• IBM Jacks Up Hardware Maintenance Fees

  March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It happens every couple of years or so, and in fact, it has not happened in a couple of years so it looks like we were about due. We are talking about maintenance price hikes on a slew of IBM hardware, price hikes that are aimed mostly at stemming the gradual decline in maintenance revenues that IBM’s Global Services unit is seeing as its base of hardware contracts. In theory, such a price increase boosts the profits of its services arm, but it also helps cover some of the inflationary costs associated with providing hardware support and housing parts of …

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• The IBM i Base Not As Jumpy As It Has Been

  March 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The backwards compatibility of RPG and COBOL applications on new hardware and new operating systems in the IBM midrange is unheralded in the IT sector, and perhaps is only rivalled by the longevity of applications running in Big Blue’s System z mainframes. Somewhere out there in the world are applications running on IBM i platforms that could be running code that stretches all the way back to 1969 with the System/3.

  Change is measured in the IBM i base, and with good reason. Small and medium businesses are conservative by nature because they don’t want to run any unnecessary risks, …

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• Inside Carbonite’s IBM i Plans For EVault

  March 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s been a year since Carbonite acquired the EVault business from Seagate for $14 million, and not a lot has changed, save for the addition of IBM i support in the cloud backup agent. But according to Carbonite, there are big plans underway to bolster the EVault product line, and in particular its IBM i capabilities.

  Carbonite continues to develop and sell the entire line of EVault products that it acquired in December 2015 from Seagate, according to Kashan Mohammad, Carbonite’s senior product manager in charge of EVault office solutions. (The home-based products, which account for the lion’s share of …

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• SaaS Meets MSP To Benefit IBM i Development

  March 22, 2017 Dan Burger

  Development environments in IBM i shops have a reputation for clinging to the past. Taking into account all the shops where there is ongoing development, it’s fair to estimate that two-thirds to three-quarters of IBM i users have changed their development techniques very little in the past 25 years. There was little incentive to change during the first 15 years, but during the past ten years and planning for the future things will have to change.

  Software as a service (SaaS) and managed service providers (MSPs) are gathering more attention. SaaS (subscription-based pricing) is becoming more common and MSPs are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 22

  March 22, 2017 Dan Burger

  When properly implemented, single sign-on is a beautiful thing for i/OS shops. It allows users to log on to their desktops and access all their servers without entering multiple passwords. But enabling SSO isn’t a cakewalk. Find out what went wrong in this instance involving iPads talking to the Apache Web Server and learn a lesson.

  Also in this issue are articles on the aftermath of artificial intelligence workloads relieving workers from tedious tasks, IBM’s blockchain secure network investment, and an SAP implementation that has gone off the tracks resulting in a $100,000,000 lawsuit. Sounds like a fire that’s out …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 11

  March 22, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The IBM i PTF Guide has a lot of meaty stuff this week. So brace yourselves. First, there are new Cumes (Cumulative updates) for IBM i V7R2 and V7R3; for V7R2 is it is C7068720 and for V7R3 it is C7061730. Also, Tech Refreshes are out for V7R2 and V7R3 – TR6 on V7R2 and TR2 on V7R3 – and these are out a week earlier than expected.

  Some words of caution on installing these. As we pointed out last week, if you are two more TR levels behind the level you want to go to – for example, if …

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• The Lowdown On Pricing For The Power S812 Mini

  March 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back on Valentine’s Day, IBM rolled out geared down variant of the entry Power S812 single-socket Power8 system for its IBM i and AIX customer bases, giving some of the low-cost love that it has heretofore reserved for its growing base of Linux customers on Power iron. The new machines are welcome, and we are told that they are about 20 percent lower cost than equivalently configured Power S822 and Power S824 machines.

  We are setting about to try to see if this is true, and as a first step, we have been hunting around for weeks to get configured …

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• IBM i Has A Cup Of Coffee With Watson

  March 20, 2017 Dan Burger

  As IBM steers its cognitive computing technology toward a profitable business process necessity, we are feeling the presence of Watson in the IBM i community. IBM’s business-oriented path forward for Watson should be well-suited to the “i for Business” installed base, or at least that portion of the installed base that believes IT is a competitive advantage.

  Analysts foresee a river of business software flowing from embedded cognitive capabilities. They say deeper data analysis leading to smarter workflow efficiencies have the attention of business managers. And they predict three-quarters of new business software will include artificial intelligence features by …

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• Conditional SQL I/O, Take 2

  March 20, 2017 Ted Holt

  Bob writes, “Hey, Ted! I hope you can teach an old dog a new trick. I am trying to replace the CHAIN operation with SQL. I chain once to a file to read a certain record. If that record is not found, I chain again to retrieve a default record. How can I make SQL do a second read to the same file?”

  This is not a hard thing to do, as SQL has no problem joining more than once to the same table. I’ll show you two methods to retrieve your data. The first method is the easier one, …

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• One On One With HelpSystems’ Debbie Saugen

  March 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems scored a big win in the business resiliency department last month when it announced the hiring of IBM veteran Debbie Saugen to head up its new business continuity services offerings. IT Jungle caught up with Saugen and HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim last week to discuss what the move means for Saugen, how it will impact HelpSystems, and how customers will benefit.

  IT Jungle: Debbie, please tell me about your background at IBM. Have you always been involved in backup and recovery?

  Debbie Saugen: I spent over 37 years at IBM and I was the technical owner of IBM i …

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