• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact

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.

  • POWERUp 2020 Pushed Online By Coronavirus Continuing Spread

    August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Any hope that the spread of coronavirus would die down enough for COMMON to hold its POWERUp conference has been successfully smothered, as the user group last week was forced to cancel its annual meeting a second time in four months. If there’s any consolation to the COVID-19 chaos, it’s that online and virtual events are getting better and better – in the IT sector generally, as well as in our little neck of the i wood.

    There will be no cake served during the 60th anniversary celebration that COMMON had planned for its annual meeting, POWERUp 2020, which was …

    Read more
  • HCL Certifies Domino 11 on IBM i/Power

    August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Domino 11 officially shipped in late 2019 by HCL Technologies, the company selected by IBM to continue development of the Domino family of products in 2017. Last month, the company announced that Domino 11 running on IBM i has been certified on select Power9 servers. Among the new capabilities that it brings is the new low-code Volt environment.

    The Domino family of products, including Notes, Sametime, Connections, and Traveler, has been through quite a bit over the past few years. After nearly a decade of neglect by IBM, HCL Tech made the development of Domino 10 a priority for the …

    Read more
  • HelpSystems Makes A Move In Data Classification

    August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Before you can secure your data, you need to know what data you have and whether it’s sensitive. That’s the logic that drove the acquisitions of a pair of data classification software companies by HelpSystems recently.

    On June 25, HelpSystems’ announced the acquisitions of two firms — Titus and Boldon James — both of which offer similar capabilities in the field of data classification. HelpSystems plans to integrate their data classification offerings into products used by its large IBM i installed base.

    Titus, which is based in Ottawa, Canada, says it provides solutions to “some of the largest financial …

    Read more
  • Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

    August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

    Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

    Read more
  • Kisco Extends Two Factor Authentication To Green Screens

    July 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Companies that still rely on 5250 greenscreens to get work done can now lock down those sessions with a new two-factor authentication feature recently delivered in Kisco Information Systems’ i2Pass offering. The New York company is also giving customers of its iEventMonitor solution new capabilities to automatically respond to error messages in a remote fashion.

    Green screens, if you haven’t noticed, are not going away. Despite the ubiquity of Web and mobile interfaces for new development, there’s a large number of applications that require users to log into a 5250 terminal emulation session to get the job done. For companies …

    Read more
  • ARCAD Generates APIs From 5250 Screens

    July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Many IBM i shops want to modernize their 5250 applications by developing REST-based Web services and API extensions, but they face difficulties getting started. These organizations may want to check out ARCAD Software’s latest offering, ARCAD API, which takes much of the pain and complexity out of the API generation process.

    REST-based APIs have become a standard method for exposing data and business logic to the outside world. There’s an abundance of ways that APIs can be used–pushing data to Web or mobile users, for example, or pulling data from a cloud-based CRM system. Just about any higher-level application function, …

    Read more
  • Cobalt Iron Supports Multiple LPARs with VTL

    July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops will be able to back up multiple LPARs to an individual virtual tape library (VTL) from Cobalt Iron, the company announced recently. The new capability overcomes a limitation that has existed since the company started to support IBM i with its data protection service a couple of years ago.

    Cobalt Iron is a Lawrence, Kansas-based provider of enterprise data protection services. The company’s flagship offering, called Compass, provides backup, recovery, and related services for or all major computer platforms, including servers running on-prem, virtualized environments, and systems and applications running in clouds.

    Some of Cobalt Iron’s customers …

    Read more
  • ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

    July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

    Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

    While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

    Read more
  • Wire IoT Up To IBM i With Node-RED

    July 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

    The Internet of Things (IoT) brings a new way to think about our digital world. From sensors on a manufacturing line to Twitter messages from the other side of the world, the IoT brings it all together. And with Node-RED, a low-code framework that is available on IBM i, wiring up these data flows into useful applications is surprisingly easy.

    Created by IBM, Node-RED is a Node.JS-based framework for developing event-driven data applications, or “flows,” that deliver a data payload in the form of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data standard, from a source to a destination. Node-RED flows …

    Read more
  • IBMiUnit Moves RPG Unit Testing Forward

    June 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

    As IBM i shops break up their monolithic programs into more reusable chunks, it’s reasonable to assume that they would adopt unit testing to make sure those chunks are working properly before promoting them into production. Unit testing hasn’t been widely adopted on the IBM i platform, which is why RPG developers who are looking for a unit testing tool may be interested in a new framework called IBMiUnit.

    IBMiUnit is an open source project that helps programmers test any RPG-based program, subprocedure, or method, including RPG-based SQL. The software, which is modeled off the popular JUnit and xUnit frameworks, …

    Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Power11 Entry Machines: The Power S1124 And Power L1124
  • BRMS Isn’t The Only Backup Product With A Security Problem
  • Guru: A Faster Way To Sign A JWT
  • Maxis Adds IBM i Support To Database Modernization Tool
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 28
  • To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable
  • How FalconStor Is Reinventing Itself, And Why IBM Noticed
  • Guru: When Procedure Driven RPG Really Works
  • Vendors Fill In The Gaps With IBM’s New MFA Solution
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 27

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle