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.

• Indian Firm Takes Over Notes/Domino Development

  November 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The Indian IT services company HCL Technologies will have a big say in the future of IBM’s Notes/Domino and be relied upon to develop the next major release of the collaboration software due in 2018, Big Blue announced last week.

  IBM announced the “strategic partnership” with the $7 billion New Delhi firm October 25 in a blog post on its website. The deal to outsource development work to HCL Technologies shows IBM’s “level of commitment to stakeholders,” writes Inhi Cho Suh, the general manager of IBM Collaboration Solutions. “The goal of the partnership is to drive future development of the …

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• IT Horror Stories

  October 30, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Let’s face it: IT can be downright scary. From unpatched servers and failed ERP implementations to clueless CIOs and that clown in the server room, information technology is a business fraught with danger. Here are a few IT tales that could keep you up at night.

  Are hackers lurking in your system? It’s more likely if you haven’t kept up on your patches. That’s the horrific lesson learned by Equifax, which recently disclosed that it lost sensitive data for 143 million consumers after bad guys worked their way into the system through a vulnerability in some open source middleware that …

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• LTO Consortium Pushes Roadmap To Gen 12

  October 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Hot on the heels of the release of final LTO-8 specifications and the first LTO-8 drives from IBM, the LTO Consortium revealed plans to push the tape technology out to a 12th generation. By the time LTO-12 ships, ostensibly in the mid-to-late 2020s, a single cartridge should be able to store nearly half a petabyte of data, according to the group.

  Last week, the LTO Consortium, which is composed of IBM, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Quantum, announced that it has pushed the LTO Ultrium roadmap out two more generations. It was the first major addition since the …

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• BVS Tool Generates PayPal Invoices From IBM i

  October 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new product from BVS Tools lets organizations generate PayPal invoices from their IBM i screens with just a few clicks of the keyboard. The product, called GreenTools for PayPal (G4PP), has the potential to save customers a lot of time compared to manually creating invoices in the PayPal environment.

  Use of PayPal is growing quickly as consumers look for alternative ways to buy things, particularly from their mobile phones. According to Statista, about one third of U.S. retailers accept payments through PayPal, and another 21 percent are expected to add PayPal support soon. The electronic payment network, which was …

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• Vision Adds Security To HA Management Service

  October 23, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Fresh off its acquisition of Enforcive, Vision Solutions last week unveiled a new managed resilience service that adds professional IBM i security services to its managed offering for high availability and disaster recovery.

  As part of its managed HA and DR services, Vision Solutions (which has been merged with Syncsort) works with customers to ensure that their MIMIX, iTera, and OMS/ODS environments are shipshape and read to be called into duty in the event of an unexpected outage or natural disaster.

  Now Vision is adding the same type of options to its managed security service and selling it alongside …

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• Visual Data Exploration Comes To Db2 Web Query

  October 18, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server isn’t known as an analytics powerhouse — transaction processing is more its thing. But with the latest release of Db2 WebQuery for i, customers are getting visualization capabilities that will let them explore their data in powerful new ways.

  IBM announced Db2 Web Query for i version 2.2.1 on October 3 as part of its Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. While the release number would seem to indicate a minor update, the improvements are actually quite substantial, says Robert Bestgen, IBM’s product development manager for Db2 Web Query.

  “We kind of moved …

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• Why Setting IT Priorities Is So Important

  October 18, 2017 Alex Woodie

  During the Great Recession, IT professionals around the world were tasked with greater responsibilities while simultaneously working with lower budgets, a pattern that has since been ingrained as the “new normal” in tech. Now, according to a report from technology solutions provider CDW, that ongoing budget crunch is manifesting itself in new ways as organizations struggle to effectively deal with a host of IT priorities.

  In its “Power of Priority” report, CDW surveyed 800 IT decision makers from eight industries to gain a greater understanding of how organizations are prioritizing, strategizing, and executing against their IT goals. It also analyzed …

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• IBM Unveils LTO-8 Tape Drives

  October 16, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The not-so-long wait for the latest Linear Tape-Open gear is finally over, as members of the LTO Consortium last week unveiled their latest drives capacity of storing 30 TB of compressed data. Among the first consortium members unveiling product was IBM, which announced its first two LTO-8 Ultrium drives.

  LTO-8 drives can store up to 12 TB of data on a single LTO-8 cartridge, and move data at rates up to 360 MB/sec. With 2.5-to-1 compression turned on, the capacity of LTO-8 drives jumps to 30 TB while the transfer rates increases to 900 MB/sec. That corresponds to a 100 …

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• IBM Updates Cloud Backup Solution

  October 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are getting new options for backing up data to the cloud from IBM, which last week announced an update to the Cloud Storage Solutions as part of its Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. Representatives from IBM and Rocket Software, which actually developed the product, clued us in on the news.

  It was almost exactly one year ago when IBM first unveiled Cloud Storage Solutions for i. The offering — which was mostly developed by Rocket Software and really is just one solution — enabled IBM i customers to back up their IFS data to …

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• IBM i Slow to Catch On, But What Does It Mean?

  October 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s been nine-and-a-half years since IBM rebranded the name of the platform from System i to IBM i on Power Systems. However, many people in the IBM midrange community call the platform by something other than its official name, according to anecdotal evidence and Web search data. Is this evidence of continued name confusion, or is there something else at play?

  IBM has been running from the iSeries name since its 2006 rebranding exercise, which replaced iSeries with System i. That name went by the wayside in April 2008, when IBM announced the Power Systems platform and the merger of …

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