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Vision Reflects on Clouds, ‘Shadow IT’ in Latest Resilience Report

February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

The cloud has become pervasive in the business IT world at most organizations. However, the rise of “shadow IT” services living on the cloud threatens to undermine companies’ data and application resilience strategies, particularly in light of the increasingly complex, hybrid cloud/on-premise setups that are becoming popular today, Vision Solutions says in its annual State of Resilience report 2015.

According to Vision’s survey, 62 percent of IT executives report using cloud services at their organization. Apparently, the old debate about whether an organization should adopt “the cloud” is over. Cloud-based services are clearly popular and are here to stay, and

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Remain Software ALM Tool Gets CA Plex Interface

February 11, 2015 Dan Burger

Independent development environments such as CA Plex have their own model-based and pattern-driven development techniques to modernize legacy IBM midrange applications as they run across multiple platforms as well as move them to the Web and to SOA environments. And as IBM i shops take on modernization projects, change management software is integral to the process. As an example, Remain Software that is announcing its application lifecycle management software, TD/OMS, has a new interface for CA Plex users.

The integration is the result of cooperation with Stella Tools, a CA Plex open source initiative.

“The way the two tools

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Create Excel Spreadsheets From DB2 Data With PHPExcel

February 10, 2015 Bruce Guetzkow

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

It is amazing that so many users manually key from a report into a spreadsheet for further analysis. PHPExcel is a tool that you can use to write directly to a spreadsheet for them. Here are the steps that you need to take to install and create a simple spreadsheet from DB2 data using PHPExcel.

Getting Started

The following are requirements to use PHPExcel on Power Systems on IBM i:

Zend Server must be installed and running
PHPExcel must be downloaded and installed

For the purposes of this

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Row Value Expressions Simplify Complex Row Selection

February 10, 2015 Ted Holt

If you like mile-long, messy, obfuscated, hard-to-read SQL, the kind that makes sane people want to cuss and spit on everybody and everything, then this tip is not for you. And please don’t apply for a job in my shop. But if you have better things to do than debug SQL, then I have a simple but clever technique for you.

Suppose the chief bean counter walks into your office and asks for a spreadsheet of general ledger transactions. He wants the current-month transactions for accounts 120, 135, 180, 192, and 198. Here’s how a novice would write the query

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Git To It

February 10, 2015 Aaron Bartell

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

In my last article we learned about Ruby methods and encapsulation. During the various exercises there were many code changes made and we didn’t really have a simple way to keep track of how the code changed from one version to the next. That’s where source change management (SCM) tools like git come into play and is what we will be diving into today.

The git Website says: “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large

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Surrounding The IBM i

February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

IBM has a plan for the IBM i operating system. It sounds slightly ominous and it might even cause some of the IBM i advocates to lock the doors to the server room. It’s not a secret. In fact, some say the idea is gaining support. The idea is to surround the i. Surround it with new Linux workloads, primarily analytics workloads, which to a large degree involve mobile and, to a lesser degree, social applications.

Maybe you don’t give a flying flapjack about Linux. Maybe, from your point of view, it’s still not ready for enterprise operating system duty

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German Hotel Search Engine Mashes Up Watson And IBM i

February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems.

An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the

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Security Risks Avoided By The Development Team

February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

Some ideas need to be told and retold before the concept is fully grasped and action results. This isn’t the first time outspoken IBM i security expert Pat Botz has warned developers about dangerous security assumptions. This advice comes periodically, and it demonstrates how people hear without listening. That’s maybe a bit too harsh because there are indications it’s become more widely recognized that programmers have a role in data security at the application level.

“You can’t secure a system these days without the programmers knowing about security,” Botz says. “Programmers can’t write programs that make data available to anyone

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IBM’s Licensing Practices Under Scrutiny

February 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

Buying enterprise software is never easy. But the complexity and heavy-handedness that IBM and the other megavendors bring to software licensing and enforcement hurts everybody involved. That’s the opinion of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, which recently announced that it is going to step up its analysis of Big Blue’s licensing practices.

The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) last month announced that it is stepping up its research of IBM and SAP software licensing strategies in hopes of helping customers navigate overly complex structures and pressuring the vendors into simplifying their policies. To that end, the UK-based firm held

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IBM Layoffs Not As Dramatic As Rumored

February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do.

Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of

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