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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Your ERP Contract is Worse Than You Thought
February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie
Marcus Harris knows a bit about ERP contracts and litigation. As a former lawyer for SAP and Infor, he’s the guy that ERP customers would have gone up against in court or a mediation room when a disagreement arises. But he switched sides and now he works on behalf of clients looking to hold their ERP vendors to account. He provided some worthwhile advice at the recent Digital Stratosphere 2020 conference in San Diego.
Like most lawyers worth their salt, Harris would rather not represent you in court. Sure, it gives his firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, lots …
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Security Still the Top Concern as Privacy Regs Loom
February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie
For the fourth year in a row, security is the number one concern of the IBM i installed base, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey. IBM i shops are clearly concerned about the need to prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. But security’s first cousin, data privacy, also stands to gain more attention with the recent passage of data privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA.
HelpSystems released the results of its latest marketplace survey last month, as it has done for the past six years. And just as it has for every year since 2017, security …
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Why Koch Is Buying the Rest of Infor
February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie
Koch Equity Development last week announced that it has bought the remaining shares of Infor that it didn’t previously own. The move puts Koch Industries in charge of the world’s third largest ERP software company, and the IBM i market’s biggest vendor. But what, exactly, drove the $110-billion industrial conglomerate into making such an investment is the subject of some speculation.
Infor, which has been flirting with an IPO for years, appeared to be on the fast-track for a Wall Street listing in January 2019, when it raised $1.5 billion in what, ostensibly, would be the last private equity …
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NGS Breaks Scalability Barrier With OLAP Client
February 10, 2020 Alex Woodie
New Generation Software is putting the finishing touches on an overhaul of its OLAP client, called QPort SmartView, that it says removes limitations on the amount of data IBM i shops can analyze. The Windows program gives users the ease of use and flexibility of Excel on the front-end, but utilizes the scalability and OLAP processing heft of IBM i on the backend to analyze substantially larger data volumes.
Typically, New Generation Software plays it down the middle when it comes to business intelligence and analytics on the IBM i platform. On the one hand, the company’s predominantly midsize clientele …
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How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation
February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie
Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.
One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …
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Google Launches Power Systems Cloud, But Not Yet for IBM i
January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie
Google last week officially unveiled IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud, a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that will allow customers to run AIX, Linux, and IBM i workloads and manage it from their familiar Google Cloud accounts. Google says that AIX and Linux are ready to go, but says that IBM i customers will have to wait just a little longer to get in on the cloud action.
The general availability of IBM Power Systems on Google Cloud has been years in the making. Google was one of the earliest enrollees in IBM’s Open Power initiative, and …
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Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions For 2020, Part 2
January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie
What will happen in the IBM i community in 2020? It’s a question that’s worth some speculation, particularly from members of the IBM i community who have given it some thought. Here is our second (and final) batch of community predictions for 2020.
The IBM i platform has been chugging along for 32 years (or 40 if you count the S/38). Do you really think this will be the year that it goes kaput? Trevor Perry certainly doesn’t think so, and you probably shouldn’t, either.
“There will be continued predictions of the demise of IBM i throughout 2020,” the IBM …
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Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1
January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie
We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.
For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.
“IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …
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Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?
January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie
In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.
HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …
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Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content
January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie
On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.
IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …
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