In a perfect world, companies would hire and retain technology professionals who possess the requisite skills for working on the IBM i server. However, that is clearly not the case, as an IBM i skills shortage has bubbled up as one of the platform’s most pressing issues. For those jack-of-all-trades who are struggling with this thing called the IBM i, the open source tool Ublu offers a bridge to familiarity.

Ublu is an interpretive scripting language designed for automating IBM i tasks from any remote platform capable of running Java, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, and other desktop operating

If you’ve noticed subtle improvements to your enterprise software lately, you’re not alone. For the past two years, IBM i ERP giant Infor has been using data science techniques to optimize various business processes that are automated by its software. And the best part may be that Infor is offering its Dynamic Science Labs expertise to customers for free and that improvements get wrapped back into the product.

The big data revolution is impacting many aspects of our lives, including how we work and play. The technologies and techniques that the big Silicon Valley Web firms like Yahoo, Google

When the New Zealand bank Westpac experienced a rare backplane failure in its System i server last year, it took a critical wholesale trading application completely offline. IBM immediately put a replacement on a plane, but the best case scenario called for three days of downtime. But thanks to its use of a high availability solution from Maxava, not a single transaction was lost.

With more than 13 million customers, Westpac is one of the biggest banks in the Asia Pacific region, and one of Australia’s “big four” banks. The Sydney-based company relies on a variety of applications and

TEMBO Technology Lab is beefing up its DB2 for i modernization solution. The South African provider of DB2 for i database modernization solutions has reached an agreement with Relational Data to resell its rapid application development tool for IBM i as part of its core Adsero Optima (AO) suite.

Based in West Jordan, Utah, Relational Data is a longtime provider of IBM i-based applications and tools to the education market. Its OnePoint suite of software automates a range of processes for schools, including recording grades, managing student and parent data, and streamlining back-office functions like operations, HR, and finance.

The

The IBM i equivalent of a mountain avalanche is the job queue file. It’s a mass of files with the potential to eventually bury system admins as they search for good jobs that have gone bad. When job logs are thousands of pages in length and contain many similar entries, the search for specific troublesome job logs can become tedious, aggravating, and time consuming. About this time, users start wishing for a tool that efficiently sorts job log information.

You might happily pay for a tool that reduces the amount of time it takes to track down jobs that are