• Warning Signs: Inside Travis Perkins’ Failed ERP Migration

  November 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When UK construction supplier and home improvement retailer Travis Perkins announced last month that it had selected Oracle Fusion Cloud’s Financials as the core of its new ERP deployment, it marked the latest in a long series of decisions about the company’s computing infrastructure. Unfortunately, it came after many poor decisions and failed ERP migrations along the way. Hopefully they will serve to educate others who might travel the same path.

  Travis Perkins’ current ERP woes began in 2016 at Infor’s annual Inforum user conference in New York City. The UK company’s then CEO, John Carter, announced that it …

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• A Preview Of The Comarch Cloud Calculator

  November 3, 2021 Tomasz Wachnicki

  For many IBM i shops, the cloud is a new consumption model and cloud-based applications and infrastructure is still a new way of doing things. If the cloud means anything, it means reducing the friction of buying and using capacity and moving from capital expenses that have to be amortized to utility-style consumption that does not have to be. But there are a lot of moving parts, and customers have to be aware of how these things plug together and how they are priced so they can reckon what their cloud bill will be each hour, day, week, month, and …

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• Precisely Ships MIMIX 10

  November 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Precisely last week unveiled Assure MIMIX 10, the latest release of its high availability software for IBM i. With this release, Precisely has simplified the initial setup and configuration of the journal-driven replication at the heart of the product. It also has broken the product up into three distinct packages.

  After a slew of acquisitions of IBM i-based high availability software providers by Vision Solutions (now Precisely) over the years, Assure MIMIX 10 remains the flagship HA offering in the company’s lineup, particularly when it comes to providing application and data continuity for larger enterprises.

  With version 10, Precisely …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 3

  November 3, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Fast foodies might have caught the recent news the IBM is working with McDonald’s to help automate the drive-thru window. It’s hard to ignore that this development will eliminate jobs, but artificial intelligence makes for interesting reading for our audience so we figured it was worth mentioning. Turns out, McDonald’s has already piloted an AI drive-thru system in 10 stores in Chicago. Those restaurants saw 85 percent order accuracy, with only one-fifth of orders needing a human to intervene and help. It’s rage inducing to leave a drive-thru without everything you ordered, so those numbers are not super impressive, but …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 44

  November 3, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Here is to hoping that all of you enjoyed the Halloween weekend, which is the unofficial beginning of the holiday season here in the United States at least. Mercifully, this has been a quiet week on the PTF front. Don’t get used to it. The situation never stays this way for very long. Variety, like the colors of the leaves and the seasons of the year, is the stuff of life.

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

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/V9.0.0/V9.1/V9.2
  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • MQ for IBM i

  …

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• Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10

  November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.

  With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …

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• PHP Is Here To Stay: PHP 8 And Beyond

  November 1, 2021 Mike Pavlak

  In 2005, PHP ushered in the era of TRUE open source development on IBM i with version 5.3 of the language, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Zend and IBM Rochester. PHP had just gone through a major evolution and was taking the world by storm in the middle of the Version 5 phenomena.

  Many IBM i developers were rapidly wrapping their heads around this wildly popular scripting technology with code stored in IFS files and Db2 data popping up on pages running directly on IBM i. Nearly every website on the web that was not HTML had some flavor …

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• Guru: Flexible Interfaces

  November 1, 2021 Ted Holt

  The details are murky, it’s been eons ago. Probably the mid-1990’s. I was working on an AS/400 that ran a mixture of System/36 and native applications. I needed to call a program that had been written in the latest version of RPG from both S/36 RPG II and native RPG III (a.k.a. RPG/400) programs. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. It’s been so long.

  The problem I ran into was rooted in a numeric parameter. S/36 programs passed numeric parameters in zoned decimal format, whereas native RPG and CL programs used packed decimal. The called program defined the parameter as …

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• As I See It: Home Work

  November 1, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Data collection and privacy weren’t much of an issue when the Constitution was being debated, which may account for the fact that those words don’t appear anywhere in the document. Probably the greatest threat to privacy at the time was gossip.

  At best, privacy is implied in the Bill of Rights. But while the government can’t quarter soldiers in your home willy-nilly, there are plenty of other digital intruders that may be billeting in your residence; tools designed specifically to tread on your privacy. And while social media has long been Hoovering every available scrap of personal data, a subclass …

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• IBM to Resell DSI’s VTL In Its IBM i Cloud

  November 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced that it is now reselling Dynamic Solutions International (DSI)’s virtual tape library (VTL) technology with its IBM i cloud offering. By running DSI Restore in its Power Virtual Server, IBM is giving its public cloud customers another option for backing up and recovering data sets of all sizes.

  DSI Restore is a Linux-based VTL solution designed specifically to back up and recover IBM i environments of varying sizes. It’s based on DSI’s popular VTL appliance, and emulates LTO drives while integrating with common backup and recovery tools for IBM i, such as BRMS, HelpSystems Robot/SAVE, …

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