• Mad Dog 21/21: The Fake, The Take, But In The End Jake

  December 3, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  IBM, at times, looks like a pair of fraternal twins. One is based on long-established activities with roots in two proprietary system architectures: mainframe and Power. This part of IBM also includes the large legacy services segments. The other twin embodies IBM’s hopes and dreams — it is what the company calls strategic imperatives — it includes most software, artificial intelligence technologies such as Watson, cloud computing, and more. This year, the strategic twin became as big as the legacy twin, and, with the Red Hat acquisition, it is expected to become permanently larger.

  Properly managed and effectively marketed, …

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• Some Insight Into The IBM i On Power Systems Base

  December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is pretty secretive about its systems business, but is really no worse than its peers in this regard. Big Blue wants to get enough information out there to keep customers comfortable about the future, keep Wall Street happy about its revenues and prospects for the immediate future (meaning one to three quarters out), and keep its competitors from getting too much insight into how it is doing in the systems racket.

  Every now and then, we get some insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, and as part of a discussion we had recently about upgrade and …

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• High Schools: The New Recruiting Grounds for IT Jobs

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are having trouble filling entry-level IT jobs due to the tight job market and low unemployment rate may want to check out another resource for finding and attracting workers: their local high school.

  Recruitment, retention, and training of new talent are always hot topics during the roundtable discussions that take place at the CIO Summit. “It’s always a very fruitful and productive topic to see what CIOs are doing,” says Alan Seiden, who has been running the bi-annual event for IBM i tech executives for the past year-and-a-half.

  So when one of the CIOs at last month’s …

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• Syncsort Snags EView for Log Data Hooks

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort bolstered its capability to harvest log data originating on IBM i and mainframes yesterday with the acquisition of EView Technology, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company that builds big iron connectors for mainstream systems management tools.

  EView Technology didn’t occupy a prominent seat in the IBM i auditorium, but it did carve out its own little niche as a purveyor of connectivity tools used by systems administrators at some of the biggest IBM i and mainframe shops in the country, such a Ford, Kraft, TD Bank, Discount Tire, Waste Management, HSBC, FedEx, and REI.

  The company’s claim to fame was …

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• MB Software Gets A Handle On Remote SQL Jobs

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  System administrators who get frustrated with the inability to see which SQL jobs coming in through ODBC are causing problems on their IBM i server may be interested in a product called Work with Active SQL (WRKACTSQL) from MB Software and Consulting, which recently announced the tool will be free through the end of the year.

  SQL is just about as close to a universal language for business as you can get. While there are other (i.e. “native”) methods of fetching data from Db2 for i, nearly three-quarters of IBM i developers report using SQL, making it the number two …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 28

  November 28, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  We often talk about the future of the IBM i and the need to draw new talent into our ecosystem. The Girls Who Code foundation recognizes the jobs created in America today require new skills and is looking to help open the door to opportunities for women in the tech community. One such girl growing up in a rural small town is profiled in a short YouTube video. You can find the link in our Redbooks, White Papers, Blogs, and Other Resources section below. And, as always, you can find links to news from the past week in the links …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Numbers 46 And 47

  November 28, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  It is catchup week (is that ketchup or catsup?) here at the IBM i PTF Guide, with the hiatus that The Four Hundred took during the Thanksgiving holiday in America. So today you get two for the price of one.

  In Number 46 of the Guide, we see that there is a new version of Access Client Solutions, Build 1.1.8.1, as of November 12! Fun stuff!

  There were also HIPERs and Security groups for all three current IBM i releases – yep, that means V7R1, too, as well as V7R2 and V7R3.

  New Links that week: Nagios system …

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• Scaling Up For Cyber Monday With IBM i

  November 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A fulfillment company that’s expected to process millions of transactions on an IBM i server today will lean heavily on a slim layer of RPG-based Web services technology to keep the commerce flowing for its large clients. But there’s nothing stopping the middleware, dubbed iWebSrv, from simplifying data integration for clients in other industries.

  Retailers work all year to ensure they’re ready for the massive surge of traffic that springs up after Thanksgiving. For bricks-and-mortar types, Black Friday is their make-or-break day, while those with an omni-channel bent have Cyber Monday prominently circled on their calendars.

  Consumers are expected to …

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• Japan Is A Different IBM i Market, But The Loyalty Is The Same

  November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early November, we did an overview of the IBM i market in Japan, which accounts for about 10 percent of the IBM i installed base and is third to North America and Europe, which have always dominated the AS/400 and follow-on IBM midrange markets.

  In this follow-up story, we wanted to dig a little deeper and talked to two downstream resellers, Bell Data (which is a publishing partner of The Four Hundred in Japan) and Star Computer, which is a downstream partner from iGuazu, the largest distributor of Power Systems with IBM i machinery in the country. …

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• Guru: When Is An Error Not An Error?

  November 26, 2018 Jon Paris

  When is an error not an error? When it is expected! In this article I want to discuss the use of RPG’s MONITOR op-code and discuss ways in which it might change the way you code RPG. I was prompted to write up my thoughts on this subject as a result of being quizzed by students at a recent RPG & DB2 Summit as to why I was using Monitor blocks rather than more conventional RPG techniques in my examples.

  So what do I mean by expected? Basically I mean those errors that you know are going to happen …

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