• What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

  Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …

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• How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

  February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

  One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …

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• Guru: Copy OUTQ To PDF

  February 3, 2020 Bob Cozzi

  A long time ago I created a CL command named Copy from OUTQ (CPYOUTQ). This command allowed you to selectively copy spooled files from one OUTQ to either another OUTQ or to the IFS as a PDF or text file. My customers use it all the time for monthly archiving of spooled files and redistribution of output. You may have it on your own system.

  Being one of the handful of original advocates for the so called “Openness APIs” for IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), I quickly embraced the system APIs and have used them extensively throughout the decades. One …

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• Chasing AI Inference, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, the Power AC922 is one of the best platforms for running HPC simulation and modeling workloads or machine learning training workloads, as is attested by the adoption of this platform for two pre-exascale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy dubbed “Summit” and “Sierra” by their respective Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory homes.

  As you know from our past coverage of this platform, the Power AC922 gets the bulk of its compute capacity from the Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators embedded in the system, which can have four or six of the “Volta” V100 GPU …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 5

  February 3, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Another day, another dollar. Another week, another batch of PTF patches for the IBM i stack.

  So here is what has gone down. There are multiple vulnerabilities in the IBM Java SDK and the IBM Java Runtime that affect the IBM i platform. Fixes for the vulnerabilities are contained in current Java PTF group for all four releases. IBM recommends that all users running unsupported versions of affected products upgrade to supported and fixed versions of affected products.

  Here is the rundown of the patches this week, by release.

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  …

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• Power9 Enters The Long Tail

  January 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no way to sugar coat this, so I will just say it: It is going to be a long year for the Power Systems platform this year, and I will be so pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong about that. But I don’t think I will be.

  The Power Systems platform, as we have explained in the past, had a great 2018, with revenues up 9.5 percent to just a tad over $2 billion as far as we can tell from our financial model, which we have painstakingly developed. Now, mind you, the Power Systems market exited …

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• DevOps Transformation: Engage Your IBM i Teams

  January 27, 2020 ARCAD Software

  Most enterprises accept the imperative to transition away from legacy waterfall-based development models towards DevOps in order to maintain their competitive advantage. However an ever increasing performance gap can be created between those organizations and teams who are stuck in the earlier stages of DevOps maturity and those who have been able to achieve scale.

  On our beloved IBM i, DevOps is absolutely “no less of a priority.” The IBM i has evolved into a truly modern platform, and generally the IBM i community has embraced the move to DevOps. There can however be certain challenges to overcome before reaching …

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• Guru: SQL Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  January 27, 2020 Ted Holt

  We all know that the SQL SELECT statement only retrieves data, right? If you want to modify data, you have to use INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE, correct? Well, to quote the great George Gershwin, It Ain’t Necessarily So. You can modify data from a SELECT statement, and maybe sometimes you should. Here’s how it’s done.

  I’ll illustrate with a SELECT statement that will run the Reorganize Physical File (RGZPFM) command over physical files that have at least 10 percent deleted records. I could do this with plain ol’ CL, of course, and that’s probably the approach I would …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 27

  January 27, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  At the beginning of the year, there’s always a lot of talk about what the future holds. We’ve done our fair share of prognosticating here in the Jungle. In fact, don’t miss part 2 of our series where we ask industry leaders to tell us what they think will happen next (top link below). IBM is starting off 2020 with lots of attention in the news, which we are going to take as a positive because it’s when they stop talking about you that you should start to get worried. So take a look at the latest headlines on IBM, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 4

  January 27, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Hello once again from the IBM i PTF Guide. We hope that your 2020 is off to a great start, and that you are keeping up to date with your PTFs on your particular release of the IBM i platform. Big Blue is still releasing patches for IBM i 7.1, and even though it will be withdrawing sales and marketing for IBM i 7.2 on April 30 of this year, it will be patching this release of the operating system and database for quite some time to come, as we talked about in The Four Hundred back in June …

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