• IBM i Strategy And Roadmap Loses Business Focus

  April 18, 2016 Dan Burger

  A white paper is supposed to help readers understand challenges and provide an objective discussion of problems and solutions. It should not be a thinly disguised image enhancement device. Do that once and it rains on all your subsequent white papers. We all would like to see IBM sell more IBM i servers. But after reading the latest white paper on IBM i, it misses the mark of a real white paper. Let me start by giving you a link where you can download this document titled the IBM i Strategy and Roadmap. I recommend everyone read it. It

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• Sundry April Power Systems Announcements

  April 18, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported last week in discussing IBM‘s Power processor roadmap for the next five-plus years, there is not going to be a Power8+ revamp of existing Power Systems machines. Instead, IBM has rejiggered the Power8 chip to create a variant aimed at supercomputing and deep learning workloads that allows for high-speed NVLink coupling between Nvidia “Pascal” Tesla GPU coprocessors and the Power8 chip. That means there is no performance boost or list price cut (or both) that is normally expected and delivered with a “plus” variant of the Power chips. But as we expected, IBM has made a

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• OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek. . . Linoma Adds 2FA from RSA to GoAnywhere MFT Suite. . . RVI Partners with Accounting Software Maker. . .

  April 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek OpenLegacy, a provider of legacy modernization solutions for IBM i and mainframe shops and their applications, this month unveiled a partnership with Softtek, a provider of outsourcing services headquartered in Mexico. The partnership gives OpenLegacy customers access to the development resources of Softtek, a Monterrey-based IT services provider with 30 offices around the world, including United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, China, and India. The company, which trademarked the term “Global Nearshore,” positions itself as a closer provider of outsourced IT services than those based in India. “Our strategic partnership

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• WOW Makes a Good Database Story

  April 13, 2016 Dan Burger

  Those who do more with less get rewarded. Sometimes the incentive is a raise or a bonus. Sometimes it’s just being able to keep your job. Either way, you could be surprised what can be accomplished in terms of business intelligence, graphical presentations, and modernization with a relatively unknown product called WOW, which is the name of the Web application development tool from PlanetJ. WOW, an abbreviation for Web Object Wizard, was designed to extract data in real time from relational databases, including DB2 for i and all the other enterprise databases of note, while generating the kinds of

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• How InterForm Simplifies XML Document Handling for IBM i

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  At the turn of the century, extensible markup language (XML) promised to simplify many data interchange tasks for IT professionals. Sixteen years later, XML is firmly part of the technological menagerie in the United States, but nowhere near a universal standard. However, over in Europe, XML is a much bigger deal, which is why InterForm added significant new XML capabilities in the latest release of its IBM i-based forms package. Supporting XML isn’t just a good idea for companies who deal with clients in Europe. In many cases, it’s the law, says InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen. “In Europe almost every

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• Why WebSocket Apps Are In Your IBM i Future

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Do you pine for the simpler days of the AS/400, when RPG was king and data was served through super-efficient 5250 interfaces? If so, you’re not alone–the relentless crush of modern technologies takes a toll on all of us. But while the world isn’t likely to go back to RPG and 5250, you might find something that works in a similar way in a new technology called WebSockets. KrengelTech‘s Aaron Bartell had a great description of WebSocket during a recent BCD webinar on Node.JS and other open source technologies for IBM i. “It’s basically full duplex communication from client

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• Inside the New Analytic Functions of IBM i 7.3

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve been waiting for new analytic functions to come to IBM i, your wait is about over. The new release of the IBM i OS that will ship Friday brings several new analytic features to the DB2 for i database–including the capability to do time-based queries and several new OLAP functions–that customers have been asking IBM to add for several years. Temporal Queries The new temporal features in DB2 for i will allow users to perform time-based queries, which could be used for business intelligence reasons, as well as for security and auditing reasons. Mark Anderson, the chief architect

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• Thank You, IBM

  April 12, 2016 Brian Kelly

  The IBM Corporation was run as a benevolent dictatorship through 1971. Thomas Watson Senior, and then Thomas Junior, ran IBM as if they owned it. They both had an entrepreneurial flair and few would deny that when they were in charge of IBM, they ran the company as if it were a sole proprietorship. They had many wonderful policies such as taking care of the people so that the people would take care of the business, and of course the classic: “Respect for the Individual.” IBM believed in Wild Ducks and chairman Watson Junior wrote about them. He was not

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• Testing For Security Inadequacies

  April 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  Organizations are often reluctant to admit that they have inadequate system security. Quite possibly they may not even realize it. That’s not uncommon, particularly in the IBM midrange community, where we know there’s a false sense of security deeply rooted in the conviction that IBM i is inherently secure. Nothing could be further from the truth, although thinking any system is inherently secure is an equally foolish mistake. It’s all a matter of understanding how to manage security on a system. Preconceived notions that the IBM i platform is some sort of superhero in a box is one of the

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• Spreading A Wider IT Net At UCG Technologies

  April 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Selling boxes in the midrange isn’t easy. A shrinking customer base, falling margins on hardware sales, and tight IT budgets combine to put the squeeze on even the best-run reseller outfits. For longtime IBM business partner Jim Kandrac, the shift was palpable enough to lead him to rename his Cleveland, Ohio-based company from United Computer Group to UCG Technologies. It’s notable that “computer” is no longer in the name of Kandrac’s company. Are computers no longer important to the business? “The word computer is becoming more passé,” he says. “They’re still important, but they’re less important.” In the heyday

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