• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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• White Hats Completely Dismantle Menu-Based Security

  February 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Think menu-based security can prevent cybercriminals from accessing the most important parts of your IBM i system? Think again, as the white hat hacking group Silent Signal recently demonstrated in a real-world penetration test of a bank’s IBM i system through a seemingly restricted green-screen interface.

  Life was demonstrably simpler for midrange administrators before the Internet took off. Before we had all these different protocols providing access to applications and data – ODBC, FTP, SQL, Remote Command, etc. – an administrator could feel somewhat confident that users weren’t accessing things they shouldn’t by simply configuring their menus in a restrictive …

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• Cloud Software To Drive Enterprise Application Growth

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even with something on the order of 242,100 layoffs at the top 40 tech companies in 2022 and another 106,950 layoffs in January alone, according to the analysts at Jefferies, it is still very difficult to find talent to update and extend application software. And that is one reason why the market researchers at IDC think that enterprise software sales will continue to grow in the coming years.

  To be specific, IDC reckons that worldwide revenue for enterprise applications – meaning real applications, not systems software that underpins applications – accounted for $279.6 billion in sales in 2022, and will …

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• How Do You Stay In Touch With The IBM i Community?

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i community is global and diverse. There is a lot of things going on in our part of the IT industry, and it can be tough to keep up with everything that is going on with the IBM i platform.

  But it is nonetheless important for us all to understand how people are keeping up to date on new technologies and other cultural and corporate things that are happening in our community. Which is why Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra (formerly known as HelpSystems), did a quick poll during the 2023 IBM i …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 6

  February 6, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  American airspace had a new security vulnerability last week in the form of a Chinese balloon loaded with who knows what, and here are the new security vulnerabilities you need to worry about for the IBM i platform. There are three new ones that you need to shoot down over the ocean, just like U.S. Air Force did with that “surveillance” balloon after it traversed the heartland of the country from Montana to South Carolina.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2023-23477), which you can find out more about …

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• Security Still Top Concern, IBM i Marketplace Study Says

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security continues to be the number one concern of IBM i shops surveyed for the annual IBM i Marketplace Study conducted by Fortra. Application modernization surged ahead from last year’s finish to make the race for number one interesting, while HA/DR and IBM i skills rounded out the top four concerns.

  Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) formally released its 2023 IBM i Marketplace Study last week, making it the ninth straight year that the company has released the study. This year’s study, which you can access here, is based on surveys taken last year by about 300 individuals from the IBM …

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• Bob Langieri Shares IBM i Career Trends Outlook for 2023

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to career trends in the IBM i community, there are few who have a better sense of what’s going on than Bob Langieri. The longtime CEO of Excel Technical Services in Orange County, California, has his fingers on the pulse of the job situation, which is why we turn to him for an outlook on 2023 trends.

  The economy started out on a down note last year before picking up momentum towards the end of 2022, Langieri notes. Those forces are still with us today, the tea leaves are inconclusive.

  “A recession is defined as two consecutive …

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• Kisco Brings Native SMS Messaging to IBM i

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Kisco Information Systems recently launched a new IBM i product designed to facilitate native SMS messaging on IBM i. Pre-integrated with Twilio, kConnect will not only keep administrators aware of security and other events occurring on IBM i, but it will also help streamline the configuration of two-factor authentication (2FA) setups on the box.

  Kisco’s newest IBM i utility allows users to send SMS messages to recipients directly from an IBM i application, which can be useful for a variety of reasons. The product supports sending messages via a command line or directly from their custom IBM i applications, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 1

  February 1, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  We’re just a month into 2023, and we can already see a lot of action from IBM. Our Top Stories this week all revolve around IBM activity, some of which is good, and some of which less so. (Layoffs are never good news, but especially so in the current economy.) But like we said, there is lots of good happening, both in and around the industry. Check out the Calendar below, which is becoming loaded with new events, so be sure to take a look. You will notice that the virtual option appears to be here to stay, and is …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4

  February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.

  Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …

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