• Mixed Results For IT Spending Forecasts

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have made it through the first half of 2017, and now is a good time to take a pause and count the money that the IT vendors of the world have amassed from the hardware, software, and services they provide to the datacenters of the world. And so, IDC and Gartner have done just that even ahead of the reporting of financial results for the second quarter. The results from these two firms generally agree, and they show that, as always, different parts of the business are growing even as other parts slow or even shrink.

  One big reason …

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• Sibley Elaborates on ‘Synergy’ of ILE Compiler Move

  July 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When Steve Sibley, the vice president and business line executive for IBM Cognitive Systems, announced a month ago that it’s moving development of its RPG compiler from the Rational group directly into the IBM i development organization, he cited the increase of “synergy” as the main reason for the move. IT Jungle finally caught up with Sibley last week and obtained a more detailed explanation.

  In his June 9 open letter to IBM i customers and partners, Sibley announced that development of the Rational programming tools for IBM i and ILE RPG and ILE COBOL compilers themselves would move into …

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• Programmer Productivity Underscores Remain’s App Management Upgrades

  July 12, 2017 Dan Burger

  If the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were bumped up to Eight, the original OS/400 applications could fill that slot. They were an efficient combination of form and function and built to last. But change eventually occurs. These days, it occurs more rapidly than ever. Application development strategies come in multiple shapes and sizes. We are witness to the debates and deployments of modernizations and migrations.

  Change management software has taken on a bigger role by becoming useful in multi-platform development environments (one tool for tracking all development), workflow management, and for the expanded role of application lifecycle management. …

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• DocPath Picks Up AFP Printing Where IBM Leaves Off

  July 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  If you’re looking to do fun and exciting things with your IBM i spool file output, you’ll need to look beyond IBM. With the death of AFP Utilities in IBM i 7.3 last year and the demise of InfoPrint Designer before that, it’s clear that IBM doesn’t want anything to do with printing or electronic document management. One vendor that’s eagerly investing in IBM i output is DocPath.

  AFP Utilities was a collection of programs from IBM that allowed IBM i shops to manage Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) content communicated to high-end production printers using the two-way Intelligent Printer Data …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 12

  July 12, 2017 Dan Burger

  The Scout motto “Be Prepared” is good advice for all of us. But when it comes to advice applicable to IBM i, Chief Scout Steve Will has specific advice on preparations that will be useful when the time for platform re-evaluation comes around. This article adds to Will’s advice on this topic noted by Monitor on June 21.

  This issue of Monitor also has articles on the delivery of open source PTFs, the positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence on workers, the tape storage dynasty that remains a factor even in leading edge companies, plus the influence, guidance and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 26

  July 12, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There is something new this week in the IBM i PTF Guide. We have added a link to the Memo to Users that is put out by IBM for each release. If you are not familiar with this Memo to Users, the developers working on the IBM i software stack try to put together a comprehensive guide to all the changes in the new release in the Memo to Users.

  It is a great “Shot across the bow” for those you venturing into a new release. With the sunsetting of V7R1 just months away, everybody should take a look …

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• Vision Buys Enforcive, Then Gets Sold And Merged With Syncsort

  July 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  To say that it was busy couple of days for Vision Solutions last week would be an understatement. On Wednesday, the company announced its acquisition of IBM i security firm Enforcive. The following day, Vision announced that it was being bought by Centerbridge, a private equity firm that intends to merge it with ETL provider Syncsort.

  When all the smoke from the fireworks cleared, here’s how the chips landed: Clearlake Capital Group, which acquired Vision Solutions barely a year ago and bought Syncsort in 2015, was offered $1.2 billion by Centerbridge Partners for majority stakes in both firms. That …

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• IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

  With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …

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• Guru: Retrieving Images From An SQL Table

  July 10, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I showed you how to load images from the IFS into a table that has a column defined as a BLOB data type. BLOB stands for Binary Large Object and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database.

  Our final goal is to retrieve the images from the table we loaded in part 1 and write them back to the IFS. Once we complete this task, we should end up with the same five images we worked with in part 1. To keep everything …

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• Counting Companies With An IBM i In The Mix

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  How many companies are running their mission critical business applications on Power Systems loaded with the IBM i operating system? Not as many as 20 years ago. That’s for certain. But who knows for sure? I mean, who knows the number? Three years ago, IBM was tossing out a worldwide estimate of 125,000. That number has not been officially updated but sources at IBM say the number of IBM i customers remains steady with that three-year-old estimate. On the other hand, I’ve heard people in the IBM i community guesstimate the installed base is under the 100,000 mark. It’s not …

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