• HelpSystems Fills Encryption Gap With Linoma Buy

  June 6, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Despite all the IBM i security vendors that HelpSystems has bought over the years–and there have been at least five of them–the company has lacked one key security capability valued by enterprises: encryption. With last week’s deal to acquire Linoma Software, the Minneapolis software vendor has finally obtained that encryption capability for IBM i. HelpSystems has been experiencing heavy demand for IBM i encryption capabilities, says CEO Chris Heim. “I wouldn’t say we lost sales because of it, but we definitely wanted to offer a full solution to our customers and that’s why we wanted to check that encryption

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• For Sale: IBM i Is A Buyer’s Market

  June 6, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is an old adage that it is 10 times as expensive to acquire a new customer as it is to keep an existing one happy. I think that whoever lived in those times and coined that phrase did not live in an economic period dominated by the cheap money that was made available–some would say necessary–to keep the global economy humming along or recovering relatively quickly when it falters. I think it is maybe a hundred or a thousand times easier to buy a company with a set of established customers than it is to acquire them one at

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• Don’t Be the Eeyore of Digital Progress, OpenLegacy Says

  June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The Internet continues to present powerful and compelling new capabilities that many organizations are leveraging to their advantage. But all too often, the tantalizing digital future remains out of reach for IBM i and mainframe shops due to the difficulty–either real or imagined–of engineering those new capabilities to work with legacy systems. Helping organizations overcome those challenges is one of the goals that OpenLegacy has set for itself. OpenLegacy CTO Hans Otharsson has spent most of his career working with enterprise systems, including banking systems running on IBM i servers and mainframes, and knows firsthand the massive amount of ingenuity,

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• ARCAD ‘DROPS’ Deployment Management Into DevOps Pack

  June 1, 2016 Dan Burger

  If you could improve your application and systems software management, what would be the overall effect on your organization be? Greater efficiency and higher productivity come to mind. And the ripple effect touches nearly every employee, customer and business partner. In organizations that depend on the IBM i running on Power Systems, the focus typically begins on the system and on technical components. For the greater good, a multi-platform approach that focuses on functions is the better choice. Application development is the backbone of many IBM midrange shops and managing that function has led to greater efficiencies through the planning,

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• CNX Widens Reach with Sencha Deal, Focus on Modernization

  June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Look out: CNX is going global. The Chicago-based provider of IBM i development tools just signed a partnership deal with Sencha that will see the Silicon Valley firm distributing Valence around the world. CNX also just released Valence version 5, which brings a number of new features, including a stronger focus on modernizing RPG applications. Scott Mullarkey, Sencha’s vice president of global alliances and professional services, says CNX’s desire to have a global footprint led to an extension of the OEM partnership the two companies signed in 2008. “Ninety-five percent of their [CNX’s] business is U.S.-based. They do not have

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• Profound Logic Taps Node.js and COBOL For New Directions

  June 1, 2016 Dan Burger

  We’re hearing a lot about Node.js as open source topics are discussed with greater frequency in the IBM i community. On the other hand, COBOL gets far less attention than it deserves considering that 80 percent of enterprise business applications run on this sturdy code. Profound Logic, one of several IBM i vendors leading the way in modernization efforts, is including both these languages in its product roadmap. Profound’s CEO Alex Roytman explains why and why now. Let’s begin with Node.js. IBM i support for open source software has increased in recent years, but open source is not new

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• Fresche Brings the Heat(map) to Legacy Modernization

  June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Before embarking upon a legacy modernization project, it’s important to do your homework. Not all IBM i screens are equal, but figuring out which ones are the most widely used is neither easy nor straightforward. This is the challenge that application modernization vendor Fresche Legacy hopes to resolve with the new heatmap solution that it’s building for its Newlook modernization suite. Guessing how users interact with legacy IBM i applications can lead to erroneous conclusions about how to proceed with legacy modernization. Instead, Fresche says the new heatmap software it’s developing will allow customers to gather usage data from the

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• LAG And LEAD Functions In DB2 for i 7.3

  May 31, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  Database devs, you can kiss many of your cursors goodbye, because DB2 for i has two sweet new functions named LAG and LEAD that will allow you to extract a column value from a different row within the result set (relative to the current row) without programmatically looping through each row. From the current row, LAG instructs DB2 to look backward in the result set a specified number of rows and retrieve a value. LEAD allows DB2 to look ahead to a specified row beyond the current row and extract a value. In DB2 parlance, these new functions belong to

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• Global Temporary Tables And Host Variables, Take 2

  May 31, 2016 Ted Holt

  In Global Temporary Tables and Host Variables, I complained that DECLARE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE does not permit me to use host variables. I presented two ways to circumvent the problem. Today I revisit the topic to show another way that was not available six years ago. First, create some global variables. create variable somelib.gv_Company dec(3); create variable somelib.gv_Customer dec(5); Then use those global variables in your program. exec sql set gv_Company = :inCompany; exec sql set gv_Customer = :inCustomer; exec sql declare global temporary table Temp1 as (select * from sales where companyno = gv_Company and customerno = gv_Customer)

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• Watch Your Data While Stepping Out With RDi Debug

  May 31, 2016 Susan Gantner

  In this latest in my series of tips on using the RDi debugger, I’ll talk about one of my favorite debug features–the Monitors view–and we’ll explore not just one or two, but four different options for stepping through program code a statement at a time. Stepping Out Just like with the green screen debugger, you can step through code a statement at a time. Figure 1 shows the various debug tool bar icons with those related to stepping through your code highlighted. The most commonly used options are the two arrows in the middle: “Step Into (F5)” and “Step Over

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