• The Time Is Now To Get A GenAI Strategy

  March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I was born a little less than a year after IBM launched its venerable System/360 mainframe platform, arguably the first information technology platform ever created and sold at scale. I graduated from college six months after the AS/400 was launched and was the founding editor of this newsletter you are now reading a little more than a year after Silverlake came to market and showed what a real platform could look like.

  I was present during the Unix revolution, the client/server revolution, the commercial Internet revolution, and the big data revolutions, and I was absolutely at the forefront of commercial …

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• Sundry IBM Tape Subsystem Announcements

  March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been shipping tape drives and tape libraries based on LTO-9 tape cartridge technology for nearly three years, which is why we think it is odd that last week we saw that the TS2290 machine now has a feature code to attach to IBM i or OS/400 systems.

  In announcement letter AD24-0463, which is pretty terse as these things go, we see that there is a new feature code 9400 for the TS2290 tape drive, also known as the 3580 Model H9S. This appears to be just a feature code to allow for direct attachment of the TS2290 …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 11

  March 18, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i is sponsored by security vulnerabilities and precious little else. There are three security vulnerabilities that are new that you need to be aware of, so let’s get to it and let you get back to work.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Db2 Web Query for i is vulnerable to a remote attacker bypassing security restrictions or to denial of service, which you can read more about here. The fixes are as follows:

  IBM Db2 Web Query for i 		Release		OS Release
  5733WQX 		2.4.0		7.4 and 7.5
  				SI85982
  				SI85987
  

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: …

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• What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.

  In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.

  For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …

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• Big Blue Goes After Healthcare With Aggressive Power Systems Pricing

  March 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We often gently admonish the vendors in the IBM i market that they have to make news to be in the news and also to do something snazzy, like a special promotion or a price cut to get the attention of customers as well as to stimulate a little business for themselves and their partners. IBM is not excepted from this advice, and is actually doing it – at least for customers in the healthcare industry that run their applications on Power Systems iron.

  In announcement letter AD23-0111, dated March 12, IBM has put out a new 24-core Power10 …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 13

  March 13, 2024 Jenny Thomas

  When Janine Melnitz mutters to herself, “I’ve quit better jobs than this,” she doesn’t actually leave and go find another place to work. (And thank goodness because who would we have called when we need a ghost busted?) While indeed.com offers a list of 10 reasons why you might quit, including feeling dissatisfied with work environment, personal conflicts, and difficult schedule, pre-emptively volunteering before you are cut due to layoffs isn’t one of them. But that’s what IBM is asking employees – mostly in Europe – to do. Layoffs shouldn’t come as a surprise since last year, IBM CEO Arvind …

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• StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.

  StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software …

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• More Db2 Web Query Alternatives, And An Update

  March 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It has been five months since IBM abruptly killed off Db2 Web Query, the IBM i-based suite of business intelligence tools that Big Blue OEMed from Information Builders. Some customers have already settled on a replacement, but many others are still combing the market looking for a good fit.

  The product that is arguably the most well-positioned to replace Db2 Web Query is WebFOCUS, the Information Builders product on which Db2 Web Query is based. IBM had an OEM agreement with the New York-based company for more 15 years before it abruptly ended in October.

  IT Jungle has asked Information …

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• Thoroughly Modern: A Practical Primer For The IBM i Cloud Journey

  March 11, 2024 Lief Morin

  Cloud has evolved significantly from its roots in the shared services era of IBM mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s. While some parallels can be drawn, today’s cloud landscape emphasizes flexible capacity and pricing models over traditional outright purchases of computing resources like the IBM i platform. The prevailing trend towards major cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud has underscored the importance of a shared architecture approach for cost-effectiveness and business prosperity.

  Most businesses rely on heavily modified solutions for their core business applications, so they find significant benefits in a shared …

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