• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 26

  July 12, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There is something new this week in the IBM i PTF Guide. We have added a link to the Memo to Users that is put out by IBM for each release. If you are not familiar with this Memo to Users, the developers working on the IBM i software stack try to put together a comprehensive guide to all the changes in the new release in the Memo to Users.

  It is a great “Shot across the bow” for those you venturing into a new release. With the sunsetting of V7R1 just months away, everybody should take a look …

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• Vision Buys Enforcive, Then Gets Sold And Merged With Syncsort

  July 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  To say that it was busy couple of days for Vision Solutions last week would be an understatement. On Wednesday, the company announced its acquisition of IBM i security firm Enforcive. The following day, Vision announced that it was being bought by Centerbridge, a private equity firm that intends to merge it with ETL provider Syncsort.

  When all the smoke from the fireworks cleared, here’s how the chips landed: Clearlake Capital Group, which acquired Vision Solutions barely a year ago and bought Syncsort in 2015, was offered $1.2 billion by Centerbridge Partners for majority stakes in both firms. That …

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• IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

  With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …

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• Guru: Retrieving Images From An SQL Table

  July 10, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I showed you how to load images from the IFS into a table that has a column defined as a BLOB data type. BLOB stands for Binary Large Object and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database.

  Our final goal is to retrieve the images from the table we loaded in part 1 and write them back to the IFS. Once we complete this task, we should end up with the same five images we worked with in part 1. To keep everything …

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• Counting Companies With An IBM i In The Mix

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  How many companies are running their mission critical business applications on Power Systems loaded with the IBM i operating system? Not as many as 20 years ago. That’s for certain. But who knows for sure? I mean, who knows the number? Three years ago, IBM was tossing out a worldwide estimate of 125,000. That number has not been officially updated but sources at IBM say the number of IBM i customers remains steady with that three-year-old estimate. On the other hand, I’ve heard people in the IBM i community guesstimate the installed base is under the 100,000 mark. It’s not …

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• Pride In Advancing The IBM i Community

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community is a global community. We sometimes forget that as we limit our view to the horizon as seen from our own IT departments. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the smart cats will tell you it’s far more likely to simply kill ignorance. The power of ideas should not be underestimated. And access to ideas is the reason the IBM i community benefits from events like the recent COMMON Europe Congress (CEC). The education and networking opportunities are what inspires people to participate, says Ranga Deshpande, president of COMMON Europe. “There’s pride in advancing the …

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• Tomorrowland: Optimism, Risk, and Preparation For IBM i App Dev

  June 28, 2017 Dan Burger

  The rules of application development were never carved in stone. They’ve always been subject to change, improvements, enhancements and even replacements. Uncertainty and risk – do you stay or do you go – torture the brains of long-range planners who recognize the importance of preparation, but are caught in the whirlpool of innovation and hyperbole. Predicting future skills and tools is not an exact science. But with a high degree of certainty, we do know that sitting on your hands is no way to prepare for the future.

  I asked a group of skillful IBM i application development monitors and …

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• Database Modernization Network Grows for TEMBO

  June 28, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A growing network of business partners is helping TEMBO Technology Lab spread the word about the benefits of database modernization to IBM i shops in North America. It’s also helping to lower the barrier to of entry for IBM i clients to get started.

  If you ask a group of IBM i professionals what application modernization means, you’ll likely hear a lot of different answers: the importance of avoiding “legacy” technologies, why free form RPG is great, the value of responsive design, and the importance of having a “mobile first” approach.

  To TEMBO founder Marinus van Sandwyk, these answers aren’t …

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• Improving Customer Engagement on IBM i

  June 28, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new survey points to a growing desire among IBM i shops to offer more customer engagement channels to their customers. However, the cost of implementing these changes and a lack of technical skills present considerable barriers, according to SoftLanding Systems, which conducted the poll.

  IT resources are a limited asset at most organizations. They must choose carefully when and where to deploy these resources for maximum affect. At the same time, there is usually a long list of “wants” from various lines of business, and perhaps a shorter list of more critical “needs.” It’s up to the CIO and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 28

  June 28, 2017 Dan Burger

  Jack Woehr duly notes IBM i open source proponents who are porting useful, popular open source to the i platform. But he also points to another path, one that he describes as object-disoriented. He can call it anything he wants, because he’s the one who blazed the trail. Woehr’s trail is generally a Java interpreter and specifically an interpretive form of JTOpen that makes it easier to encapsulate legacy IBM i as-is and offload the Web dev to the people who do Web dev best.

  The quality of the products being produced in the open source community and the inclusiveness …

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