• It’s Your Last Chance To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are coming down to the final stretch and we need you to take a few minutes and participate in the IBM i Marketplace Survey that has been done for the past several years by HelpSystems. The survey takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.

  The community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior, and Big Blue is more open about this process than many IT suppliers even if it might not feel like it sometimes. So this is your chance …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• Getting Progressive About Regression Testing

  October 22, 2018 Jeff Tickner

  (Sponsored Content) If you want to employ modern software development and testing techniques, you have to move on from simple unit testing by developers and implement regression testing in your quality assurance (QA) organization. This is perhaps the best way to take the risk out of continuous development – something that companies have to embrace if they are to remain competitive.

  The difference between regression testing and normal testing is that in the most common model, the developer has a request to fix a problem or to add a feature, and they make their changes and do unit …

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• Guru: Ready Or Not! Part 5 Of Big Changes In RDi V9.6, Edit/Browse Toggle, PDM Perspective, More

  October 22, 2018 Susan Gantner

  In this tip I’m going to cover a few of the “smaller” features implemented in V9.6.0.3 and …0.4 that I think you should know about. I’ll cover my favorite — the Edit/Browse toggle feature — as well as some enhancements to Block Nesting. I’ll also follow-on to my last tip about the PDM affinity features in the Object Table — the PDM perspective — plus a few more little goodies.

  A quick hint for you on the subject of exactly what new features became available within RDi and when: If you ever want to see a complete list of new …

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• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey Again

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another year has come and gone, and it is once again time to take the pulse of the IBM i community and see what is exciting and raising that pulse and what is not.

  We truly are a community, and it helps to know what is going on. IBM doesn’t provide much insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, much less the IBM i platform within it, so we have learned to rely on surveys by user groups and by the major software vendors in the community to try to figure out what is going on out there …

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• 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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