• As I See It: A Second Life

  February 28, 2022 Victor Rozek

  These days it’s not unusual for high school students to be computer savvy to a degree their parents could only dream of. But that wasn’t the case in 1972 when Jay Brandt attended high school.

  Oregon-based Benson Polytechnic High was conceived as a trade school, but over time adopted a pre-engineering curriculum. There, students could build a rudimentary foundation in a technology that would shortly transform the world. Jay quickly mastered the Four Horsemen of ancient IT: Basic, Fortran, COBOL, and Assembler; and when school broke for the summer, he had a novel idea.

  Although the high school had a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 9

  February 28, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, and we start off with this notice from the support people at IBM, which indicates that a HIPER PTF patch may include longer Abnormal IPL times during C9002C20 SNADS recovery. We also wanted to point out that we have added two new tabs to the Guide, QMGtools and ACS-Navigator for i. These are links we have found when troubleshooting and are useful for a more global look at those products.

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

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• IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.

  IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

  February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

  But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …

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• Love Your ERP or List It?

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to business applications, companies are strangely attached to them. According to a recent Forrester study, more than two-thirds of organizations are happy with a range of existing core business applications and don’t plan to leave them. But the upside of digital transformation beckons, leading the analyst group to wonder whether application owners are better off loving their ERP systems or leaving them.

  Forrester tackled the challenge of digital transformation in a creative way with a recent report, titled “On Premise ERP: Love It or List It,” which compares a company’s business application stay-or-go decision to the popular …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 23

  February 23, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  One of the things we like about Monitor, in addition to having the opportunity to share a selection of news items we think might be of interest or entertainment to our readers, is this weekly column gives us the opportunity to watch for trends in our ecosystem and the ones around us. Since the year began, and especially in the last few weeks, it has been exciting to watch our Calendar filling up with opportunities to learn and connect. There is something for everyone, with in-person and online events, and we like to think it’s an indication of the health …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 8

  February 23, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Wake up! There is a new security vulnerability in the Java stack within IBM i. See Security Bulletin: IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i are affected by CVE-2021-234, which you can read at this link. The IBM i Group PTF numbers containing the fix for the CVE follows. Future Group PTFs for Java will also contain the fix for this CVE:

  • Release 7.4: SF99665 level 13
  • Release 7.3: SF99725 level 24
  • Release 7.2: SF99716 level 34

  To help you with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as a companion to the …

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• Global COBOL Growth Spurs Reevaluation of ‘Legacy’ Assets

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  COBOL is supposed to be a dead language, tied (mostly) as it is to the IBM mainframe, which is also dead. But according to a recent survey from Micro Focus, the amount of COBOL code in the world actually is expanding. What in COBOL is going on?

  Micro Focus commissioned the research group Vanson Bourne to evaluate the state of COBOL use in the world, and the results of that research were released on February 4. Perhaps the most eye-popping figure references the title of the report, “How much COBOL is really out there?”

  The answer: Anywhere from 775 to …

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• Infor Customers Share IBM i Stories

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Infor is often disparaged for being a graveyard of IBM i ERP products. But at the recent Inforum Digital event, three Infor customers shared why they’re bullish on their IBM i ERP systems from Infor.

  Badger Meters is a publicly traded manufacturer of water meters based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 115-year-old company has more than 1,600 employees and has relied on Infor ERP LX system and BPCS predecessors to automate its operations for many years.

  According to Jim Reinardy, the director of information systems for Badger Meters, ERP LX has met the company’s needs, which has included a number of …

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• IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.

  Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.

  The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. …

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