• A Fresche Emphasis On Services

  June 19, 2017 Dan Burger

  How does your organization plan its IT roadmap? If that roadmap includes implementing new technologies and modernizing legacy systems while staffing has been set at maintenance mode levels, your choices are to hire additional staff, admit the roadmap goal is unattainable, or contract the work to be done by a company with experience helping organizations meet their needs with expertise for hire.

  The decision is not an easy one regardless of how easy it may seem to offload your problem onto someone else’s shoulders. Trusting a professional service provider with specific experience in what you need may seem like an …

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• IBM i Picks Up The Slack

  June 14, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Have you heard about this new thing called Slack? While it may sound like something your least productive programmers might do, Slack is actually one of the hottest new productivity apps in the land. And now it’s coming to the IBM i, thanks to BVS Tools.

  Brad Stone’s BVS Tools recently rolled out a new application called GreenTools for Slack, or G4SLK. The product is an extension of Stone’s existing communication tools that integrates the IBM i server with Slack.

  Slack, if you’re not aware, is a free Web-based service designed to help companies communicate and collaborate more effectively. …

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• Maxava iFoundation Grants Available; IBM i Community Benefits

  June 14, 2017 Dan Burger

  When it comes to investments in the IBM i community, the leading-by-example philanthropy of Maxava, now in its seventh year, has hit the target of making meaningful change. The company’s iFoundation has put funds in the hands of local user groups where it encourages IBM i professionals to become active in the community and get people thinking and moving and becoming more connected and more engaged.

  Maxava just confirmed another $50,000 to fund foundation grants to local user groups that promote training and education in IBM i technology. This program reminds me that change is better served by good …

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• A New Data Connection From IBM i To Watson Analytics

  June 14, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Big data analytics is everywhere these days. It simply can’t be helped. And now that IBM is supporting the capability to load DB2 for i data directly into the Watson analytics service, it could be worth your IBM i time to check out what IBM has cooking in Cognitive.

  IT Jungle recently checked in with Steve Sibley, IBM’s vice president and business line executive in charge of systems, to talk about the latest developments with Watson, including the new DB2 for IBM i Connect tile on BlueMix.

  The new tile “is designed to make it easier for our clients to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 14

  June 14, 2017 Dan Burger

  An IT strategy is often a major resource strategy. Where to allocate resources and how much to allocate is a big part of it. When you are the chief architect for IBM i, you set your priorities beginning with the DB2 for i database and work from there. There are competitive strategies to take into account and collaborative strategies as well. In this article, Steve Will talks mostly about the need for collaborative strategies.

  You could say open source is an important collaborative strategy for IBM i. There’s a legitimate emphasis in that direction. Building skills and increasing the IBM …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 23

  June 14, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The only group updated this week was the SF99706 High Availability for V7R1 group. It has approximately 30 fixes, dealing with everything from missing disks to security breaches. It is well worth putting this HA group on your system if you are in a PowerHA world, or dealing with iASPs. For fun, we have listed a few of the PTFs in the group below:

  SI57128 - OSP-OTHER Fix Poodle vulnerability issue. The Poodle vulnerability issue was found in CIM. This has been fixed. Disable SSLv3, the RC4 and RSA Export ciphers in CIM.
  MF62562 - LIC-OTHER Additional Debug Support. Added 

  …

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• The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition

  June 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power9 processor not coming to the IBM i and AIX platforms until sometime early in 2018, rather than right now as many of us were led to believe would be happening, we have some extra time on our hands. So we should all – including the executives who run IBM Systems and its subordinate Cognitive Systems division (formerly known as Power Systems) – take this opportunity to take a hard look at how the IBM i platform is packaged and priced and how a modern integrated platform should be architected.

  The IBM i customer base needs the Cognitive …

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• Understanding IBM’s PowerHA For i

  June 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to high availability on the IBM i platform, there are two main options: logical replication and PowerHA SystemMirror for i. While the architecture and benefits of logical replication solutions are well-established and well-known, PowerHA remains a bit of a mystery for many. We will try to shine some light on how PowerHA works, and whether it is the right choice for you.

  There has been an increase in interest around HA so far in 2017, but many IBM i shops remain confused about the various options. In the first article in this HA series, we took …

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• Guru: Error Handling in SQL PL, Part 1

  June 12, 2017 Ted Holt

  I once fancied myself a logical thinker. I changed my mind when I started programming computers. I quickly realized that I was incapable of writing an error-free program. Chalk up another valuable lesson to experience. More experience taught me to program for both expected and unexpected conditions, and now I apply that concept to all languages that I use, including SQL PL.

  SQL PL has excellent exception-handling methods, and they’re not hard to use. In this article and Part 2 to follow, we look at how DB2 informs you that your SQL request worked correctly or not. Next, we’ll take …

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• As I See It: The Hungry Leader

  June 12, 2017 Victor Rozek

  Corporate leaders like to compare business to the military. From top-down command structures, to having a “mission,” that can only be accomplished by “capturing” market share, and “crushing” the competition; it all sounds very Ramboesque. Given the languaging you would think every CEO was the second coming of George Patton. Turns out Patton had more regard for the people under his command.

  Besides the fact that the color of corporate bloodshed is green, there is a core difference between military ethics and corporate ethics. Author and TED Talk regular Simon Sinek succinctly summarizes the difference. The military, says Sinek, “gives …

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