• Is COBOL on IBM i Experiencing a Renaissance?

  January 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  There is no doubt that RPG is the dominant language when it comes to IBM i development. But there are some indications that more interest in COBOL may be brewing in IBM i circles, particularly among customers of a certain size and industry segment.

  COBOL has been on the mind of Dan Magid, the CEO of data integration software developer Eradani. That will happen when large banks come out of the blue and ask you to support COBOL in your product, which Eradani did with its data integration middleware for IBM i.

  “What’s been interesting for us is, we …

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• Midrange Optimism for In-Person Events in 2022

  January 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you’re hankering to reconnect with your IBM i colleagues in person this year, we have good news for you: In-person events are set to make a comeback in 2022. COMMON’s annual POWERUp conference in New Orleans in May tops the list, but many other groups are making their physical comebacks, too.

  COMMON president Gordon Leary is eager to bring the world’s largest IBM i user group back into the physical fold starting May 23, when the POWERUp 2022 conference kicks off at the New Orleans Marriott. So are a lot of COMMON members who haven’t seen each other in …

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• Companies Still Grappling with Economic Woes

  January 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We’re nearly 23 months into the pandemic, but COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on how we work and play. Companies that make and move goods — a core constituency of the IBM i installed base — have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-induced kink in the supply chain, but rising prices and inflation aren’t far behind.

  The United States is in the middle of a remarkable economic period that few experts (if any) predicted. For that, you can thank your friendly neighborhood coronavirus, which put into motion a series of events, many with unforeseeable consequences, that continues to ripple …

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• Listen In To The 8th Annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again when HelpSystems reveals the results of its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which believe it or not has now been done eight years in a row. The survey provides a snapshot into the thinking of IBM i shops all over the world as they contemplate the strategic and tactical issues relating to their mission critical applications and the security, resilience, capacity, economics, and long-term viability of the IBM i platform that supports them.

  Personally, I sincerely wish that HelpSystems had been doing this survey since the AS/400 was launched in 1988, because it …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 4

  January 26, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  A new Oracle JCE Code Signing CA was recently implemented in the IBM JDK to resolve APAR IJ26310. Specifically, this is related to IBM JDK 8.0 SR6 FP25, JDK 7.1 SR4 FP75, and JDK 7.0 SR10 FP75, whereby Java applications running on the IBM i operating system might encounter the error messages “JCE is not installed properly” or “JCE cannot authenticate the provider XX” or “xyz.jar is not signed by a trusted signer” after upgrading to the following IBM i Java Group PTF level or newer.

  The following IBM i Java Group PTF levels install 8.0 SR6 FP25.

  • Release 7.1:

  …

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• Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.

  To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …

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• EvolveWare Sees Growing Demand for Application Rehoming

  January 24, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic has acted like an accelerant for IT modernization, as companies seek a better technical base upon which to launch new digital initiatives, often from the cloud. At EvolveWare, which specializes in migrating applications, 2021 brought a flood of business migrating applications off legacy systems, including big iron systems from IBM, and 2022 looks to be just as busy.

  Miten Marfatia founded EvolveWare back in 2001 to address what he predicted would be a surge in application modernization in the new millennium. Marfatia had put quite a bit of thought into the company’s business model, and figured there …

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• IT Spending Growth To Slow In The Coming Years

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a weird couple of years for IT organizations due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. So many normal patterns have been disrupted that it is sometimes hard to imagine that things can go back to, well, normal. But if the analysts at Gartner are correct, then 2022 will be the year that IT departments start thinking about the future again instead of triaging problems caused by the pandemic, and it will also be a time of more conservative IT spending growth.

  Last week, Gartner put out its revised IT spending figures for 2021 and also updated …

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• As I See It: The Ideal Workplace, Part 2

  January 24, 2022 Victor Rozek

  New year, new possibilities. And what better place to start than sharing the experiences and aspirations of IT professionals.

  Last month, as 2021 was coming to an end, I asked readers for feedback on how they would describe their ideal workplace; the issues that were important to them, the quality of their working environment, and how they wanted to be treated by their company and its management. I offered a list of issues for consideration, and below is a summary of their responses.

  The first question was a variation of the classic “paper or plastic” dilemma. Would you prefer to …

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• Some Good Advice About Log4j Mitigation Gotchas

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Apache Log4j logging utility written in Java and available since the end of the Dot Com Boom in early 2001, has been installed far and wide into many systems and systems software packages in the more than two decades it has been available. And that is why the zero-day security vulnerability discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and revealed on December 9 has caused so much concern.

  Log4j is everywhere and that means the Log4Shell vulnerability that Alibaba described makes it particularly scary. But before we get into some of the mitigation advice that …

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