• HelpSystems Gets New Investors, CEO

  October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, as HelpSystems recently announced that it has a pair of new investors, as well as a new CEO. The software company has also made strides in the security space with a pair of new offerings, including one that supports IBM i.

  Let’s start with the man – or should we say, the woman – at the top. Kate Bolseth, who was most recently the COO, has taken over the top job at HelpSystems. Bolseth was the general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems when IT Jungle interviewed her last …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What To Pack For The Digital Transformation Journey

  October 16, 2019 Emmanuel Tzinevrakis

  Welcome to a new column called Thoroughly Modern. The name is meant to convey the idea that we need to define the desired – if ever-evolving – end state of our businesses and the people, processes, and programs that encapsulate how everything works when we get there.

  It is a given that everyone understands that digital transformation is sweeping every industry, with incumbents being challenged by upstarts – and each other – as they try to create new and better ways to provide products and services to customers in a modern, digital world. We accept this as a first …

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• Syncsort Expands IBM i Integration with ServiceNow

  October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to take full advantage of cloud-based IT management services may be interested in hearing about a new offering unveiled by Syncsort last week. With the new release of its Ironstream for ServiceNow product, Syncsort is making it easier for companies to push IBM i and mainframe event data into ServiceNow Event Management.

  ServiceNow has made its mark in the burgeoning fields of IT service management and AIOps. With $2.6 billion in revenue and more than, 5,000 software as a service (SaaS) subscribers, the publicly traded firm (NYSE: NOW) helps companies manage their increasingly complex IT …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 16

  October 16, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  It’s a big day for IBM. Big Blue will be reporting its Q3 earnings this afternoon and there are a lot of expectations on what results may, or may not, be seen from the Red Hat acquisition, among other possibilities. Of course, you can expect to see some slicing and dicing of IBM’s numbers, as well as what it may mean for our IBM i ecosystem, in future issues of The Four Hundred, but until then, please read on to check out what’s been happening around IT this past week.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (Barron’s) IBM will …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 41

  October 16, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  We were busy at IBM Systems Technology University in Las Vegas last week and also had to chew through the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4, so we are not our normal chatty selves here at the IBM i PTF Guide. Please do forgive.

  So what’s new, you ask? There are new HIPER groups on all four releases. Yes, even IBM i 7.1, with MF66663, which deals with hard disk issues. That’s enough excitement for one week, really.

  New (or Updated) Links this week: None this week, busily gleaning useful tidbits from TechU calls material! …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

  October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

  “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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• Need Help Approving A Modernization Project? Try A Business-Led Approach

  October 14, 2019 Ajay Gomez

  Getting momentum and buy-in for a modernization project can be tough. I’ve lived through this and fought the battle many times. What makes it difficult is that the problem is not obvious and needs to be explained to people outside of IT. For example, it’s not obvious to a business leader that RPG II code should be modernized to RPG ILE. In fact, if we were to modernize the underlying code without telling them, they wouldn’t notice a difference. The business doesn’t see the effects of modernization unless it’s UI modernization, which is why it’s tough to get buy-in.

  Interestingly …

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• Guru: Move Objects with Access Client Solutions

  October 14, 2019 Dawn May

  Sending objects from one IBM i partition to another is a common task. Access Client Solutions’ IFS task makes it simple to copy or send objects. The IFS task was introduced in ACS in July 2016, so this is not a new development, but it may not be widely known.

  Perhaps you need to send a save file to another IBM i partition. There are several ways to do this. FTP and Secure FTP are often used, but using FTP to transfer IBM i objects involves all sorts of complications. The IBM i Knowledge Center dedicates an entire section on …

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• An 11-Core Power9 Makes The Rounds, And Other Hardware Enhancements

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who go way back in the IBM midrange are used to rhythm in hardware announcements. In the early days, there were several announcements per year as new processors were rolled out across the product line and new peripherals for various kinds of storage and networking were rolled out. The pace was brisk back in the day, with nearly annual processor upgrades and associated updates to systems.

  These days, systems are really updated every three years or so, but still, there is the vestigial spring/fall announcement cadence when Big Blue now does Technology Refreshes for the IBM i …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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