• Servers Hit The Skids Last Year, This Year Might be No Better

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the first building block of any system is the server, and watching how these are acquired, managed, and disposed of tells you a lot about what is going on with applications in the datacenter and who is making money off of them. It has been a long time since the Power Systems division at IBM has been an economic powerhouse in the server space, but now even the X86 platform, long dominated by Intel, is starting to show some signs of losing its luster.

  It stands to reason. In the final quarter of this year, X86-based machines accounted for …

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• A Youth Movement For IBM i Champions

  March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but there’s a veritable youth movement afoot in IBM i land. While the platform may not be turning heads on college campuses just yet, it received a vigorous shot in the arm when IBM named relative youngsters Liam Allan and Kody Robinson to the latest crop of Champions for Power.

  The IBM i platform may appear to outsiders as a stodgy old platform maintained by graying men and women on the brink of retirement. But for those on the inside and in the know, there’s an understanding that sophisticated software never gets old and never goes out …

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• Bank-Turned MSP Sees Growth in IBM i

  March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There aren’t a lot of areas of the IBM i business that are growing these days. Fewer companies are running the platform, which causes young people to look elsewhere to start their careers. That dynamic is actually helping to drive business for First National Technology Solutions, which was an IBM i customer before becoming a managed service provider (MSP).

  In January, First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) announced it was seeing “a sharp increase” in demand for IBM i and mainframe hosting. While the Omaha, Nebraska-based company gets most of its revenue by providing private and hybrid cloud hosting for Windows …

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• VAI And HelpSystems Integrate ERP And Document Management

  March 1, 2017 Dan Burger

  The paper chase continues. File cabinets stuffed like sausages. Purchase orders, invoices, adjustments, and correspondence in an archive and retrieval system that’s been used since the horse and buggy days. Electronic document management has yet to arrive at a surprising number of midsize businesses.

  Data management begins here at the intersection of modern ERP and digital business processing. “Companies in every industry are looking for ways to streamline business processes,” says Joe Scioscia, vice president of sales at VAI, an ERP software company that has added a document management component via a partnership with HelpSystems. Workflow efficiencies are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 1

  March 1, 2017 Dan Burger

  If you put the IBM i community under a microscope, you might see a few little squiggly things that generally unseen by the naked eye. Those things would be database engineers. Seldom seen doesn’t mean they are of little consequence. DB2 for i is the heart of the system. If you run the system, you should make sure it’s heart healthy.

  Back for its fourth consecutive year, the Women in IT conference is a professional development eye-opener for all IT pros. A look back at last year’s conference might inspire you to attend the upcoming repeat event. For additional events …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 8

  March 1, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It pays to be regular when it comes to systems management, and it is not a good thing to get too far behind. Take Windows Server as an example. With tens of millions of customers and plenty of bugs and security patches for this target-rich environment, Microsoft has to do everything in its power to try to keep the Windows installed base – both servers and PCs – patched and secured.

  Windows Update can be used to automatically apply patches as they come out in the wake of Patch Tuesday once a month, or customers can set up a dedicated …

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• Security Awareness: Eight More Patches For IBM i Vulns

  February 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  National security awareness month isn’t until October, but that didn’t stop IBM from issuing a torrent of patches this month to address all kinds of security problems in its products. For IBM i specifically, Big Blue patched eight flaws found across the OpenSSH and OpenSSL libraries for the three IBM i OSes under support. The Power HMC also received numerous security patches, as did dozens of other IBM products.

  OpenSSL and OpenSSH have been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities over the past three years, ever since the Heartbleed flaw was found in OpenSSL. As more flaws are found in …

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• IBM i Community To Get Closer Look At Watson

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  The cogs in cognitive are turning. And there are indications that IBM is ready to go beyond the story of how it works to stories about it is working. The messengers remain somewhat tight lipped, but we can expect cognitive to be a celebrated technology at the COMMON conference in early May.

  Watson, the face of IBM cognitive computing, is highly recognizable. Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for building, running, and managing apps and services, including Watson, is getting more attention. And the number of APIs that pull this together with integration points for all platforms, including IBM i, …

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• Guru: Eliminate The Legitimate Use Of GOTO, Take Two

  February 27, 2017 Ted Holt

  I was annoyed that IBM chose not to support GOTO and TAG in free-form RPG calculations. I rarely used those opcodes, but when I did, it was in disciplined situations when nothing else would do. Besides, I didn’t want to be treated like a baby. Now it’s a non-issue. IBM finally provided an alternative to the last legitimate use of GOTO.

  Almost five years ago, I wrote about a situation that I come across from time to time, namely the need to execute a clean-up routine before exiting an RPG subprocedure. Since nothing forbids a subprocedure to have multiple …

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• As I See It: Expanding Reach And Shrinking Intelligence

  February 27, 2017 Victor Rozek

  For those of us accustomed to ingesting information in scraps, the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been a month’s worth of forced-feeding. Lincoln, the challenger, and Douglas, the Senate incumbent from Illinois, jousted seven times in seven cities adhering to a format that would shrivel today’s sound bite-spouting politicians, and overwhelm voters with truncated attention spans.

  The first candidate would speak for a solid hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal, topped-off by a 30-minute rejoinder from the first speaker. Three hours of political debate; three hours of issues and remedies, analysis and inspiration, with speakers erudite enough to keep audiences engaged …

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