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.
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Remain Unifies Its Products with New Framework, Dubbed ‘Octo’
March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
The folks at Remain Software have been cranking out the code all winter, and the fruits of their labor are now here for all to view. Chief among the new deliverables is Octo, which the Dutch company describes as a Web-based orchestration layer and framework that will unite its various products and provide a common dashboard. Updates of other products, including the flagship TD/OMS offering, are now available, too.
The headliner for Remain Software’s second milestone delivery of the current release cycle (which spans from summer to summer) arguably is Octo. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo …
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Prepping For Supply Chain Crunches with Manhattan Associates
March 14, 2022 Alex Woodie
As the provider of the warehouse management software used by many of the top brands in the country, Manhattan Associates has a better view into the current supply chain crunch than most. That shouldn’t surprise you. But what may surprise you are the actions the company has been taking for years to prepare itself and its customers for shocks not unlike the current one.
“We’ve been really busy the last five or six years cooking up some pretty cool new things,” says Adam Kline, senior director of product management at Manhattan Associates. Kline is the product manager for WMi, …
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IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?
March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie
Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.
After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …
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IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue
February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie
When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.
IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …
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Love Your ERP or List It?
February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie
When it comes to business applications, companies are strangely attached to them. According to a recent Forrester study, more than two-thirds of organizations are happy with a range of existing core business applications and don’t plan to leave them. But the upside of digital transformation beckons, leading the analyst group to wonder whether application owners are better off loving their ERP systems or leaving them.
Forrester tackled the challenge of digital transformation in a creative way with a recent report, titled “On Premise ERP: Love It or List It,” which compares a company’s business application stay-or-go decision to the popular …
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Global COBOL Growth Spurs Reevaluation of ‘Legacy’ Assets
February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
COBOL is supposed to be a dead language, tied (mostly) as it is to the IBM mainframe, which is also dead. But according to a recent survey from Micro Focus, the amount of COBOL code in the world actually is expanding. What in COBOL is going on?
Micro Focus commissioned the research group Vanson Bourne to evaluate the state of COBOL use in the world, and the results of that research were released on February 4. Perhaps the most eye-popping figure references the title of the report, “How much COBOL is really out there?”
The answer: Anywhere from 775 to …
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Infor Customers Share IBM i Stories
February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
Infor is often disparaged for being a graveyard of IBM i ERP products. But at the recent Inforum Digital event, three Infor customers shared why they’re bullish on their IBM i ERP systems from Infor.
Badger Meters is a publicly traded manufacturer of water meters based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 115-year-old company has more than 1,600 employees and has relied on Infor ERP LX system and BPCS predecessors to automate its operations for many years.
According to Jim Reinardy, the director of information systems for Badger Meters, ERP LX has met the company’s needs, which has included a number of …
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IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution
February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.
Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.
The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. …
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IBM Revs FlashSystem Line, Adds Cyber Vault
February 14, 2022 Alex Woodie
IBM last week debuted new members of its family of NVM-Express all-flash storage arrays, including the FlashSystem 7300 and FlashSystem 9500 arrays. It also launched a new release of the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and rolled out the Cyber Vault to thwart ransomware.
The FlashSystem 7300 replaces FlashSystem 7200 in the all-flash hierarchy of IBM systems, delivering a 25 percent performance boost. According to IBM’s hardware announcement, each 2U device will feature two node canisters, each with two 10-core Intel Cascade Lake processors and 128 GB of cache standard (with options ranging up to 1.5 TB). The array has …
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Marketplace Study Shows How IBM i Language Use Evolves
February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie
It’s no secret that RPG dominates development on the IBM i platform. SQL and Control Language (CL) are also heavily used in the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of IBM i shops. But what about other established languages, like Java and C++? What about newer open source languages, like PHP and Node.js? The recent HelpSystems Marketplace Study provides us a clue into language use.
HelpSystems published its first IBM i Marketplace Study back in January 2016, reflecting data collected in late 2015 from 834 IBM i professionals around the world. One of the questions it has consistently asked is …
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