• Happy Holidays To All Of You From All Of Us

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After two years in pandemic-induced isolation, things got back to something close to normal in 2022. Which was a relief as well as a bit exasperating. It is hard to know what to trust as any trend anymore.

  For my family, which got whacked by “Delta” SAR-CoV-2 back in December 2019 after I took the three older kids to Chinatown in New York City for the holidays, we managed to avoid it since lock down in March 2020. But just before traveling to see family on Thanksgiving, where we have several immunocompromised relatives, we got the “Omicron” variant and had …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• What AWS Supply Chain Can Offer IBM i Shops

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services says its new machine learning-powered Supply Chain offering can provide better forecasting of inventory shortages, as well as predict demand for goods in all manner of supply chains. That includes companies in the consumer goods supply chain, in which many companies rely on IBM i-based applications to keep the goods moving.

  Following years of success building infrastructure and platform solutions, AWS has been creeping up the stack into the application business lately. Usually this is done in partnership with ISVs that supply the software to run atop the sprawling AWS infrastructure. But increasingly, the cloud giant is …

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• The Steady Growth Of The Low Code Movement

  December 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With IT talent in short supply and expensive as too much demand chases too little supply – a hard concept to get your brains around with over 42 million software developers working around the world creating and maintaining software that has an economic value in excess of $1 trillion a year – it is no surprise that some are looking to low code tools to help automate some aspects of their business.

  Low code is not just happening in the datacenters of small and medium businesses writing new applications to take on new problems and add new functionality to systems. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 14

  December 14, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  This is it! The last Monitor of 2022. While we are grateful to have survived another year in the Jungle, the idea of a few weeks off is sounding pretty good about right now. We do have one more issue of The Four Hundred for you to look forward to coming up this Monday, but after that, we will be on recharge mode until 2023. Before we go, here’s one last look around our ecosystem, starting with an opportunity for you to influence the direction of our favorite IBM i. The whole team at IT Jungle wishes you a happy …

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• IBM Bolsters Fed Business with Octo Buy

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM is buying Octo, a Reston, Virginia-based provider of IT solutions to the Federal government. The acquisition, which was announced last week, is expected to close before the end of the year and should bring IBM expertise and manpower to help federal agencies modernize their operations in specific areas, including data science, AI, big data, security, and the cloud.

  Octo was founded in 2006 by Mehul Sanghani to provide IT solutions to federal agencies. Over the years, the company has won some prestigious contracts. In March 2020 it signed a $50 million deal provide the United States Patent and Trademark …

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• Want To Influence IBM i’s Direction? Consider Joining An Advisory Council

  December 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Do you want to make your mark on the future of IBM i? If so, there may be a volunteer position available to you on one the two advisory councils run by COMMON and COMMON Europe, which play important roles in advising IBM what new features and technologies should be added to the platform.

  Members of the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) and the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) play an important role shaping what new features and functionality are added to the IBM i platform. The two councils work closely with IBM to review and prioritize customer requirements submitted …

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• Capture Point Restore: The Perfect Companion For High Availability

  December 12, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Businesses are constantly challenged by cyberattacks, coupled by their ever-increasing diverse nature. Ransomware and malicious data deletion or corruption can originate from both inside or outside of the business and staying out of the headlines by preventing attacks or at worst limiting the impact is high on the agenda for many.

  There’s seemingly never a day goes by without a prominent attack being reported, damaging both the tangible capabilities to conduct business at the time, combined with intangible ongoing damage to business reputation that these destructive incidents invariably bring.

  Many businesses have wisely invested in high availability for their IBM …

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• A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

  December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

  First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …

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• As I See It: Ghosting Productivity

  December 12, 2022 Victor Rozek

  Recently, the Department of Labor announced that worker productivity fell to a level not seen since 1947. Like the proverbial fart in the elevator, it got everybody’s attention but no one could identify its source. Economists, CEOs, and government officials were all frantic for a fix but, speculation aside, nobody could identify the precise reason for the precipitous drop.

  All the usual – and some unusual – suspects were trotted out. The pandemic, the shift to working from home, the Great Resignation, quiet quitting and, when in doubt, blame the wobbly work ethic of Gen Z. But these unusual factors …

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