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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.

  • No Plan To Bring .NET To Power, IBM Says

    July 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

    IBM says it currently has no new projects underway to get .NET to run on Power, which IT Jungle previously reported was a project that was underway at IBM. What’s more, existing efforts to run .NET applications on IBM i that have been backed by Big Blue have apparently drawn very little interest from the vendor community.

    Back in March, we reported on a plan within IBM to get .NET running in a containerized Red Hat Linux and OpenShift environment running on Power, much the same as it had done with System z. Our source told us the project involved …

    Read more
  • Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

    July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

    The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through business, changing the way companies operate and resetting customer expectations. Businesses that can’t keep up with these evolving needs face long-term headwinds in terms of competitiveness. Implementing a modernization strategy is paramount for companies in these situations, but where do you start?

    While business closures from COVID-19 were bad, they could have been a lot worse. A 2021 study released by the Federal Reserve concluded that 200,000 establishments closed as a result of the pandemic. That was lower than a study from a year earlier that found 400,000 establishments could close. “Actual exit is …

    Read more
  • Service Express Buys iTech Solutions, iInTheCloud

    July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

    It was a “double i” acquisition day recently for Service Express, the IBM business partner that completed acquisitions of iTech Solutions and iInTheCloud on July 5. The moves give Service Express a much bigger presence for IBM i cloud services in the US after it completed a similar deal in the UK.

    Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Service Express broke into the IT market decades ago servicing DEC and VaxAlpha accounts. Over the years, the company has grown its presence in the IBM market, providing hardware systems, solution sales, and managed services, in addition to managed services, IT asset disposition, …

    Read more
  • ATS Group Looks For Patterns In The IT Chaos With Galileo Suite

    July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

    If you’re having trouble keeping track of a busy IT environment, you’re not alone — many organizations are in the same boat as you. But when you check out many observability tools, you’ll often find they don’t even know how to spell “IBM i.” That is not the case with Galileo Suite, a collection of IT monitoring and observability tools from Advanced Technology Service Group that supports a range of operating systems, including IBM i.

    IT Jungle caught sight of Galileo Suite at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference in New Orleans, where the company behind the suite, ATS Group, …

    Read more
  • Support For Java 7 Ending WAS 8.5 On IBM i

    July 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that are running the traditional version of WebSphere Application Server 8.5 atop a Java 7 codebase will need to upgrade to Java 8 or risk running out of support from IBM.

    At the end of July, IBM will cease to support WAS Traditional 8.5 running on JDK 7.0/7.1. Customers will need to upgrade their WAS 8.5 environments to JDK 8.0 to maintain support with IBM. IBM currently provides full support for WAS 8.5 and WAS 9.0 running on JDK 8.0. You can read more about this on the Official Support Statement for the IBM WebSphere Application Server …

    Read more
  • Exploring Security Applications for IBM i OLAP

    July 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

    The IBM i platform is typically thought of as a transactional server, and it does that job very well. But it also has solid analytical capabilities, thanks in large part to new OLAP features added many years ago with IBM i 7.3. Now the platform’s database guru, Scott Forstie, is looking for ways to promote greater use of these OLAP capabilities, and security is emerging as a top application.

    Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what a good thing you have. This appears to be the case with IBM i 7.3, which launched way back in 2016 and …

    Read more
  • More IBM i Security Flaws Revealed

    July 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

    The summer slowdown might have started in your particular business, but things are just getting warmed up IBM security researchers, who disclosed a series of new vulnerabilities across IBM i products over the past couple of weeks, including IBM i Merlin, WAS Liberty, OpenSSL, the Digital Certificate Manager, and Zlib.

    On June 27, IBM disclosed that the collection of open source and proprietary tools and technology it’s brought together as IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) suffers from no fewer than 16 separate security flaws.

    Among the most series of these flaws is a CVE-2022-22965, a data binding …

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  • Merlin Development Framework Now Supports IBM i 7.3

    July 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

    Big Blue has decided to support IBM i version 7.3 with Merlin, the new application development framework that was introduced in May as part of the IBM i 7.5 launch. The decision should help widen the potential user base for Merlin, even while discouraging operating system upgrades.

    Merlin is a new software package from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from IBM, Red Hat, …

    Read more
  • IBM Mulls Using DataMigrator as Cloud Warehouse Pipeline

    June 29, 2022 Alex Woodie

    IBMers are playing around with an update to a little-known ETL tool called DataMigrator for i that would make it easier for IBM i shops to move transactional data to cloud-based data warehousing platforms. The update would use Apache Kafka for the final connection to the cloud.

    DataMigrator ETL Extension, as the product is formally known, is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool created by IBM back in 2015. The product was developed to work with Db2 Web Query, the Java-based business intelligence tool that it OEMed from Information Builders (now owned by TIBCO).

    DataMigrator for …

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  • PowerTech AV Automatically Detects Ransomware Activity

    June 29, 2022 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that are concerned about ransomware attacks may be interested in a new release of PowerTech Antivirus from HelpSystems, which can automatically detect ransomware activity on the IBM i system and block it before it can cause damage. There’s also a nifty new “canary file” feature that will hopefully keep IBM i users from falling down the coal mine.

    PowerTech Antivirus, which formerly carried the Stand Guard Anti-Virus label, was originally developed by Bytware to detect and prevent viruses from infecting the IFS on IBM i. The software, which HelpSystems obtained in a 2008 acquisition, uses an …

    Read more

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