• A Chat With Steve Woodard, The New CEO At Fresche Solutions

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is one way you know that the IBM i market is still a good one. Smart people who like to make money, and in fact have to make money for their investors, keep buying up the big players in the software spaces related to the IBM i platform, and they are also successively profiting from those acquisitions and those sales as they create big conglomerates that serve the IBM i community.

  So it is American Pacific Group (APG) has become the majority shareholder in Fresche Solutions, which is based in Montreal and which is without question the largest company …

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• The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance is what gives companies …

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• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During a normal holiday season, family and friends are our refuge from the adversities and tribulations of the world. And this year, we need our people more than ever and we can’t have them.

  It’s peculiar, and we all have similar stories of how we cannot see and embrace the people who we are closest to because we have to quarantine. It is hard to say if we are overreacting or not, but for many of us, there is a small margin of error and so we err on the side of caution.

  For those of you who have lost …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 16

  December 16, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The holidays are almost here, and our hope for you is they are filled with cheer. The news this year has not always been great, but it’s been our pleasure to keep you up to date. There’s been surprises when we had no clue, like when IBM was split in two. And our editors are always first out of the gate with the news that is top rate. With this last edition of Monitor we bid adieu, on January 4 we will be seeing you. And now for us 2020 is done, let’s hope for better in 2021.

  Top Stories

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 50

  December 16, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Here we go again. Last week, we had new defective PTFs for IBM i 7.2, IBM i 7.3, and IBM i 7.4, and this week there is yet another new defective PTF for IBM i 7.4. Also, there is an update for IBM i Access Client Solutions V1.1.8.6.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/V9.2.0
  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/V9.0.0/V9.1/V9.2
  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • IBM MQ for IBM i – V7.1.0/V8.0.0/V9.0.0/V9.1.0
  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.1: …

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• Some Confusion Around IBM i 7.1 And IBM i 7.2 Support

  December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of writing last week’s discussion about how Big Blue would be supporting the IBM i operating system, database, and systems software stack out to 2032 and beyond, I discovered some anomalies in the documentation that IBM has put out regarding extended support for specific IBM i releases.

  For many customers, getting beyond IBM i 7.1 is impossible for various reasons, which we have discussed in the past. Some of the reasons are technical – customers have lost their source code and they can’t tweak it to run on more modern releases of hardware and software, or their …

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• X Marks The Spot For CYBRA’s Forms Software

  December 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to creating forms and labels on the IBM i server, CYBRA’s MarkMagic is one of the most frequently used products in the market, and is used by the biggest companies in consumer goods and retail. With the latest release of MarkMagic X, the company is finding new and creative ways to get additional functionality into the hands of its users.

  MarkMagic X, which is also called version 10, introduces a host of new features that have been requested by CYBRA’s sizable installed base. With over 30 years in business, CYBRA has amassed 2,700 customers, including nine …

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• Guru: Success Requires Many Teachers

  December 14, 2020 Ted Holt

  I am not a “super programmer”- if such a thing even exists. I am not a genius, nor am I a guru. I’m not an expert. Whatever success I have had as a computer programmer these years, I attribute to a very few causes. I would like to end this year by writing about two of them.

  Number 1: I have learned, often the hard way, how to keep myself out of trouble. My code is dull and bland and boring, and I like it that way. I strive to make my code straightforward, honest, and so easy to understand …

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• The Ultimate Set Of Tools

  December 14, 2020 Rob McNelly

  Those of a certain age will certainly remember the moment in Fast Times At Ridgemont High when Jeff Spicoli got himself into a bind after he wrecked his friend’s car. Luckily, Spicoli’s dad was a TV repairman, and he had an ultimate set of tools. Spicoli knew that with those tools, he could fix it. That level of confidence is intoxicating, although in this case it was possibly misplaced.

  I have a friend that lives around the corner from me that actually does have the ultimate set of tools, and knows how to use them. For example, he recently rebuilt …

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• Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter

  December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.

  We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …

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