• VAI Rides a Rocket. . . 2015 IBM i Predictions from Raz-Lee. . . New Storage Solutions from Quantum. . .

  February 12, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i predictions for 2015 keep rolling in, this time from the folks at Raz-Lee Security. The folks at VAI have a lot of experience with application modernization, but you’ll never guess which technology they’re using now. We’ll also take a look at some of the IBM i topics that will be covered at IBM’s upcoming InterConnect 2015 conference. VAI Rides Rocket to the Web. . . and Beyond Over the years, VAI has tried many different technologies to modernize the user interface of its RPG-based ERP application. Not all have panned out, and today it appears it has

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• Orchestrating Your API-Enabled Assets On IBM i

  February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

  OK, so you’ve API-enabled your IBM i applications and joined the ranks of modern applications. You are definitely going to benefit from simplified integration for both data and application. But now there’s a bunch of SOAP and REST calls flying all around, and it’s getting hard to keep track of them. That’s an area that CM First Group is hoping to address with a new business process management (BPM) tool imported from Europe. CM First is now reselling the Axon.ivy BPM Suite, a business process modeling and management tool originally developed by its business partner, AXON IVY of Germany. The

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• IBM Leads In Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

  February 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is crowing like a chanticleer about its recent ranking as the top provider worldwide for both hybrid and private cloud infrastructure for 2014. The latest research shows that Big Blue is growing more or less at the same pace as the overall cloud, but it is a distant third behind the industry juggernaut, Amazon Web Services, and is growing at half the rate of the industry upstart, Microsoft Azure. IBM has staked a big part of its future on the cloud and ponied up $1.2 billion last year to build out existing datacenters operated by its Global

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• Vision Reflects on Clouds, ‘Shadow IT’ in Latest Resilience Report

  February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The cloud has become pervasive in the business IT world at most organizations. However, the rise of “shadow IT” services living on the cloud threatens to undermine companies’ data and application resilience strategies, particularly in light of the increasingly complex, hybrid cloud/on-premise setups that are becoming popular today, Vision Solutions says in its annual State of Resilience report 2015. According to Vision’s survey, 62 percent of IT executives report using cloud services at their organization. Apparently, the old debate about whether an organization should adopt “the cloud” is over. Cloud-based services are clearly popular and are here to stay, and

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• Remain Software ALM Tool Gets CA Plex Interface

  February 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  Independent development environments such as CA Plex have their own model-based and pattern-driven development techniques to modernize legacy IBM midrange applications as they run across multiple platforms as well as move them to the Web and to SOA environments. And as IBM i shops take on modernization projects, change management software is integral to the process. As an example, Remain Software that is announcing its application lifecycle management software, TD/OMS, has a new interface for CA Plex users. The integration is the result of cooperation with Stella Tools, a CA Plex open source initiative. “The way the two tools

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• Surrounding The IBM i

  February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM has a plan for the IBM i operating system. It sounds slightly ominous and it might even cause some of the IBM i advocates to lock the doors to the server room. It’s not a secret. In fact, some say the idea is gaining support. The idea is to surround the i. Surround it with new Linux workloads, primarily analytics workloads, which to a large degree involve mobile and, to a lesser degree, social applications. Maybe you don’t give a flying flapjack about Linux. Maybe, from your point of view, it’s still not ready for enterprise operating system duty

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• German Hotel Search Engine Mashes Up Watson And IBM i

  February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems. An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the

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• Security Risks Avoided By The Development Team

  February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Some ideas need to be told and retold before the concept is fully grasped and action results. This isn’t the first time outspoken IBM i security expert Pat Botz has warned developers about dangerous security assumptions. This advice comes periodically, and it demonstrates how people hear without listening. That’s maybe a bit too harsh because there are indications it’s become more widely recognized that programmers have a role in data security at the application level. “You can’t secure a system these days without the programmers knowing about security,” Botz says. “Programmers can’t write programs that make data available to anyone

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• IBM’s Licensing Practices Under Scrutiny

  February 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Buying enterprise software is never easy. But the complexity and heavy-handedness that IBM and the other megavendors bring to software licensing and enforcement hurts everybody involved. That’s the opinion of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, which recently announced that it is going to step up its analysis of Big Blue’s licensing practices. The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) last month announced that it is stepping up its research of IBM and SAP software licensing strategies in hopes of helping customers navigate overly complex structures and pressuring the vendors into simplifying their policies. To that end, the UK-based firm held

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• IBM Layoffs Not As Dramatic As Rumored

  February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do. Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of

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