• Syncsort Talks Rebranding, IBM i Product Strategy

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Think you know Syncsort? Who the company is and what it does? Well, you might want to take a fresh peek, because the company that acquired Vision Solutions and a handful of other IBM i software firms is on the move. In fact, it used the COMMON POWERUp 18 conference in San Antonio this week to begin rolling out a long-awaited company rebranding and major product refresh – including its new Fusion unification strategy and several new IBM i products.

  First of all, the company will continue to be known as Syncsort. The executives leading the Pearl River, New …

  Read more

• The IBM i Year In Review

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  With another year almost in the books for the IBM i community, we thought it was time to reminisce on the top stories of 2016. Security vulnerabilities, hacked AS/400s, blockbuster acquisitions, new releases of the operating system, and major conferences all garnered their share of digital ink. Here’s a rundown on the top IBM i-related stories making news this year. It started innocently enough, way back in. . . January . . .When we asked “what should you do with your spare CPWs?” After all, you can’t take ’em with you. But with so much processing oomph on those brawny

  …

  Read more

• IBM i Modernization Gets a Newlook Accelerator

  December 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  Legacy applications tend to outlive the predictions of their imminent demise. The trouble they cause can be costly, though, as maintenance and vanishing skills for out-of-date programming languages are problems. Modernizing applications remains a priority in many IBM midrange shops, where reuse of existing IBM i 5250 screens and RPG (and COBOL) code is being closely examined. Tools like Accelerator from Surround Technologies and Newlook from Looksoftware are getting attention, too. The latest collaboration from these two software vendors results in the generation of an IBM i-based user interface that’s accessible from any desktop or mobile device with a browser.

  …

  Read more

• Rocket Adds IBM i Support to Backup Reporting Tool

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that find it difficult to track the state of their backups across IBM and non IBM platforms may want to check out the latest product news from Rocket Software. Last week the company announced that its Servergraph Professional product now supports IBM i, thereby enabling customers to view BRMS backup status alongside that of other backup tools, like NetBackup and TSM. Considering the amount of data stored by the average enterprise these days, it’s clear that backup has transformed into a major application workload in its own right. Ensuring the integrity of backups has always been

  …

  Read more

• Mad Dog 21/21: Ginni And The Jinns

  December 14, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Did you ever have a run of terrible luck, when just about everything seemed to be going awry? You might be somebody who shrugs off mud spatters of misfortune. If so, you wouldn’t be Salman Rushdie, who has composed a whole world in which imps, the kind called jinns in Islamic mythology, pop up all over the place causing havoc and misery. His novel Two Years contains such a world, one that coincidentally might seem familiar to Virginia Rometty, whose spell at the helm of IBM has been marred by mayhem. Perhaps the jinns are picking on Ginni. In

  …

  Read more

• Happy Holidays And Big Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2017

  December 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young. It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had

  …

  Read more

• Talking Change Management With Chrono-Logic

  December 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter. To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i

  …

  Read more

• New LUG Spreads ‘MAGIC’ In The Mid-Atlantic

  December 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging. If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,

  …

  Read more

• Escape From The Tape Trap

  December 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM i storage strategy remains heavily dependent on tape. Even beyond the IBM midrange, around 75 percent of all data is stored on tape. Old habits die hard, even when alternatives become easier and less expensive to manage. A good example is the Universal Backup Device designed by LaserVault. In its original form, it’s an IBM i backup appliance that appears as a tape device. Now it works in VM environments as well. The VM integration eliminates the cost of the LaserVault appliance and the cost of an X86 server. That’s roughly $6,000 to $8,000. Instead of requesting a

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: History Repeating

  December 12, 2016 Victor Rozek

  It was a known problem 16 years ago. And for 16 years it was largely ignored, even though it poses a direct threat to representative democracy. It is a problem well understood by IT professionals and cyber security experts, and it haunts the entire spectrum of computer-dependent users from the military and political establishment, to corporations and the public. It was the subject of debate, accusation, and investigation during the recent election, and it has the power to cast doubt on its legitimacy. The problem: Through neglect or deliberate intent, computers that decide elections have been allowed to remain vulnerable

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles