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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.

  • High Schools: The New Recruiting Grounds for IT Jobs

    November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

    Companies that are having trouble filling entry-level IT jobs due to the tight job market and low unemployment rate may want to check out another resource for finding and attracting workers: their local high school.

    Recruitment, retention, and training of new talent are always hot topics during the roundtable discussions that take place at the CIO Summit. “It’s always a very fruitful and productive topic to see what CIOs are doing,” says Alan Seiden, who has been running the bi-annual event for IBM i tech executives for the past year-and-a-half.

    So when one of the CIOs at last month’s …

    Read more
  • Syncsort Snags EView for Log Data Hooks

    November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

    Syncsort bolstered its capability to harvest log data originating on IBM i and mainframes yesterday with the acquisition of EView Technology, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company that builds big iron connectors for mainstream systems management tools.

    EView Technology didn’t occupy a prominent seat in the IBM i auditorium, but it did carve out its own little niche as a purveyor of connectivity tools used by systems administrators at some of the biggest IBM i and mainframe shops in the country, such a Ford, Kraft, TD Bank, Discount Tire, Waste Management, HSBC, FedEx, and REI.

    The company’s claim to fame was …

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  • MB Software Gets A Handle On Remote SQL Jobs

    November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

    System administrators who get frustrated with the inability to see which SQL jobs coming in through ODBC are causing problems on their IBM i server may be interested in a product called Work with Active SQL (WRKACTSQL) from MB Software and Consulting, which recently announced the tool will be free through the end of the year.

    SQL is just about as close to a universal language for business as you can get. While there are other (i.e. “native”) methods of fetching data from Db2 for i, nearly three-quarters of IBM i developers report using SQL, making it the number two …

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  • Scaling Up For Cyber Monday With IBM i

    November 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

    A fulfillment company that’s expected to process millions of transactions on an IBM i server today will lean heavily on a slim layer of RPG-based Web services technology to keep the commerce flowing for its large clients. But there’s nothing stopping the middleware, dubbed iWebSrv, from simplifying data integration for clients in other industries.

    Retailers work all year to ensure they’re ready for the massive surge of traffic that springs up after Thanksgiving. For bricks-and-mortar types, Black Friday is their make-or-break day, while those with an omni-channel bent have Cyber Monday prominently circled on their calendars.

    Consumers are expected to …

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  • Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

    November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

    Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

    Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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  • HelpSystems Gets Into JAMS for Scheduling

    November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

    HelpSystems yesterday announced the acquisition of MVP Systems Software, the Connecticut-based developer of the JAMS workload management and scheduling software. While JAMS supported IBM i, HelpSystems will count on the product to deliver capabilities primarily in the open systems realm, with cloud possibilities looming in the future.

    The acquisition came together as the result of mutual respect that HelpSystems and MVP Systems Software had for each other, says Kate Bolseth, general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems.

    “We’ve known each other for years in the workload automation space and I’d say that we’ve both been very impressed with one …

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  • Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

    November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

    For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

    Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …

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  • Modernizing IBM i Apps with Microservices

    November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

    Application modernization means different things to different people. For some, it could be turning a 5250 screen into a Web or mobile interface, or replacing database access with SQL. But for others in the IBM i community, including the vendor OpenLegacy, modernization refers to exposing existing business logic as APIs through a microservices architecture.

    Microservices refers to a software development technique whereby applications are broken down into multiple self-contained components and served via APIs in a loosely coupled but coordinated manner. The main advantage of this approach is each microservice is built independently of others, which can boost productivity and …

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  • iSphere Upgrade Bolsters RDi Even More

    November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

    When it comes to IBM i programming tools from IBM, Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) is the integrated development environment at the top of many professionals’ wish lists. However, the IDE’s functionality is lacking a few departments, which provides an opportunity for innovation in the community, as IBM originally envisioned. One of the projects that’s been running with the ball is the popular iSphere project, which recently unveiled a new release.

    iSphere is a free plug-in for RDi and WDSC that was first released by Frank Hildebrandt of Task Force IT-Consulting back in 2013. The original idea behind the …

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  • Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

    November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

    The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

    In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …

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