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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Meet IBM’s New Security Architect for IBM i
June 17, 2019 Alex Woodie
Security isn’t just a feature of the IBM i operating system. It’s a fundamental concept that all IBM engineers share as they go about their business building and maintaining the system that’s used by over 120,000 organizations around the world. But when it comes to bringing it all together, there’s one person in charge of ensuring the operating system is as protected as it can be: the security architect.
The security architect job has been held by several folks in the IBM Rochester lab over the years, including Patrick Botz, Carol Woodbury, and Jeff Uehling. Botz and Woodbury now work …
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Bucking the System: Higher Ed, Hold the College
June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie
Jim Buck spent 15 years teaching IBM i and RPG at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Buck achieved great things there, finding hundreds of students good jobs around the country. But ultimately the college experience grew old for Buck, so he ventured out on his own. That’s when he founded his own online IBM i educational company, imPower Technologies.
That was two years ago, in the spring of 2017. After spending almost a year getting imPower Technologies up and running, Buck is teaching students IBM i and RPG once again. Currently he offers two courses: an introduction to IBM …
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CNX Welcomes 5250 Apps Into Valence Framework
June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie
For years, CNX has prided itself on providing the IBM i community with development tools for creating modern Web applications on the platform. The company looked unapologetically to the future, and encouraged customers to move on from their green-screen pasts. But in response to strong customer demand, the company has relented and decided to allow green screens into the framework via an innovative new Web-based emulator dubbed Fusion5250.
Fusion5250 is all about giving customers choice, CNX says. The software, which is a core new feature in Valence 5.2+, lets Valence customers access a modern application developed with CNX’s Nitro App …
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IBM i Gets a New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’
June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie
The IBM i platform isn’t getting any younger, and neither are the thousands of individuals who work on it. But that doesn’t mean that platform as a whole should be marked by gray. To celebrate the viability of the platform’s ability to attract young people, IBM System Magazine just introduced its newest crop of “Fresh Faces.”
IBM System Magazine has been calling attention to the IBM i youth movement since 2016, when it debuted its original crop of Fresh Faces. Liam Allan was a member of that group as a teenager, and he has since gone on to build himself …
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It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here
June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie
For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.
It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …
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Profound Marks 20 Years With A Free Dev Site For Node.js
June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie
Profound Logic turns 20 years old this year, a remarkable achievement for CEO Alex Roytman and his crew. But instead of receiving presents, the Dayton, Ohio, company gave the IBM i community a gift in NodeRun, a website where developers can create and deploy full-stack Node.js applications that can run in the cloud or on-premise IBM i servers. Best of all, NodeRun is free.
Profound Logic started way back in 1999 by developing utilities for RPG programmers. As the World Wide Web continued to grow, Profound CEO Alex Roytman and company created new tools to help RPG programmers make the …
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Fresche Bullish On ‘Factory’ Approach As IBM i Market Improves
June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie
Factories offer a level of repeatability, predictability, and efficiency that make the manufacture of goods simpler, less risky, and more profitable than it would otherwise be. Now the folks at Fresche Solutions are taking a factory-based approach to a markedly different endeavor: the modernization of IBM i applications. The early returns from Fresche indicate some optimism may be in order.
Last week at the POWERUp conference in Anaheim, California, Fresche Solutions CEO Andy Kulakowski and his team spoke at length with IT Jungle about its new factory approach to selling modernization software and services, as well as the recent successes …
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These ISVs Are Moving To Support IBM i 7.4
June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie
We’re just over halfway between the announcement of IBM i 7.4 and general availability. That means that IBM i 7.4 and all of its features – including the much-anticipated Db2 Mirror – are actually still in beta. IBM is hustling to take care of last-minute changes to the release before shipping the software, which is planned for June 21. Many of the independent software vendors sailing the IBM i waters are also gearing up for GA.
CNX will support IBM i 7.4 with Valence, its framework for developing modern IBM i applications, on June 21. “CNX will support it on …
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POWERUp Delivers Shot In The Arm To IBM i
June 3, 2019 Alex Woodie
The IBM i platform has shown some growth in recent quarters, but it nonetheless faces a plethora of headwinds when it comes to surviving, much less growing, in the coming years. It’s not X86-based, and you can’t find it in the public cloud (at least not yet). It’s definitely not new, and it’s certainly not sexy. (Maybe no server really is at this point.) But coming on the heels of the IBM i 7.4 unveiling in April, the recent POWERUp conference delivered another greatly needed boost to the IBM i community.
You can be forgiven for thinking the worst of …
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Why i Reason #87: Eschewing Performance for Its Own Sake
May 20, 2019 Alex Woodie
Make no mistake about it: IBM’s Power Systems server can flat out fly. The two biggest supercomputers on the planet right now – Summit and Sierra – are Power9 machines, although much of the computational oomph comes from Nvidia GPUs. But one thing that sets the IBM i server apart from its hardware compatriots is that it avoids the celebrity of performance.
Performance is “in” right now in the IT space (it never really went out of style). Industry standard server makers (i.e., those who make X86 servers) fight over who has the fastest systems. Public cloud platforms battle to …
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