• RPG Investment Advice For Long Term Goals

  March 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  RPG programming remains a hugely important skill in the IBM Power Systems niche where the IBM i lives. It shares that space with other languages such as Java, PHP, a few fourth-generation options and a host of open source options. More than once in its long life, RPG has been declared dead.

  Like an untended plant, some IBM i shops have let RPG die. It lingers on with little or no nourishment in other organizations. But it’s also doing very well as a modern language when in the hands of skilled programmers. Who are the skilled programmers and what are …

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• What IBM i Shops Should Know About Digital Transformation

  March 8, 2017 Alex Woodie

  You may have heard the term “digital transformation” bandied about and figured it was probably another two-bit term for a nickel idea. While all the specifics of digital transformation may not apply to the typical IBM i shop, the general idea behind the concept is one that most IBM i shops would do well explore.

  So, what is digital transformation? In an IBM Institute for Business Value report, the company defines it as “Creating new business models where digital meets physical.” Wikipedia calls it “the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society.” …

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• IBM VP Dishes Up Statistics For Infrastructure Growth

  March 8, 2017 Dan Burger

  The metamorphosis of IBM has been a journey from typewriters to mainframes, to mini-mainframes to PCs, to infrastructure, to cloud computing, to big data analytics and most recently to cognitive computing. IT infrastructure for cognitive workloads was on the mind of Tom Rosamilia as he spoke to the IBM Business Partners several weeks ago at the PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas.

  Rosamilia, the senior vice president of IBM Systems group, emphasized the delivery of cognitive insights would depend on infrastructure and that partners would help create the solutions, while customers would choose how they want to deploy it – most …

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• Don’t Look Now, But PCI Just Changed Again

  March 8, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Heads up, IBM i shops: Companies that process any volume of credit card transactions now must send self-assessments to their acquiring banks under the jurisdiction of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This is a pretty significant change, as previously only merchants processing large volumes were subject to strict PCI DSS requirements.

  On January 31, a new PCI provision went into effect that requires Level 4 merchants to submit a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) to their issuing banks. Previously, Level 4 merchants, which are defined as processing 20,000 or fewer ecommerce transactions or 1 million total transactions, were …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 8

  March 8, 2017 Dan Burger

  It’s just an observation, but it seems Rational Developer for i (RDi) is more closely aligned with the desires of IBM i shops since it left the IBM Software Group and moved in with the IBM i development team. An example can be made of the latest RDi enhancements.

  A little bit of play time with RDi helps developers understand the benefits that come with modern development. The same can be said about open source. It doesn’t seem i-oriented until you get a little closer to where the action is. Seeing may not be believing, but give it a fair …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 9

  March 8, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  For the past 19 years now, IBM midrange business partner DLB Systems Associates has been putting together a guide to help OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops figure out what to patch in their operating systems for midrange gear every week. This IBM i PTF Guide is incorporated it into the Wednesday edition of The Four Hundred starting in 2017.

  From here on out, to make things predictable, the IBM i PTF Guide will be located in story five of that Wednesday edition of the newsletter, right below Four Hundred Monitor, which we have also preserved and brought inside …

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• IBM i License Transfer Deal Comes To The Power S812 Mini

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early days of the AS/400 midrange system, the processor, memory, networking, and disk and tape storage hardware embodied in the system was by far the most costly part of that system, far outweighing the cost of the systems software that ran atop it. We don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but it was something like 85 percent hardware cost and 15 percent software cost.

  Fast-forward a few decades, and the Moore’s Law improvements in every component in the hardware means that hardware is far less costly. But software doesn’t have a Moore’s Law scaling; in fact, …

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• The Missing RPG OA Puzzle Piece

  March 6, 2017 Dan Burger

  RPG Open Access is a technology that was introduced with much fanfare with the IBM i 7.1 release of the operating system. That was in 2010. A handful of software vendors showed what it could do by using it in their application modernization tool kits as a means to get beyond screen-scraping and actually control the user interface.

  Now RPG OA is seven years old and not a lot has changed. A few more vendors have incorporated it as a method for creating user interfaces. The potential for RPG OA is mostly unrealized and it remains unrecognized by the majority …

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• Guru: The PHP Path To Victory, Part 1

  March 6, 2017 Chris Ringer

  If you read my two previous PHP articles, you may be tempted to make the leap to use PHP on your IBM i. But you may also have reservations because how in the world will you technically support those apps post implementation?

  This article discusses the path a PHP request takes as it travels through various subsystems up to your RPG code and how to do basic troubleshooting if something goes wrong.

  Tag Team Match

  Often greatness is achieved with the help of someone else. Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. Babe Ruth had Lou Gehrig. And Abbott had Costello. In …

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• IBM i Cloud Providers React To Amazon S3 Outage

  March 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Last week’s Amazon S3 outage served as a wakeup call that cloud platforms, despite the scalability and availability advantages, actually aren’t infallible. But will the Internet giant’s East Coast outage have any lasting effect on cloud adoption? And will it impact cloud adoption among IBM i customers? We asked some experts to find out.

  User error was blamed on the “impairment” of US East 1, one of 16 “regions” under the massive AWS tent. The region, which is based in AWS’ Ashburn, Virginia data center, never went down entirely, despite claims that all of AWS was down, or that the …

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