• EXTOL Helps IBM i Shop with Web Services . . . m-Power Delivers In-Memory Analytics . . . VAULT400 Racks Up Another Win

  September 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  EXTOL Helps IBM i Shop with Web Services CURT Manufacturing has been using the EXTOL EDI Integrator for i software from EXTOL International for over a decade. But when the tow-hitch manufacturer decided to expand its business on the Web, it needed something to accelerate its new ordering processes. That’s when it tapped another product from the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, software company: EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) Web Services. With EBI Web Services installed on the company’s Power Systems server, CURT Manufacturing found the solution it needed. It’s all about ensuring that CURT’s back-end processes could deliver faster response times to requests

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• Taking The Power Systems Pulse With GM Doug Balog

  September 14, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe, but we are most of the way through the third quarter and looking ahead to the final quarter of the year. There is a pretty big lag in time between the last bit of business that is done in every 13-week period and when large companies like IBM actually know how well or poorly they have done. In the case of the Power Systems division within Systems Group, and particularly with the IBM i portion of that business, Big Blue says as little as possible to quantify and qualify how the business is doing. But

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• IBM i Marketplace Survey: The Importance Of Being Earnest

  September 14, 2015 Dan Burger

  Determining the benefits, challenges, and costs associated with evolving IT environments leads to one of the most critical decisions businesses face. The IBM midrange environment is unique in many ways due to the system architecture and, some would say, the reluctance of its user base to make changes. The advocates geek out on the system’s vast capabilities, but surprisingly little is known about the actual developing trends and evolving IT roadmaps of the organizations that make up the community. Jumping on and off technology bandwagons is rarely seen in the IBM i community, but then a lot goes unaccounted for

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• Assignment IBM i: What Makes It Tick?

  September 14, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Two computer science students in Europe were recently given an unusual assignment: Learn about the IBM i platform and what makes it tick. After talking with a number of IT professionals familiar with IBM i, they gained a greater understanding and respect for it–and most importantly, what IBM i needs to continue being a successful platform in the future. Victor Wiklund and Veronica Randleff say they felt lost when they were first asked to investigate the IBM i and report on the future of the platform. As second-year students in the computer science and engineering program at KTH, the Royal

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• RPG Certification And Coursework Nears Completion

  September 14, 2015 Dan Burger

  A long overdue update to the RPG curriculum and course guide available through the IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative (PSAI) is nearing completion. The revision work puts several modern RPG enhancements into the education and certification processes, which have gone hand in hand because of a cooperative effort involving IBM and COMMON. Jim Buck, an instructor at Gateway Technical College was instrumental in the bringing forth the changes. The revised curriculum is seen as a key piece in getting more schools to teach RPG and other IBM i topics. “The schools that are part of the Academic Initiative need

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• Reader Feedback On A Hypothetical Future IBM i System

  September 14, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past several issues of The Four Hundred, I have been talking about the gap between the impressive performance that IBM delivers with each successive generation of Power processors and the amount of capacity that the vast majority of customers need. Or, more precisely, the capacity that they don’t seem to need to run their core IBM i workloads, much to the chagrin of Big Blue, its reseller and ISV partners, and the rest of the IBM i ecosystem that is trying to make a living. In addition to outlining that performance gap, with the help of

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• Did IBM i Just Get Hacked at DEF CON?

  September 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A presentation at the recent DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas raised some eyebrows among the IBM i crowd. In “Hack the legacy,” a European IT worker purported to demonstrate how to bypass the operating system’s security and take control of the machine. But according to IBM i security pro Carol Woodbury, the so-called vulnerabilities that could let black hats into your machine are actually old hat. You’d be fooling yourself if you believed that the IBM i platform was never discussed among hackers. But rarely has the proof been so stark as what came out of DEF

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• Agilysys’ Tardy BI Tool Added To Lodging Management System

  September 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  The hospitality business is a technology mother lode. Agilysys is a major player in the hospitality business by virtue of its tight grip on the gaming industry, which is entwined with lodging, restaurants, and the resort experience. In this arena, the customer is king and knowing customers well delivers the keys to the kingdom. But beyond the customer experience, there’s all the operational data that’s fed into the property management system and elevates efficiencies. It doesn’t seem like a proprietary, on-premise property management system (PMS) would stand a snowball’s chance in Vegas, but Agilysys is doing its best to keep

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• Adapting to Omni-Channel with Conditional Printing a CYBRA Specialty

  September 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The humble shipping label sits at the intersection of our digital lives and the real world. You can order 15 items from Amazon without leaving your comfy chair, but warehouse workers still need to find the product and generate the right barcode label that tells UPS where to go. CYBRA has been playing this game for a while, but a new release of its MarkMagic forms generation software helps IBM i shops take omni-channel fulfillment to efficient new levels. The focus for MarkMagic these days is all about conditional printing in support of changing fulfillment trends. Not long ago, a

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• European Distributor Taps Maxava for Data Resiliency

  September 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  LF SpA, an Italian distributor of spare parts for the food and beverage industry, has adopted high availability software from Maxava to protect its operation from downtime, the HA software recently announced. From its headquarters in Cesena, LF ships a variety of spare parts for professional kitchens, washing equipment, commercial refrigeration, coffee machines, vending, and bar equipment. The company keeps more than 40,000 parts in stock, and maintains a 97 percent part availability rate, according to its corporate video. The company’s 33,000 square-foot warehouse enjoys modern touches, such as a fully automated stocking system to go along with a paperless

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