• What Does This Year Look Like For IT Spending?

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those who run businesses always keep two sets of data in their heads. One set is how their own business is doing relative to itself over past months, quarters, and years. And the other is how the economy at large is doing. Figuring out the correlation between the two, and what to do as these two data sets converge – or don’t – is essentially the task of upper management. It’s an art, not a science.

  Around this time every year, we like to take a survey of what the big IT consultancies say in regard to IT spending to …

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• ‘Alarming’ Security Gaps Exposed in IBM i Marketplace Report

  February 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve ever met Ian Jarman, you’d know that the IBM Power Systems business unit executive for IBM Lab Services is not a man who gets easily excited. So when the longtime IBM Rochester executive said he was “alarmed” by the decided lack of basic security precautions in IBM i shops during the recent webinar to discuss the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Report, you might get the sense that something is quite wrong.

  Once again, security was at the top of the list of top concerns of IBM i shops in HelpSystems’ annual survey and report, which is now …

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• Skytap Offers Deals and Discounts in IBM, Azure Clouds

  February 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM is offering up to $500 in free money for new customers who sign up for Skytap on IBM Cloud, a joint infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering between the two companies that allows customers to run IBM i, AIX, and Linux workloads in the IBM Cloud. Meanwhile, Skytap is offering a free upgrade to enterprise support for the remainder of 2021 for customers who sign up for its Power on Azure cloud IaaS offering.

  Skytap landed on IT Jungle’s radar in late 2018, when it announced it was building a “true cloud” offering for IBM i. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 10

  February 10, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  We’re only three days in, but it’s already been a long week. We’re busy in the Jungle, but the news outside – at least in the world of computing – has been decidedly slow. Still, we have culled the best of it and hopefully you will find it a welcome distraction from the pandemic and political happenings outside our little ecosystem. If you’re still in parts of the world where you’re still stuck at home, be sure to check out our Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings section below for some great opportunities for learning and networking that you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 6

  February 10, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  For those of you who are enthusiastic about the feed and speeds and slots and watts of machinery like we are, you will be happy to know that there is a new Redbook publication called IBM Power Systems S922, S914, and S924 Technical Overview and Introduction, Featuring PCIe Gen 4 Technology, which does exactly what the title says and you can see at this link.

  Also there is a new Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime affect IBM i, which you can read about here. The latest Java Group for each …

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• IBM i Groups Cautiously Adding In-Person Events To Schedules

  February 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus reared its nasty head in the United States, shutting down large swaths of the economy and forcing hundreds of millions of people to shelter at home, there is the hint of a glimpse of a ray of sunshine: The possible return of in-person events in the IBM i community. Maybe, anyway. Or maybe not.

  While nothing is certain in these unprecedented, topsy-turvy times, it appears that several IBM i groups are planning to host physical events where actual humans will be allowed to congregate with other humans for the purpose of learning about …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Understanding Your IBM i Web Application Needs With Application Discovery

  February 8, 2021 Scott Gingerysty and Derek Woods

  Considering web and mobile development on IBM i? Before you start coding, it’s helpful to assess and validate your vision with a Discovery. Adding this step to your development process increases the likelihood that your project will succeed because it gives stakeholders a clear understanding of what you need, how the application will solve users’ problems and what it will cost.

  Fresche’s Web Application Development team is frequently called upon to consider a new business application and estimate how much it will cost to build it. With the amount of detail we typically have at this point (to wit: almost …

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• Guru: The Uncertainty of Redundant Row Selection

  February 8, 2021 Ted Holt

  Is redundancy good or bad? I say it depends. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens — usually.” I have seen some unusual behavior when joining database tables, but try as I might, I can’t figure out what that unusual behavior depends on. Let me show you what I mean.

  First, we need some data for illustration. Let’s say that our company uses an ERP system that was designed for make-to-stock manufacturing. What the factory builds goes into the warehouse, and customer orders are …

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• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

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• The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

  This history continues, and is …

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