• Five IBM i Facts That Will Surprise Your CIO

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Trying to keep the IBM i relevant in your organization? It probably seems like an uphill battle at times, especially if you have a CIO who knows next to nothing about the platform. Here are five fun facts that may help save the platform at your organization, or at least get the CIO to give it a second look before he kicks it to the curb. Fact 1: IBM i on Power is cheaper in the long run than Windows or Linux on Intel The sticker shock associated with the acquisition of a new IBM i server can be damaging

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• RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC’s Earnings Miss

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Depending on where you live in the world, there’s either a shortage or a surplus of RPG programmers at any point in time, a dynamic we have covered here in IT Jungle. But rarely has the availability of IBM i programming talent so publicly affected a company as it did last week, when the CEO of Computer Sciences Corp. blamed his company’s $230 million-plus revenue shortfall in part on a shortage of RPG coders. Mike Lawrie, the president and CEO of CSC, said “execution missteps” related to personnel recruitment were partly to blame for a revenue shortfall in the

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• iFD Streamlines Document Workflow With New Product

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  In most organizations, work revolves around documents and the movement of those documents. Purchase orders come in from customers and they get approved or denied, which triggers the next step in the process. It’s how business has gotten done for decades, but there is room for improvement, according to inFORM Decisions, which two weeks ago launched an IBM i-compatible workflow management product called iWorkflow. iWorkflow is a business process management (BPM) software program that’s aimed at automating much of the manual routing of documents that takes place in the average organization. The software runs on Windows, but integrates with

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• Considerations For Implementing Encryption On IBM i

  February 18, 2015 Leo Salvaggio

  Although it started out as a technology aimed at the financial industry, data encryption has become the standard among all industries. Think about it: health records, social media accounts, and state and local records all contain personal information. At the same time, security breaches are becoming commonplace. According to the “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States” by IBM and Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of a data breach is $5.9 million. That is a big price tag for an organization to pay for something that could have been prevented. That cost does not even take into

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• CYBRA Getting Creative With RFID Solutions

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Ten years ago, when Wal-Mart first started mandating that its suppliers use RFID tags in product deliveries, the unit cost of RFID tags was seen as the biggest barrier to adoption. Fast forward to 2015, and improvements in manufacturing have dramatically lowered the cost of RFID. But it’s been the adoption of new business models that has led to an explosion of RFID use cases, according to the folks at CYBRA. CYBRA has closely monitored the evolution of radio frequency identification (RFID) in the consumer processed goods supply chain. Back in 2003, CYBRA jumped at the chance to help

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• PHP Changes IBM i Shops, And They Change The PHP Community

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  What has PHP done to buck the trend in IBM midrange shops to resist change? Fear of disrupting traditional business policies and procedures is not unusual and it’s not unique to the IBM i community. Change is scary, but it can also be exciting. PHP has brought about a pretty fair share of change. And in the process, PHP has changed. The IBM i PHP community has changed, too. There are a lot of companies that leverage their RPG development staffs by cross-training them in PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for Web development but also used as a general

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• Startup OpenLegacy Open Sources App Modernization Tool

  February 16, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A company called OpenLegacy is beginning to gain momentum with a suite of free and open source tools for modernizing IBM i and z/OS applications. Besides giving away most of its technology (it charges for support in its professional edition), the company is also unique with its API-driven approach to giving older apps new life with Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces. OpenLegacy was founded in Israel about a year ago with the goal of helping organizations expose their IBM i and z/OS assets in new and useful ways. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Romi Stein, is a former IBMer and

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• IBM Europe Deals On Power Systems, Raises Storage Prices

  February 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the new year under way, with IBM shipping a substantially completed Power8-based system lineup, and with the company eager to ramp up its Power Systems sales, it would be reasonable to expect for Big Blue to be wheeling and dealing here in the first quarter of 2015. As it turns out, IBM has been quiet as a mouse on the deal front in the United States and Canada, but the company is cutting deals in Europe to bolster Power System sales. At the same time, paradoxically, and no doubt due to the strengthening US dollar, IBM Europe is raising

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• HelpSystems, SoftLanding Partner To Upgrade TurnOver

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  SoftLanding has collaborated with HelpSystems to obtain more modern cross-referencing and documentation tools for SoftLanding’s widely used change management tool, TurnOver. The partnership, which was announced last week, involves the integration of a more modern version of HelpSystems’ application development tool, called ABSTRACT, with the goal of enhancing software development capabilities for IBM midrange shops using TurnOver. TurnOver (referred to as TurnOver for iSeries v100 edition in the company’s literature) supports repeatable procedures for developing and maintaining IBM i applications, including issue tracking, project management, development, and deployment. It is used by IBM i ISVs and development departments in IBM

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• Conference Puts IBM i System Management In Spotlight

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  System management skills on IBM i have never been showcased in their own conference, but that’s about to change. A two-day conference co-hosted by the COMMON user group and i In the Cloud, a managed service provider, is scheduled for March 3 and 4 in suburban Chicago. The session agenda includes two tracks: one is straight-forward systems management while the other is specific to virtualization skills. Instruction is being handled by system admin subject experts Larry Bolhuis and Pete Massiello. Technologies such as virtualization, the cloud, analytics, and mobile and social front-ends each require a good grasp of the

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