It’s been years since we could talk about the Big Three of IBM i change management system vendors. Aldon, SoftLanding, and Mortice Kearns Systems have all been gobbled up by bigger software houses whose core business models, alas, do not revolve around the IBM i. And while IT Jungle has kept up with the first two, we haven’t delivered any insight on the MKS Implementer product that Parametric Technology Corp acquired several years ago–until now.

PTC bought MKS in 2011 for $295.5 million (Canadian). As a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software, Massachusetts-based PTC is a much larger company,

We spend a lot of time talking about hardware and software here at IT Jungle, but there is another crucial element to the platform that often gets overlooked: the people who turn the machines into applications and, in turn, money from which they derive their many livings. The systems have evolved on the confluence of Moore’s Law advancement curves for their constituent components, but if people want to advance, they have to work hard to keep pace with new technology while maintaining the old.

The whole point of the System/38, and its follow on, the AS/400 and its successors,

There are times when we find ourselves in the wrong place, but it turns out to be the right time. Les Peebles can tell you about that. During a presentation on webfacing 5250 screens, a technology that Peebles was not in favor of implementing, he was introduced to a web services option that came to be a solution to the IBM i and Windows integration issues he was grappling with. The wrong place was now the right place.

Peebles began his IT career as an RPG developer. In the years that followed, he learned Java and web development. He also

Application development continues to be the name of the game in IBM midrange shops. What’s changing is the integration of development environments. RPG development remains the meat and potatoes, but a growing list of side dish environments are on the table. Change management software helps maintain order as these diverse entities cross paths, but it also takes on more responsibilities beyond the strictly app dev assignments. Take Midrange Dynamics, for example.

Its latest release of MDCMS, Version 7.4, features cross-system tracking capabilities at the top of the priority list. Workflow, troubleshooting, and deployment improvements have been added, but the

IBM last week patched another pair of security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSH client for IBM i. The security flaws, which impact all current releases of IBM i–and very likely older releases that are no longer under maintenance–carry a moderate to severe risk, and could be used to execute arbitrary code on an IBM i server, obtain private cryptographic security keys, or execute a denial of service attack, IBM says.

On February 1, IBM issued a security bulletin to address the two flaws in its OpenSSH implementation for IBM i. Both flaws stem from a poor design in the OpenSSH client