• Father, Son, & Co: Kisco Systems Drills Down On Security

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Rich Loeber was a divisional IT manager for over 16 years before he founded Kisco Information Systems in June 1984, four years before the AS/400 was launched. The System/36 had just launched the year before, and the System/38 had been around and in production for a handful of years at that time. Loeber founded Kisco – presumable named after Mount Kisco, a town in the Hudson Valley in New York State – to offer data processing services to IT shops in the New York metropolitan area.

  Two years later, Kisco became an independent software vendor in the IBM midrange, and …

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• How Kyndryl’s IBM i Customer Base Benefits from the Big Blue Split

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Now that IBM is done with the spin-out of its Global Technology Services (GTS) business, the company that resulted from that spin-out, Kyndryl, is free to pursue its own strategy. For Kyndryl’s considerable IBM i installed base, that freedom will result in a much broader array of technological options and services engagements becoming available to them.

  With 500 employees dedicated to supporting its IBM i customers, Kyndryl has one of the biggest IBM i services practices in the world, says Nicolas Le Van Dé, Kyndryl’s IBM i global offering manager.

  “I think we are the leader in terms of IBM …

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• IBM i Modernization – Life After RPG

  March 30, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  How an IBM i business approaches legacy application modernization doesn’t differ from application modernization on any other platform. Well, there is one slight difference. Many of those IBM i businesses have the added weight of replacing working legacy applications for the simple fact that RPG fell out of mainstream coding decades ago. The code is efficient and perfectly runs mission-critical apps, but there are fewer and fewer programmers around to maintain that code.

  Colleges and universities stopped teaching RPG before Y2K was even a concern. Developers that learned RPG in the 1980s and early 1990s were 30 or 40 years …

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• Pledging Backup Assurances in an Unsure World

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies are facing increasingly threats to their backups these days. Whether it’s ransomware attacks, migrations to the cloud, or random hardware failures, the possibility of corrupted data looms as big as ever. With World Backup Day taking place tomorrow (March 31), it makes sense to check out the state of backups on IBM i.

  The first thing to know is that backup plans appear to be changing at many companies, or at least the mechanism they use to execute the backup. From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of IBM i shops using tape to backup and recover data dropped from …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 30

  March 30, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  “We don’t just create business value, we create progress.” That’s the plan from IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna as Big Blue looks to shine the spotlight back on itself. You can read what’s in store for the year ahead in our Top Story below. Our favorite IBM i is getting some extra attention this week, too, as you can read about in our top post under the Redbooks, White Papers, Blogs, and Other Resources section below. It’s nice to see things starting to kick into high gear around our ecosystem after the past year-plus of stagnant waters.

  Top Stories

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 13

  March 30, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  It’s pretty quiet on the PTF western front. Not that there isn’t always some kind of weird stuff going on . . . because, let me assure you, there is. IBM i customers have all kinds of weird things happening, and that ain’t no April Fool’s joke. But, mercifully, this week, as we end the first quarter and Spring is starting meteorologically as well as calendaricly – yes, I just made that word up – there are only a few things going on.

  Once again: To help you with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as …

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• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

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• Inside Jack Henry’s Long-Term Modernization Roadmap

  March 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates is one of the stalwart brands for IBM i applications. The Monett, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 banks and credit unions running its core banking systems on IBM i, with another 650 on AIX and a few hundred more on Windows Server. So when the company last month officially unveiled its next-generation technology strategy, it turned a few heads.

  As it turns out, Jack Henry has been working on its new tech stack for the past five years. As the company sussed out the strategy and the first products were born – an application for …

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• Guru: SIEM Is Only Part Of IBM i Cybersecurity

  March 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  Many times, we hear from IBM i business owners that their SIEM – that’s short for Security Information and Event Management – is their cybersecurity solution for the IBM i. But that can’t be true, and I want to explain why it is part of the security shield but certainly not all of it.

  Let’s start with SIEMs and how they fit into cybersecurity frameworks. SIEM is mentioned in the PCI appendix, but not once in the core of the 250+ PCI DSS requirements, likewise, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework lists event monitoring as one of the 100s (1/100s) of NIST …

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• As I See It: Two Front War

  March 28, 2022 Victor Rozek

  History records that the Second World War began when Germany invaded Poland, breaching its western border on September 1, 1939. For the Poles, however, that accounted for only half of their unfolding misery. Largely forgotten, 16 days later, the Russians invaded Poland from the East.

  Being situated between Germany and Russia in the war-ravaged 20th century turned out to be geographically inauspicious. Long after the Germans were defeated, the Russians stayed. Opportunistic invasion turned into long-term occupation.

  A similar story is unfolding in Ukraine, where a two-front war is being waged: one analog, the other digital. Weeks before tanks and …

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