• RPG, Java, And The Future Of Infor’s IBM i ERP Suites

  October 17, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Infor is in the midst of a multi-year overhaul of its three RPG-based ERP suites for manufacturers, which include LX, XA, and System 21. When the overhaul is complete, the products will still run on the time-tested IBM i server, but the code behind the products will look significantly different.

  In response to changing technology and customer expectations, Infor essentially is rewriting all three ERP suites using something called the Infor Development Framework. The IDF was originally developed to help transition the bulk of the Infor ERP XA product (MAPICS) from RPG to Java, and now it’s being used for …

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• CM First Removes IBM i Requirement From ALM

  October 17, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are adopting the application lifecycle management (ALM) software from CM First no longer need an IBM i server, the company announced recently. The move with CM MatchPoint is intended to widen the deployment options for CM First’s targeted customer base, which is CA Plex and 2E users.

  CM MatchPoint is used to automate the development of CA Plex and CA 2E environments, particularly among large development teams that are geographically dispersed. The software manages several aspects of Plex and 2E development, from user-submitted change requests and workflow to version control and deployment.

  With the delivery of CM MatchPoint …

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• Legacy Apps Kept Alive Just for Data, Survey Suggests

  October 17, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A good percentage of IBM i shops are keeping legacy applications running after their “use by” dates have expired for no other reason except the data they hold still has value, despite the security and privacy risks that those old systems pose to the organization, according to a new survey released by SoftLanding Systems yesterday.

  SoftLanding Systems surveyed several dozen IT professionals at recent industry events, including International i-Power 2018 and PowerUP18, and concluded that 63 percent of IBM i shops are maintaining a legacy application just to access the data.

  Asked why the organizations had not migrated the data …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 17

  October 17, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  As we breathlessly await the news out of COMMON, which is happening this week in Pittsburgh, we turn to what else is happening in the world of IT. When it comes to IBM, it seems when we aren’t talking about Artificial Intelligence, we are talking about the cloud, and then we circle back again. This week is no different. IBM CEO and president Ginni Rometty kicked off the Gartner conference with a keynote that focused on AI, while Big Blue launched its Multicloud Manager. After you catch up on the news, be sure to help make some by weighing in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 41

  October 17, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  The PTF Guide at IT Jungle has been keeping IBM i users up-to-date on Individual, Group, and Cumulative PTFs for many, many years. But this guide is only helpful if you use it, so please take the time to make sure you are current on your PTFs. The PTFs on this page go back over two years, which is hopefully a lot further back you’re you would need to go. OK, lecture over. Now for what’s new! This week was saw a Security Bulletin for Vulnerability CVE-2018-11763 in the IBM i HTTP Server that affects IBM i. However there were …

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• New Open Source ERP Suite Written In ILE RPG

  October 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  There’s something quite novel being introduced today at the Fall COMMON conference in Pittsburgh: An open source ERP package written in free-form RPG. Dubbed intERPprise, the software project is intended to harness core IBM i strengths – its integrated database and ILE environment – but above all, provide an example for what modern and native open source software can look like on IBM i.

  The intERPrise project (www.i-nterprise.org) was spearheaded by a group of IBM i advocates, including Chris Hird and Marinus van Sandwyk, who wanted to demonstrate what a modern business application would look like – and …

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• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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• Guru: A More Efficient Way To Merge With SQL

  October 15, 2018 Mike Larsen

  Lately, I’ve been using the merge statement in my programs to insert or update rows in a table. I recently came across a situation where a program using merge was running every few minutes and performing updates to thousands of rows each time it ran. Since this table was journaled, it was obvious some re-design was necessary.

  For those unfamiliar with the merge statement, it is sometimes referred to as an “upsert.” That means it will either perform an update or an insert. In RPG terms, I like to compare it to a chain operation. With a chain, you check …

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• No Room For Cloudy Thinking When Moving To The Cloud

  October 15, 2018 Doug Mewmaw

  With new IT innovation, comes new IT thinking. That’s the way it’s always been.

  Right now, that new shiny IT toy that everyone must have is the cloud. In fact, the global market for managed services will grow from $107 billion in 2014 to $193 billion by 2019. As a result, Managed Services Providers (MSPs) are trying to convince CIOs to not only outsource their data center administration, but to trust them that they can manage their entire IT enterprise cheaper and more efficiently.

  Unfortunately, they both may just have their head in the clouds. You see, I’ve been here …

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• The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.

  Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …

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