranding and major product refresh – including its new Fusion unification strategy and several new IBM i products.

  First of all, the company will continue to be known as Syncsort. The executives leading the Pearl River, New …

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• Massiello Named First Lifetime Champion for Power

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Pete Massiello has been a mainstay of the IBM i community for decades. He’s the president of iTech Solutions, a former president at COMMON, a respected technical authority on the platform, an in-demand speaker, and part of the inaugural group of IBM Champions for Power Systems in 2011. Now he can add one more title to his resume: Lifetime Champion for Power Systems.

  IBM this month announced that Massiello is the first Lifetime Champion for Power, an event for which he was not prepared. “It was a surprise to me,” he said, before quickly adding “It’s a huge honor, an …

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• Syncsort Acquires Townsend’s IBM i Encryption Software

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort has acquired the bulk of Townsend Security’s products in a bid to bolster its burgeoning suite of security software for IBM i. The big get for Syncsort (formerly Vision Solutions) is AES/400, Townsend’s well-respected database encryption software for the IBM i platform. Meanwhile, Townsend Security will continue developing and selling encryption key management software for open systems and cloud platforms.

  When it comes to database encryption on the IBM i server, there are few options. There are various encryption solutions available from IBM, including Cryptographic Services, which is the mainstream offering today. But when it comes to third-party …

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• Past And Future Collide At PowerUp 18

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  COMMON kicked off its first inaugural PowerUp conference Sunday in San Antonio, Texas, where an estimated 1,000 attendees are gathered to learn about the Power Systems platform and share their knowledge with other users. The IBM i server’s 30 years of reliable service was a big topic of discussion, but IBM executives Steve Sibley and Stefanie Chiras were determined to talk about Power’s AI future.

  Any platform that lives to be 30 years old in this day and age is doing something right. While today’s IBM i server is not the same beast as the first AS/400 that came out …

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• What’s Cooking With IBM i On GitHub?

  May 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community’s relationship with open source started off as a slow embrace, but it’s turning into something more serious. A central player in this love affair is GitHub, which is not only the world’s largest repository for open source code, but increasingly a vehicle for delivering open innovation on the IBM i platform.

  GitHub is a privately held company that was founded 10 years ago in San Francisco as Logical Awesome LLC with a simple goal: provide a hosting service and collaboration framework for software development projects managed with the Git open source version control system.

  The company …

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• Here’s What’s Next for the Enterprise Software World

  May 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thirty years ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) was a hot new technology promising to help streamline business processes. While ERP continues to generate billions in revenue, it’s mostly for keeping complicated systems up and running. Now the daughter of the founder of JD Edwards is sharing a bold new vision for how her company, called Nextworld, plans to take enterprise software to the next stage.

  We first got wind of Nextworld venture about a year-and-a-half ago. We knew the Colorado company had big plans and a stream of funding from Kylee McVaney’s father, Ed McVaney. However, since Nextworld was …

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• IBM Adds New PDM Perspective to RDi

  May 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM is receiving high marks for a new feature called PDM Perspective that it just launched in Rational Developer for i version 9.6.0.2. The new feature gives users the capability to filter libraries or members in RDi that’s very similar to the way PDM functioned in SEU. It’s so good, according to some IBM i experts, that it eliminates any reason not to use RDi.

  There are several new features in RDi version 9.6.0.2, which IBM released May 2, but it’s the PDM Perspective feature that’s getting the most attention. According to IBM, the new PDM Perspective in the Object …

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