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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.

  • IBM i Badges Reward You For Community Participation

    October 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

    If you are proficient on the IBM i platform and active in the IBM i community, then you might be interested in the new IBM i Community Badge Program sponsored by Big Blue that rewards IBM i professionals with digital certificates for actively engaging with the community. Nearly 100 badges have already been handed out, so don’t be surprised when they start popping up on the Web.

    The IBM i Community Badge Program officially debuted last Tuesday, October 8 – the same day that IBM launched the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. The program, which …

    Read more
  • HelpSystems Gets New Investors, CEO

    October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

    Change is in the air in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, as HelpSystems recently announced that it has a pair of new investors, as well as a new CEO. The software company has also made strides in the security space with a pair of new offerings, including one that supports IBM i.

    Let’s start with the man – or should we say, the woman – at the top. Kate Bolseth, who was most recently the COO, has taken over the top job at HelpSystems. Bolseth was the general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems when IT Jungle interviewed her last …

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  • Syncsort Expands IBM i Integration with ServiceNow

    October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that want to take full advantage of cloud-based IT management services may be interested in hearing about a new offering unveiled by Syncsort last week. With the new release of its Ironstream for ServiceNow product, Syncsort is making it easier for companies to push IBM i and mainframe event data into ServiceNow Event Management.

    ServiceNow has made its mark in the burgeoning fields of IT service management and AIOps. With $2.6 billion in revenue and more than, 5,000 software as a service (SaaS) subscribers, the publicly traded firm (NYSE: NOW) helps companies manage their increasingly complex IT …

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  • Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

    October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

    Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

    “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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  • Raz-Lee Asks ‘What If’ With Firewall

    October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

    Security administrators who feel challenged to keep up with the volume and variety of log data emanating from the IBM i server may be interested in the new “What If” features that Raz-Lee Security recently added to Firewall, its exit-point management solution for IBM i.

    Firewall helps to guard network access points to IBM i servers, including TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, DHCP, and other protocols. The software lets administrators set global and specific access rules for groups of IBM i servers and users, as well as controlling access to IBM i objects and providing the ability to set exceptions for specific …

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  • IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

    October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

    IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

    We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

    In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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  • Monoliths, Microservices, And IBM i Modernization: Part 1

    October 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

    What’s the best approach for application modernization: Maintain the monolithic architecture, or break it into individual microservices? This is an important question, especially for IBM i shops that are looking to take their considerable investment in encoded business logic to the next level.

    At first blush, the answer seems obvious: Monolithic architectures are bad, and microservices are good. Monolithic architectures, which are still quite prevalent in the IBM i world, proliferated from the 1970s well to the 2000s thanks in part to the popularity of packaged ERP suites that automated a multitude of processes and also to the programming inclinations …

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  • IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

    October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

    Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

    IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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  • Midrange Dynamics Dives Into REST With Acquisition

    October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

    Change management specialist Midrange Dynamics this month announced that it has acquired Rest4i, the UK-based developer of a native IBM i framework for integrating RPG and SQL applications with REST-based APIs. The move positions Midrange Dynamics as a player in the rapidly evolving world of microservices.

    Rest4i was founded several years ago by Stuart Milligan, who headed up DB2 database modernization firm Databorough before selling it to Fresche Solutions (then Fresche Legacy) back in 2013. Milligan foresaw the coming wave of microservices and developed software to “turn the IBM i into a complete REST API server and the RPG developers …

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  • LANSA Revs Low-Code, UI Modernization Tools

    October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

    LANSA is under new ownership, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing down the delivery of software, as the company has shipped a pair of product updates for IBM i and other platforms in recent months. That includes a new release of Visual LANSA, its flagship low-code development environment, and aXes, its screen modernization tool for 5250 apps.

    In July, LANSA announced a new release of aXes, its tactical modernization tool for converting 5250 applications into Web interfaces. aXes, which LANSA acquired 10 years ago, provides a way for IBM i shops to convert 5250 screens on-the-fly without any …

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