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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Food Company Goes All In With WebFocus BI
November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of business intelligence software is a notoriously difficult thing to do. But when it comes to Lipari Foods and its implementation of Information Builders’ BI suite, it’s safe to say that its employees’ relationship to data has changed in a profound and meaningful way.
Lipari Foods is a midsize company headquartered in Warren, Michigan, that distributes food to 5,000 customers in 18 Midwestern states, a range that extends from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Thanks to the surge in popularity of specialty foods, such as gluten-free and halal, the privately owned distributor has grown quickly, and …
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Fiserv Banks On FlashSystem For Speedup
November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie
There are lots of ways to make your transaction and analytic workloads move a little faster: optimize the database, add memory, tweak some code. But if you want to make them go a lot faster, pair them with a bank of high-speed solid state drives. That’s what IBM i banking software provider Fiserv did recently with IBM’s FlashSystem storage gear.
According to an IBM Solution Brief, the Brookfield, Wisconsin, software vendor went to IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, lab in late 2015 to benchmark a FlashSystem storage array for a large commercial bank that’s a user of Signature, Fiserv‘s IBM …
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The Top iOS Apps For IBM i
November 27, 2017 Alex Woodie
Despite sharing a similar name with Apple products, IBM i isn’t mobile. You can’t run IBM i on your smartphone or tablet, let alone on your watch or whatever IoT-connected gadget people need now. But that doesn’t mean developers haven’t written a bunch of mobile apps that connect to IBM i. Here are the top 15 iOS apps for IBM i.
Being a developer of propriety hardware and software, Apple won’t share much about, well, just about anything. In fact, the super secretive company from Cupertino, Calif., doesn’t even provide a way to browse the catalog of iOS apps on …
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VAI Experiments With Watson
November 15, 2017 Alex Woodie
It’s hard not to hear about Watson these days, especially since IBM changed the name of its Power Systems division to Cognitive Systems. But what can the cognitive service bring to pragmatic IBM i shops who are wary of change? The ERP software company VAI is at the forefront of experimentation.
According to VAI CIO Kevin Beasley, VAI started working with Watson in 2016. A lot of the early work that year involved manually uploading a bunch of ERP data into Watson, mixing it with data supplied by IBM, and then seeing what Watson came up with.
One of …
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Understanding Your 2FA Options for IBM i
November 15, 2017 Alex Woodie
It’s hard to have too much security on the Web these days, particularly with a preponderance of hackers, botnets, and keyloggers hanging around. One way to boost one’s cyber security is to use two-factor authentication, or 2FA, when connecting to sensitive applications and databases. Luckily, the technology is available for IBM i, too.
2FA is a technique that boosts the security of the log-on process and thwarts unauthorized access of sensitive systems. Instead of letting a person onto a computer based on the combination of just a user name and password, 2FA requires the person to have an extra identifier. …
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HATS Finds A RESTful ‘Swagger’
November 13, 2017 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops will gain access to new API tooling on Thursday, when IBM ships a new release of its Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) software that supports Swagger, a popular open-source specification for designing, generating, documenting, and consuming REST-based APIs.
APIs built using the Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol have become the primary way that companies expose their applications and data in a programmatic way. By defining one’s application program interfaces (APIs) in the RESTful style – as opposed to, say, the older, XML-heavy Simple Object Application Protocol (SOAP) style – companies can join in, and partake of, …
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IBM Teaches ACS New Tricks
November 8, 2017 Alex Woodie
Last month’s Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 brought a number of enhancements to the operating system and the database. But one should not overlook the new stuff coming to IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), including changes to the 5250 emulator, extensions for database access, and security enhancements.
ACS, in case you forgot, is the new go-to client interface that administrators, developers, engineers, and power users alike can use for handling a range of IBM i tasks. The Java-based product, which IBM unveiled back in August 2012, bundles a bunch of useful goodies into a single product, …
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IBM Champions Deadline Is Next Week
November 8, 2017 Alex Woodie
Who would you like to see become an IBM Champion? If there’s somebody in the IBM i or Power Systems community that you think can make a difference, then you have less than a week to nominate them.
Every year, IBM selects a new group of champions across five areas, including analytics, cloud and cloud integration, collaboration solutions, Power, and IBM z. To be considered for the 2018 class of IBM Champions, a person must be nominated by Monday, November 13.
So, what is an IBM Champion? According to IBM, the program “recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical …
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Should Spark In-Memory Run Natively On IBM i?
November 6, 2017 Alex Woodie
There’s a revolution happening in the field of data analytics, and an open source computing framework called Apache Spark is right smack in the middle of it. Spark is such a powerful tool that IBM elected to create a distribution of it that runs natively on its System z mainframe. Will it do the same for its baby mainframe, the IBM i?
So, what is Apache Spark, and why should you care? Great questions! Let’s introduce you to Spark.
Spark came out of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab about five years ago to provide a faster and easier-to-use alternative to MapReduce, which …
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Functionality Trumps Glitz in ERP Decision
November 1, 2017 Alex Woodie
What do you look for in a new ERP system? For the folks at Veterinary Purchasing Company, which is transitioning away from its homegrown S/36-era ERP system, the decision came down to a preference for proven substance over hollow glamor.
Veterinary Purchasing Company is a member-owned company that was founded in 1972 by a group of veterinarians who wanted to increase their purchasing power by buying in bulk on the wholesale market. The company, which employs about 210 people at its headquarters in St Mary, Ontario, also sells to non-shareholder vets and animal hospitals across Canada.
In the mid-1970s, VP …
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