• We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

  March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  (Sponsored Content) While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics …

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• Guru: SELECT INTO And Arrays

  March 8, 2021 Ted Holt

  I got egg on my face again. I told a couple of colleagues that they could use the SELECT INTO statement to load multiple rows into an array data structure in an RPG program. Boy, was I wrong! I had confused SELECT INTO with the FETCH statement, of course, which retrieves data over which a cursor has been declared.

  But the matter continued to nag me. I much like the simplicity of SELECT INTO. There’s no cursor to declare, open, fetch from and close, the same reason I like the FOR loop in SQL PL. It seemed (and continues …

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• Clearlake Re-Acquires Precisely In $3.5 Billion Deal

  March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Clearlake Capital Group has regained a controlling interest in Precisely, the company it sold four years ago to another private equity firm called Centerbridge Partners. This time around, Precisely is a significantly bigger company, with a valuation of $3.5 billion and 12,000 customers.

  You almost need a flowchart to graph the on-again, off-again state of Clearlake’s ownership of Precisely and two companies that came before it, Syncsort and Vision Solutions. But we’ll do the best we can using words.

  To recap: In 2015, Clearlake takes a controlling interest in Syncsort, a Pearl River, New York-based provider of data integration solutions …

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• Ansible Automation Story Gets Better on IBM i

  March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When IBM and Red Hat launched support for IBM i with its Ansible automation software in July 2020, it provided about three dozen Ansible modules that supported specific actions on IBM i. The companies recently added another dozen or so Ansible updates for IBM i, making the software even more useful on the midrange server.

  Ansible is an open source configuration management package originally designed to enable remote administration of Linux servers. Over time, the software has been adopted to support a wide number of operating environments, including Kubernetes orchestration environments managing Docker containers in public and private clouds.

  The …

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• Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.

  2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …

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• mrc Refreshes IBM i Low-Code Dev Tool

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the latest release of mrc’s m-Power Web app development tool will find the tool easier to use and that applications can be developed faster than before, the company says.

  mrc markets m-Power as a low-code development platform that supports IBM i and other Java platforms. The software is not a full-blown integrated development environment (IDE), the Chicago-based vendor says. But if the user is looking to quickly generate Web interfaces, dashboards, reports, portals, or mobile apps for existing IBM i applications, then it is a good fit.

  The vendor says it built the new release …

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• Unit Testing Automation Hits Shift Left Instead of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Cash

  March 3, 2021 Nick Blamey

  (Sponsored Content) In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, with its dual pressures of the uncertainty of the economy at a small and global scale and the fever pitch need to rapidly modernize applications, it is hard to know where to start. Given this scale of change, as a supplier of application modernization tools that are derived from both a strong IBM i heritage and the youth and strength of open source, you might think that ARCAD Software would be most interested in selling customers its entire toolbox.

  Not necessarily – the answer all depends on your starting …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 3

  March 3, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  IBM’s attention on the hybrid cloud is common knowledge by now. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been crystal clear that he is deeply passionate about the hybrid cloud, and some weeks the hybrid cloud dominates the news cycle. Like this week. Our IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will kicked it off with his latest blog post to clear up some of the confusion he says surrounds industry cloud strategies, which you can find as our Top Story below. Then read on for the latest on the hybrid cloud, as well as the latest IBM i resources and events.

  Top Stories

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 9

  March 3, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Hello, good people of the IBM i Land. As so many newscasters all said across the United States earlier this week, it is hard to believe that it is March already. But it is March indeed, and it has been about a year since the coronavirus went pandemic. We hope you are well, and we hope you stay that way.

  In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will see that Rational Developer for i now supports an updated Java – to be specific, Java 8 SR 6 FP 15. You can find out more at …

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