• As I See It: IT Come Home

  September 25, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Wanna buy a skyscraper, cheap? Need an extra million square feet of space to store your stuff? Want enough living space for you and 600 of your closest friends? No problem. In large and mid-sized cities across the country, once-robust downtowns are looking a bit gaunt. Storefronts are shuttered, restaurants are struggling, and once-thick downtown traffic has noticeably thinned. And for that, you can thank, or blame, technology.

  Specifically, the technology that allowed so many of us to work from home during the Covid years. We got spoiled, enjoying unprecedented flexibility, freedom, independence, and convenience. No commute, no set hours, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 39

  September 25, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This is not new news, but recurring news. IBM has once again pushed the implementation date of an IP change for tech support out a couple of times, and, here it is again. IBM’s notice:

  “Due to technical issues, the September 19/20 change has been postponed. Additional guidance will be provided by October 6, 2023. For those that have adjusted their firewall configuration, please do not remove the new entries until we provide further guidance. Preparing customer firewalls and proxies for the upcoming infrastructure changes – Call Home, Electronic Fix Distribution.”

  You can find out more about this issue, which …

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• ARCAD’s Deal with IBM for DevOps In Merlin Is Exclusive

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched Merlin in 2022, it touted the browser-based environment as a new way to deliver functionality to the IBM i installed base and potentially to distribute third-party solutions. But right now, the only third-party vendor IBM is working with when it comes to Merlin is ARCAD Software, which has exclusive rights to supply the DevOps components within Merlin, according to executives with both companies.

  IBM introduced Merlin with great fanfare in May 2022 as a potentially transformative technology. Not only was Merlin the first browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) from IBM, providing an alternative to the powerful but …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava

  September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.

  This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …

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• Is The Cloud On Your IBM i Horizon?

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s almost impossible to ignore the enormous pull that the cloud is exerting on the software industry today. Companies that run the IBM i server are also subject to that gravity, although it has different ramifications for their technological future, as well as the decisions they’ll make if they want to run their operations in the cloud.

  IBM i shops, almost by definition, are not running on the cloud today, at least not in the public cloud the way it is normally defined. While there are a handful of managed service providers (MSPs) offering private cloud IBM i runtimes, and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 20

  September 20, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  In June, NPR published an analysis of the existential threat artificial intelligence poses to humanity. Hopefully IBM is heeding that warning as it puts into motion its plans to train 2 million people in AI technologies in the next three years. Readers of Monitor know we have been keeping a watchful eye on IBM and how AI is playing a role in its strategy moving forward. We recently shared articles about IBM hiring freezes and layoffs that were attributed to the adoption of AI, and we continue to keep you in the loop on more developments, as you will read …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 38

  September 20, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This episode of the IBM i PTF Guide is being put together in honor of that venerable rodeo clown and comedic actor, Louis Burton Lindley, Jr., better known to all of us as Slim Pickens. Because after a bunch of security vulnerabilities were covered in the prior issue that came out on Monday, we are now all caught up after the holiday and there is not a huge amount going on.

  But there is always something you need to watch out for. So read on.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last …

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• The Subscription Pricing For The IBM i Stack So Far

  September 18, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been following the transformation of the pricing and packaging of the IBM i operating system, its integrated database, and the suite of Licensed Program Products, or LPPs, that are commonly installed alongside of the operating system to create a mostly complete system software suite. Last week, we talked about how the machines in the P05 and P10 software tiers would be moving to all-subscription pricing, and this week we are following up with the pricing information we have been able to gather to date as well as talking to Big Blue about the changes.

  IBM has been clear …

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• Facing The Challenges Of Upgrading Old Systems With The Cloud

  September 18, 2023 Jason Hardy

  If you are one of the many IBM i shops that has always created its own applications and that has a long history of investing in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms over the past three and a half decades at reasonably regular intervals to keep the hardware and the systems software current, you have it relatively easy and we definitely want to talk to you about your move to the cloud and how we might help.

  But if you are one of the many OS/400 and IBM i shops that have, for myriad reasons, gotten stuck …

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• Guru: Generating XML Using SQL – The Easy Way

  September 18, 2023 Bob Cozzi

  There are many verbose methods of generating XML. You can:

  • Write your own RPG code
  • Using a free or third-party API
  • Use SQL iQuery OUTPUT(*XML) option
  • Use the built-in SQL XML functions such as XMLELEMENT

  I’m sure there are others, but these seem to be the most popular.

  For years I had been using the XMLELEMENT approach; a rather verbose set of XML function built into Db2 for i SQL. In fact, SQL iQuery’s OUTPUT(*XML) is based on that feature. It simply regenerates your SQL statement using XMLELEMENT statements for each output column/field name.

  But if you’re using something IBM …

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