• Four Hundred Monitor, January 28

  January 28, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  This week we are seeing a lot of news on the cloud and blockchain technologies. It is no coincidence that IBM is firmly rooted in both of these areas, and Big Blue is starting to see rewards from the seeds it has been planting and tending so carefully. While the IBM i doesn’t always weigh prominently in these conversations, good news for IBM is good news for our ecosystem, too. We also got to take a look at IBM’s final earnings report from last year and their expectations for the year ahead. Overall, the future looks bright . . . …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 4

  January 28, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Alright, good people of IBM i Land, here is what is new for the latest edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. There are HIPERs – short for High Impact/Pervasive, meaning you need to pay attention to these – for all three current releases, which means IBM i 7.1 (which is on extended support), IBM i 7.2 (which is still on regular support), and IBM i 7.3 (which is new enough to not care about how old it is yet).

  There are also PTFs for the Backup and Recovery group for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 releases. …

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• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

  Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …

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• SEA Adapts Messaging App For MSPs

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing workloads and applications, managed service providers (MSP) have a unique set of requirements. Due to these requirements, MSPs that run IBM i workloads often end up building their own systems management and monitoring software. With a new release of its message management software, Software Engineering of America (SEA) now has an out-of-the-box solution for MSPs.

  Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady uptick of interest in private cloud environments hosted by MSPs. In the IBM i space, there are now dozens of MSPs operating in the market, including many former IBM business partners …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 23

  January 23, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  While most of us are still transitioning into the New Year, according to Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO, Big Blue is already a company of the future. After heavily investing in the future in the recent past, Rometty says it is now time for consistent performance. You can watch her entire discussion about what’s to come for IBM and tech in general in 2019 at the first link below. Here in the Jungle, the New Year brought new life to some old tech tips in the most recent of Four Hundred Guru Classic. Find the link to the latest issue …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 3

  January 23, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  You might be feeling like this is your lucky day, what with getting two PTF guides in one week and all. But there isn’t much new going on in the latest PTF Guide following Monday’s edition. There are no new links to share, but we do have a tip you might find helpful:

  Did you know you could set the defaults on the SAVE menu Opt 21 by using Opt 20 on the same menu? This will save you a lot of writing!

  There are no new defectives this week, but here is the usual rundown of the last defective …

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• The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

  January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …

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• Infor Raises $1.5 Billion, Teases An IPO

  January 21, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When will Infor go public? For years, the company has hinted that an initial public offering (IPO) of stock is in its future, but has remained mum on the exact timing. Last week, as part of an announcement regarding a $1.5 billion investment by private equity firms, the ERP software company finally came clean and solidified its public stock offering plans to the world.

  The IPO will come in 2019, the New York company says. Or maybe 2020. It all depends, according to Infor, on “market conditions.”

  With stocks last week, major indices are still flirting with correction territory, and …

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• Guru: Speed Up Command-Line PHP

  January 21, 2019 Alan Seiden

  While PHP runs quickly via the Apache web server, command-line PHP scripts (run from PASE directly or via CL or RPG) have a lag on start-up. In this article, I show how to speed up PHP when called from the command line (known as PHP-CLI).

  Why does PHP-CLI (command line PHP) have a slow start-up? While several reasons are often given, I’ve found the culprit to be the loading of PHP extensions that are enabled by php.ini and other configuration files of Zend Server. Examples of extensions are ibm_db2, simplexml, and Zend’s proprietary components.

  Within a normal web server environment, …

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